How AI is Reshaping Democracy: Insights from Bruce Schneier & Nathan Sanders

How is AI fundamentally changing democracy?

In this episode of the Better Politics Podcast, host Lisa Witter is joined by Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders, authors of Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship, where they examine the ways that AI is transforming every aspect of democracy, for better and worse.

Bruce is a public interest technologist and lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School who has advised governments and civil society organizations for decades. Nathan is a Berkman Klein Fellow at Harvard University who studies the infrastructure of democratic participation. Together they trace how AI is already reshaping lawmaking, judicial reasoning, campaigns, and constituent communication.

The conversation moves from individual use cases to the larger structural questions: how AI concentrates power the same way past transformative technologies have, why familiarity shapes who adopts these tools and who resists them, and what governments can do differently this time compared to how they handled other technologies like social media.

Bruce and Nathan also lay out their framework for responding: resisting inappropriate uses of AI, advocating for responsible ones, reforming an ecosystem dominated by a handful of corporations, and renovating the democratic structures AI is putting under strain.

Resources from this episode:

• Political Leadership Impact Path
• The Renovator Substack, by Danielle Allen
• POPVOX Foundation
• TechCongress

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