Abstract

New technologies can broaden the scope of human limits. We can fly to the moon thanks to rocket science, we can communicate with each other by mobile phones and WiFi and we can exceed human life with medical equipment like pacemakers. But there are aspects of our life that still are very distrustful of implementing new technology into functioning. An example of such a field of our everyday life is democracy. Although we don’t vote with spears or white or black spheres anymore and we use paper ballots and computer voting systems, the field of making political decisions remains conservative.

There are concepts of democracy that are trying to become an alternative to our everyday political life that is connected with a delegation of everyone’s political power to elected representatives. Deliberative democracy enthusiasts are trying to design a deliberative political system that will realize the participation of every citizen in making decisions by deliberation for the common good. They’ve created many deliberative institutions like citizen assemblies or citizen panels but they are limited in the number of citizens that can participate in them. Also, another point of critique is that e.g. panelists are too much dependent on thematic experts. Can technology help to overcome these limitations? The concept of augmented democracy presented by Cesar Hidalgo shows that debate about such an opportunity has already started. Augmented democracy in prof. Hidalgo intention promise tosolve two barriers of deliberative democracy: the potential to engage everyone in finding a solution at the same time through its digital twin and the opportunity to raise human cognitive bandwidth to a very high limit by computational processing assistance. Can these promises be fulfilled? Can the concept of augmented democracy help to eliminate weak points of deliberative democracy idea and make the deliberative democracy concept really competitive with our current representative systems? Or maybe digital twin assistance shouldn’t be considered in the concept of deliberation and deliberative democracy and augmented democracy has almost nothing in common?

During the analysis of augmented democracy, we may assume that people would choose digital twins to deliberate but they can choose dialogue or debate to try to make their own opinions to be leading. In a capitalistic society, people would prefer to use digital twins to increase their professional abilities. In the academic debate, it should be considered how different ideas for democracy can mesh together and what result can stem from these different concepts. 

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