Event: London Knowledge Café: Conversational Collective Intelligence – a New Kind of Democracy Thursday 2nd May 2024

London Knowledge Café
Conversational Collective Intelligence: A New Kind of Democracy

Time: 18:30 to 20:30 BST

This is a free event. Please arrive at 6:00 pm or shortly after, allowing you time to settle in and meet other people. Light refreshments will be available. The Café will start promptly at 6:30 pm.

Facilitator: David Gurteen

Host: House of Commons Library

Venue: Westminister (details available later)

Theme: Conversational Collective Intelligence: A New Kind of Democracy

Democracy has existed far longer than the invention of elections and the tying of ‘free and fair’ elections into the definition of democracy as part of the UN Declaration of Human Rights 1948.

While democracy is fundamental to society, is it working the way it should? The greatest threat to democracy is the illusion that we live in one. Recent reports by the Economic Intelligence Unit, Freedom House, and UCL Constitution Unit, to name just a few, show that there has been the longest consecutive period of democratic backsliding since records began, and on a global scale – substantially more than a third of the world’s population are found to be living under authoritarian rule.

Have we forgotten what a good democracy feels like? In the UK, we don’t need scientific studies to show that people do not feel like their voices are heard or that we have a say in how our country or society is run. There are few channels of democratic engagement between election times. In a deliberative democracy, voices matter more than votes.

Amongst the research papers on collective intelligence covering how the latest developments in AI technology can support and scale deliberations, a gap has been identified in evaluating the human participant experience versus how quickly decisions are made or how the machine is trained and machine learning.

This is why Bella Roberts, our speaker, focused explicitly on the feelings of empowerment which includes an increased knowledge and understanding of the subject and other people’s perspectives for her Masters thesis research project.

In this Knowledge Cafe, with its principles of open dialogue, light structure, and free-flowing conversation, we will discuss what democracy means and how we feel about it. It promises to be fertile ground to learn from each other, connect with people, and better understand a complex topic, but most importantly, improve our inner understanding of something so fundamental as Democracy.

Speaker: Bella Roberts

Passionate about people, Bella left an investment bank in 2021 after a decade in corporate finance to run for the London Assembly as the first candidate for an independent party looking to decentralise power from Westminster to a more regional, localised level.

This experience has been further developed through her Masters in Digital Politics, where her research project focused on How can Collective Intelligence Enhance Democracy? Which was completed the same year that ChatGPT and LLM technology was released to the public.

With efforts to harness this for the benefit of the people in parallel to the failures of politicians to represent the people, Bella founded the ANTIPARTY movement, which seeks to separate politics from democracy. She also co-hosts an ongoing series of webinars on AI & Democracy with the UK Democracy Network.

THE CAFÉ PROCESS

If you are unfamiliar with the Café process, it is quite simple.

After Bella introduces the theme, she will present a question for us to ponder. We will then have three rounds of small group conversations, during which we will divide into groups of three or four to discuss the question.

Following our small group discussions, we will reconvene as a whole group to share our individual reflections and insights.

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