{"id":1513,"date":"2025-01-24T05:05:20","date_gmt":"2025-01-24T05:05:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/serisec.com\/index.php\/2025\/01\/24\/third-interdisciplinary-workshop-on-reimagining-democracy-iword-2024-html\/"},"modified":"2025-01-24T05:05:20","modified_gmt":"2025-01-24T05:05:20","slug":"third-interdisciplinary-workshop-on-reimagining-democracy-iword-2024-html","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/serisec.com\/index.php\/2025\/01\/24\/third-interdisciplinary-workshop-on-reimagining-democracy-iword-2024-html\/","title":{"rendered":"Third Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy (IWORD 2024)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Third Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy (IWORD 2024)<\/div>\n

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Last month, Henry Farrell and I convened the Third Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy (IWORD 2024<\/a>) at Johns Hopkins University\u2019s Bloomberg Center in Washington DC. This is a small, invitational workshop on the future of democracy. As with the previous<\/a> two<\/a> workshops, the goal was to bring together a diverse set of political scientists, law professors, philosophers, AI researchers and other industry practitioners, political activists, and creative types (including science fiction writers) to discuss how democracy might be reimagined in the current century.<\/p>\n

The goal of the workshop is to think very broadly. Modern democracy was invented in the mid-eighteenth century, using mid-eighteenth-century technology. If democracy were to be invented today, it would look very different. Elections would look different. The balance between representation and direct democracy would look different. Adjudication and enforcement would look different. Everything would look different, because our conceptions of fairness, justice, equality, and rights are different, and we have much more powerful technology to bring to bear on the problems. Also, we could start from scratch without having to worry about evolving our current democracy into this imagined future system.<\/p>\n

We can\u2019t do that, of course, but it\u2019s still still valuable to speculate. Of course we need to figure out how to reform our current systems, but we shouldn\u2019t limit our thinking to incremental steps. We also need to think about discontinuous changes as well. I wrote about the philosophy more in this essay<\/a> about IWORD 2022.<\/p>\n

IWORD 2024 was easily the most intellectually stimulating two days of my year. It\u2019s also intellectually exhausting; the speed and intensity of ideas is almost too much. I wrote the format in my blog post<\/a> on IWORD 2023.<\/p>\n

Summaries of all the IWORD 2024 talks are in the first set of comments below. And here are links to the previous IWORDs:<\/p>\n