LIFE-SAVING IDEAS (5/5)

"WHAT IF AI OPENED THE DOOR TO PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY?"

And here is the final article in this mini-series, taken from Nicolas Bordas's book "Les Idées qui sauvent" (Life-Saving Ideas), which I highly recommend. It comes from the fifth part of the book, entitled "Activating Our Power to Act". The subject of this article ties into the discussions surrounding the problems and future of democracy that we have addressed many times on this blog. In a related vein, and in a different area, as the debate on Artificial Intelligence gains momentum, the author quotes political scientist Lucas Gras, who, in his book "La Démocratie en péril" (Democracy in Peril), suggests using AI to facilitate democratic debate by potentially making pluralism audible. In this area, if the tool is well-structured to help address the issues of massification and the complexity of our societies, it can find new uses for the benefit of humanity. A very interesting article to conclude this brief interlude of a few weeks ...

Part 5

Activating our power to act

Sometimes reality seems to overwhelm us. The balance of power appears too strong to shift. Our individual commitments seem to carry little weight against collective inertia. What's the point of acting if everything resists? If everything returns? If everything gets worse?

And yet, we are constantly in motion. Because a stagnant world is a lifeless world. Because a society incapable of transformation is a society condemned to bitterness, anger, or withdrawal. To act is not simply to do. It is to choose. To arbitrate. To imagine. To commit. To resist. And sometimes: to begin.

This final section of the book explores this often underestimated power to act. It doesn't offer a program of action or a how-to guide. It sketches out ideas, not to prescribe, but to inspire. An idea is more than just a thought: it's a lever, an impulse, a catalyst for action.

Taking action isn't always about aiming for a dramatic break. It's often about initiating a subtle shift. Changing the perspective. Sometimes, a minimal movement is all it takes to open a new path.

This is about work, cooperation, resilience, imagination, democracy, language, and climate justice. It intersects with Aristotle's phronesis, the inventiveness of the imaginative actor, the horizon of an ecocracy yet to be built, and the audacity of embracing conflict to disarm violence.

None of this is heroic. On the contrary, it is profoundly human. It is more about contributing than conquering.

Activating our power to act is not about responding to every crisis at once. It's about rediscovering what, within us, remains capable of movement, clarity, and confidence. The most effective action often begins with a clear idea, a shared emotion, or a liberating word.

The world does not need supermen, but awakened living beings who activate their power to act.

"WHAT IF AI OPENED THE DOOR TO PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY?"

Democracy is slow, ecology is urgent.

What if ecocracy were our chance to avoid sacrificing one to save the other?

"To be a democrat would be to act in recognition that we never live in a sufficiently democratic society."

JACQUES DERRIDA

While representative democracy seems becalmed in France, caught between growing distrust of elected officials and massive abstention, a temptation arises with every political crisis: the referendum. As if citizens could be reconnected to politics through a one-off, binary consultation. On both the left and the right, the magic word is brandished as a remedy for powerlessness, anger, and civic distance. This reflex, however, masks a profound paradox: neither representative democracy nor referendum-based democracy currently allows citizens to fully participate in the lawmaking process, which has been at the heart of the democratic ideal since ancient Greece. In his essay *Democracy in Peril* , political scientist Luc Gras articulates this with rare clarity: democracy is not dying from a lack of public opinion, but from the growing impossibility of enabling it to contribute. What he calls "autonomous political logic" refers to this tendency of those in power to legislate without the governed, or even against them. Even when large-scale citizen consultations are organized, such as the Great Debate or the grievance books, the contributions gathered are rarely given their due consideration. Civic knowledge exists, but it is ignored, neglected, and relegated. Democracy dies from this deliberate silence surrounding what citizens express, when no forum or tool is in place to amplify their voices and facilitate their participation in the legislative process.

CREATING THE CONDITIONS FOR A CONSTRUCTIVE DEBATE

For Luc Gras, it is urgent to break this deadlock by reactivating the very foundations of democracy. Not out of nostalgia for the Greek agora, but out of fidelity to its original spirit: a democracy that is not imposed from above, but built from below, in a collective, living, contradictory, and iterative process. A democracy that does not fear dissent, but knows how to work with it, nurture it, and extract collective wisdom from it. What he proposes is a new three-pronged approach: deconstructing sclerotic, established systems, rebuilding the city around genuine civic dialogue, and enabling the emergence of virtuous candidates dedicated to the common good. The democratic project, in its Greek version as well as in its modern extensions, rests on the plurality of perspectives. Democracy is not a majority-based accounting exercise; it is an art of dialogue. It is not enough to consult; we must create the conditions for genuine deliberation—permanent, open, and structured. A task once undertaken by popular assemblies has become monumental in contemporary societies. This is where AI comes in: it alone is capable of aggregating, sorting, summarizing, and structuring the complexity of citizens' opinions on a massive scale. AI is not a legislator, but a facilitator, capable of making pluralism heard, of transforming thousands of individual contributions into points of consensus or areas of contention. Provided, of course, that power is not delegated to it, but rather placed at the service of a profoundly human process: deliberation.

AI AT THE SERVICE OF DEMOCRATIC DIALOGUE

This is precisely what Audrey Tang experienced in Taiwan. The former Minister of Digital Affairs and co-author of the Plurality manifesto, she implemented AI-assisted deliberative democracy mechanisms. With the vTaiwan platform, citizens are invited to co-create legislative proposals on complex issues: platform regulation, cybersecurity policy, and the framework for the digital economy. Contributions are aggregated, mapped, and synthesized using tools like Pol.is, which allow dynamic consensus to emerge from divergent opinions. It is no longer the loudest voices that dominate, but the strongest points of convergence. Here, AI becomes an ally of pluralism. Another striking example is that of "alignment assemblies," where randomly selected citizens deliberate in small groups on issues of general interest, with the help of a facilitating AI that synthesizes the discussions, identifies points of convergence, and presents the results to decision-makers. During a consultation on an anti-fraud law, more than 450 people, drawn from a panel of 200,000 citizens, were able to participate in a large-scale online deliberation with unprecedented logistical efficiency. Far from replacing humans, AI becomes the catalyst for broad civic dialogue. These tools help overcome two major obstacles to contemporary democracy: mass participation and complexity. In a society of 70 million inhabitants, how can everyone be heard? And in a world of highly technical challenges—from climate change to artificial intelligence itself—how can informed deliberation be organized? AI can help solve these two challenges, provided it does not replace human decision-making, but rather informs it. Provided, too, that it is transparent, structured, and pluralistic in its algorithms as well as its intentions. This is what Audrey Tang advocates through the concept of broad listening : a wide, attentive, distributed listening that takes into account all voices, even the weakest, even the most minority, in order to better integrate them into collective decision-making.

TOWARDS AN AUGMENTED DEMOCRACY

Artificial intelligence is not intended to replace citizens or make decisions for them. But it can help bring about a new democratic horizon, one that is more inclusive, more deliberative, and more participatory. A horizon where citizens no longer simply give their opinions at regular intervals, but are continuously involved in shaping public decisions. This augmented democracy, still in its infancy, can only be built on solid ethical principles: transparency of algorithms, data protection, traceability of debates, and guarantees of inclusivity. It will require combining scientific rigor, political discernment, and human sensitivity. The Plurality project is perhaps one of its most inspiring prototypes: a techno-political democracy founded on the active recognition of disagreements, cognitive cooperation, and the pooling of diverse intelligences. Plurality is not just a program or a tool; it is a living method, a vision of distributed governance, respectful of differences and structured around a shared objective: building a society in diversity. The goal is not to automate democracy, but to restore its depth, vitality, and legitimacy in the age of digital transformation. This is the path being explored by other initiatives around the world: algorithmic participatory budgeting in Brazil, AI-assisted citizen conventions in Belgium, and the collaborative campaign of Japanese politician Takahiro Anno, who used artificial intelligence to structure the contributions of thousands of citizens to his electoral platform. But beyond these pioneering figures, what matters is the political intention: to make democracy a shared, living, evolving endeavor, where every voice counts and every decision can be debated, adjusted, and enriched by collective intelligence. Only by reconciling technology and deliberation, innovation and listening, collective intelligence and democratic pluralism will we be able to meet the challenges ahead. AI can contribute to this, not by replacing humans, but by strengthening their capacity to coexist, cooperate, and build a desirable future. A more demanding democracy, perhaps slower, but more vibrant. An augmented democracy, because it is broader, more open, and more multifaceted. An intellectual, political, and technological undertaking that is becoming a democratic imperative.