Reimagining Democracy

Abstract Modern representative democracy reflects eighteenth-century technological limitations, and innovations based on new technological capacities are needed. In a series of workshops at the Harvard Kennedy School, fifty invitees in 2022 and 2023 discussed representation frameworks, mechanisms of direct democracy, the delegation of decisions to artificial intelligence systems, and alternative models (such as sortition and liquid democracy) for the selection of decision-makers. This speculative discourse yielded no firm new models but did underscore the importance of imagining discontinuous political innovations that might be suited to contemporary and future technological realities.