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Essays Tagged "Conversation"
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Cyberattacks Shake Voters’ Trust in Elections, Regardless of Party
- Ryan Shandler, Anthony J. DeMattee, and Bruce Schneier
- The Conversation
- June 27, 2025
This essay also appeared in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Governing.
American democracy runs on trust, and that trust is cracking.
Nearly half of Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, question whether elections are conducted fairly. Some voters accept election results only when their side wins. The problem isn’t just political polarization—it’s a creeping erosion of trust in the machinery of democracy itself.
Commentators blame ideological tribalism, misinformation campaigns and partisan echo chambers for this crisis of trust. But these explanations miss a critical piece of the puzzle: a growing unease with the digital infrastructure that now underpins nearly every aspect of how Americans vote…
Will AI Take Your Job? the Answer Could Hinge on the 4 S’s of the Technology’s Advantages over Humans
Sometimes speed matters – and sometimes it doesn’t.
- Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders
- The Conversation
- June 16, 2025
This essay also appeared in Fast Company, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and Tech Xplore.
If you’ve worried that AI might take your job, deprive you of your livelihood, or maybe even replace your role in society, it probably feels good to see the latest AI tools fail spectacularly. If AI recommends glue as a pizza topping, then you’re safe for another day.
But the fact remains that AI already has definite advantages over even the most skilled humans, and knowing where these advantages arise—and where they don’t—will be key to adapting to the AI-infused workforce…
The Apocalypse That Wasn’t: AI Was Everywhere in 2024’s Elections, but Deepfakes and Misinformation Were Only Part of the Picture
- Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders
- The Conversation
- December 4, 2024
This essay also appeared in Cascadia Daily News, Commonwealth Beacon, Fast Company, Gizmodo, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
It’s been the biggest year for elections in human history: 2024 is a “super-cycle” year in which 3.7 billion eligible voters in 72 countries had the chance to go the polls. These are also the first AI elections, where many feared that deepfakes and artificial intelligence-generated misinformation would overwhelm the democratic processes. As 2024 draws to a close, it’s instructive to take stock of how democracy did…
Indian Election Was Awash in Deepfakes—but AI Was a Net Positive for Democracy
- Vandinika Shukla and Bruce Schneier
- The Conversation
- June 7, 2024
This essay also appeared in Channel News Asia and PBS News.
As India concluded the world’s largest election on June 5, 2024, with over 640 million votes counted, observers could assess how the various parties and factions used artificial intelligence technologies—and what lessons that holds for the rest of the world.
The campaigns made extensive use of AI, including deepfake impersonations of candidates, celebrities and dead politicians. By some estimates, millions of Indian voters viewed deepfakes.
But, despite fears of widespread disinformation, for …
AI Could Improve Your Life by Removing Bottlenecks between What You Want and What You Get
- The Conversation
- December 21, 2023
Artificial intelligence is poised to upend much of society, removing human limitations inherent in many systems. One such limitation is information and logistical bottlenecks in decision-making.
Traditionally, people have been forced to reduce complex choices to a small handful of options that don’t do justice to their true desires. Artificial intelligence has the potential to remove that limitation. And it has the potential to drastically change how democracy functions.
AI researcher Tantum Collins and I, a public-interest technology scholar…
AI Disinformation Is a Threat to Elections—Learning to Spot Russian, Chinese and Iranian Meddling in Other Countries Can Help the Us Prepare for 2024
- The Conversation
- September 29, 2023
This essay also appeared in Defense One, Fortune and Scientific American.
Elections around the world are facing an evolving threat from foreign actors, one that involves artificial intelligence.
Countries trying to influence each other’s elections entered a new era in 2016, when the Russians launched a series of social media disinformation campaigns targeting the U.S. presidential election. Over the next seven years, a number of countries—most prominently China and Iran—used social media to influence foreign elections, both in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. There’s no reason to expect 2023 and 2024 to be any different…
Re-Imagining Democracy for the 21st Century, Possibly Without the Trappings of the 18th Century
- The Conversation
- August 7, 2023
This essay was also published by Chron, Phys.org, and UPI.
Imagine that we’ve all—all of us, all of society—landed on some alien planet, and we have to form a government: clean slate. We don’t have any legacy systems from the U.S. or any other country. We don’t have any special or unique interests to perturb our thinking.
How would we govern ourselves?
It’s unlikely that we would use the systems we have today. The modern representative democracy was the best form of government that mid-18th-century technology could conceive of. The 21st century is a different place scientifically, technically and socially…
Can You Trust AI? Here’s Why You Shouldn’t
- Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders
- The Conversation
- July 20, 2023
This essay also appeared in CapeTalk, CT Insider, The Daily Star, The Economic Times, ForeignAffairs.co.nz, Fortune, GayNrd, Homeland Security News Wire, Kiowa County Press, MinnPost, Tech Xplore, UPI, and Yahoo News.
If you ask Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant AI system, whether Amazon is a monopoly, it responds by saying it doesn’t know. It doesn’t take much to make it lambaste the other tech giants, but it’s silent about its own corporate parent’s misdeeds.
When Alexa responds in this way, it’s obvious that it is putting its developer’s interests ahead of yours. Usually, though, it’s not so obvious whom an AI system is serving. To avoid being exploited by these systems, people will need to learn to approach AI skeptically. That means deliberately constructing the input you give it and thinking critically about its output…
AI Could Shore Up Democracy—Here’s One Way
- Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders
- The Conversation
- June 20, 2023
This essay also appeared in ArcaMax, Big News Network, Biloxi Local News & Events, Chicago Sun-Times, Fast Company, GCN, Government Technology, Inkl, Macau Daily Times, MENAFN, Nextgov, and Yahoo.
It’s become fashionable to think of artificial intelligence as an inherently dehumanizing technology, a ruthless force of automation that has unleashed legions of virtual skilled laborers in faceless form. But what if AI turns out to be the one tool able to identify what makes your ideas special, recognizing your unique perspective and potential on the issues where it matters most?…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.