Your Undivided Attention20 Okt 2022

They Don’t Represent Us — with Larry Lessig

We often talk about the need to protect American democracy. But perhaps those of us in the United States don't currently live in a democracy.

As research shows, there's pretty much no correlation between the percentage of the population that supports a policy and its likelihood of being enacted. The strongest determinant of whether a policy gets enacted is how much money is behind it.

So, how might we not just protect, but better yet revive our democracy? How might we revive the relationship between the will of the people and the actions of our government?

This week on Your Undivided Attention, we're doing something special. As we near the election, and representation is on our minds, we're airing a talk by Harvard Law professor and Creative Commons co-founder Larry Lessig. It's a 2019 talk he gave at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, DC about his book, They Don't Represent Us.

The book title has two meanings: first, they — as in our elected representatives — don't represent us. And second, we — as in the people — don't represent ourselves. And this is where social media comes in: we don't represent ourselves because the more we use social media, the more we see extreme versions of the other side, and the more extreme, outraged, and polarized we ourselves become.

Last note: Lessig's talk is highly visual. We edited it lightly for clarity, and jump in periodically to narrate things you can’t see. But if you prefer to watch his talk, you can find the link below in Recommended Media.

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

Video: They Don't Represent Us

The 2019 talk Larry Lessig gave at Politics and Prose in Washington, DC about his book of the same name

Book: They Don't Represent Us

Larry Lessig’s 2019 book that elaborates the ways in which democratic representation is in peril, and proposes a number of solutions to revive our democracy -- from ranked-choice voting to non-partisan open primaries

Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens

Princeton's Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page study measuring the correlation between the preferences of different groups and the decisions of our government

RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

Digital Democracy is Within Reach with Audrey Tang

https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/23-digital-democracy-is-within-reach

How Political Language Is Engineered with Drew Westen and Frank Luntz

https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/53-how-political-language-is-engineered

Your Undivided Attention is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. Follow us on Twitter: @HumaneTech_

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(162)

We Need AI Treaties. This is How We Get Them

In the middle of the twentieth century, the existential threat posed by nuclear weapons seemed inevitable. The number of countries with nukes was climbing rapidly, and the idea of stopping the nuclear...

18 Jun 51min

What Do We Mean by Humane Tech?

We often think of the challenges created by technology as separate and disconnected, so trying to solve them feels like playing the world's hardest game of Whac-A-Mole. What if, instead, we tackled t...

4 Jun 52min

Anthropic’s Mythos Has Changed Cybersecurity Forever. What Now?

A generation ago, the world's critical infrastructure was physical. Today, it’s largely digital. Your bank vault is a database, your filing cabinet is a server, your car is a robot on wheels. And in a...

14 Mai 46min

AI and Cancer: Why Superintelligence Won’t Get Us to a Cure

One of the most common arguments you hear from company executives racing to develop super-intelligent AI is that it will cure cancer. It’s an incredibly powerful and seductive promise. If superintell...

30 Apr 47min

Have We Trained AI to Lie to Itself — And to Us?

Our guest this week is David Dalrymple, who goes by Davidad. Davidad is one of the world's foremost and early researchers of AI “alignment:" how we get AI systems to act the way we want them to. In or...

16 Apr 42min

BONUS: Our AI Town Hall with Oprah Winfrey

Today on the show, we’re bringing you a recent conversation Tristan and Aza had with Oprah Winfrey on her podcast, The Oprah Podcast, taped in front of a live studio audience. Tristan and Aza first me...

9 Apr 1h 1min

Here’s Our Roadmap to a Better AI Future

In order to shift the incentives of AI — the trillions of dollars in investment, the race to geopolitical power and dominance — it’s not enough to simply understand the problem, we need real action. ...

2 Apr 52min

Why the Meta Verdicts Are a Big Deal (And What It Was Like to Testify)

In two landmark cases, juries in California and New Mexico found Meta and Google liable for creating addictive, harmful products and failing to protect children from exploitation and abuse. These verd...

26 Mar 19min