Democracy is a conversation.

Think about it: Modern democracy as we know it is built on top of information technology.

In the Middle Ages, there was no tech to enable conversations between millions of people spread over an entire country. Only when newspapers, telegraph, etc came along that this became possible. And only then did democracy became the dominant force of governance.

The biggest danger we face now is the opposite of what we faced in the Middle Ages. In the 21st century, something else is making conversations impossible: the trust between people is collapsing.

The internet has become the primary medium of conversation. The risk that generative AI presents is online space getting flooded by information created by non-humans masquerading as humans. So when you are talking with someone online you have no idea if it is a human or a bot.

Unless we have some guardrails against this kind of danger, conversation descends into chaos. And so does democracy.