Divya Siddarth - AI + Democracy [Alignment Workshop]

Divya Siddarth argues democracy must evolve to constrain AI power before it concentrates beyond public control. Her 70-country research reveals massive cultural divides: 43% would use AI for emotional support, 25% accept AI romantic relationships, with religious populations strongly opposed. She highlights real governance failures like language models circumventing India's laws for preventing gender-selective abortion, showing centralized AI governance cannot capture distributed information needs. Siddarth proposes personal agents as democratic infrastructure and scalable preference aggregation, noting exponential growth in AI agent interactions will outpace linear governance capacity, requiring auditable systems at "achievable effort levels." Note: The opinions shared in this event are those of the speaker(s) and may not represent the views of FAR.AI or their affiliated organizations.