What’s your “(p)doom” – the percentage chance that rogue AI will create an existential catastrophe? Judging by their recent warnings, it is rising among tech bosses. On 25 September, OpenAI paused training of its latest frontier models as reports of AI agents going rogue mounted.
A day later, Australia’s Senate asked the bosses of OpenAI and Anthropic to appear before an inquiry after rogue OpenAI agents broke into US government websites and an Australian health portal. Bill Gates, meanwhile, has warned that AI in the wrong hands could “cause a billion deaths”. Days before, Dario Amodei and Sam Altman, the chief executives of Anthropic and OpenAI, appeared before the UN security council.
Amodei warned that AI could become “a risk to humanity as a whole”. Altman said that “if AI is to be democratic, the most important decisions cannot be made by labs in San Francisco alone”. Doomsday scenarios aside, AI is already disrupting schools, workplaces and public services, with the most marginalised often feeling the impacts harder and faster.
If democracy is to matter in this era of tech power, surely we must try to democratise AI. Proposals for a datacentre more than twice the size of Manhattan provoked a furious backlash over energy use and the potential impact on the state’s stressed water supplies and Great Salt Lake ecosystem, all while people felt excluded from having a say. On 18 and 19 September, Utah Common Ground convened 38 residents selected by civic lottery to consider what role the public should have in shaping decisions about AI technology and infrastructure.
Despite their political differences, participants overwhelmingly agreed on the need for greater public control. Their 10 recommendations included public hearings and independent environmental assessments for hyperscale datacentres, community-led AI literacy programmes and tighter transparency rules. Every recommendation received at least 82% support.
In a polarised state, that is a mandate legislators should struggle to wave away. Globally, there have been more than 80 public participation projects focused on AI over the past five years, involving more than 200,000 people in more than 95 countries. In Switzerland, a citizens’ assembly demanded privacy, transparency and meaningful human control.
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