AI Book Review: Rewiring Democracy – How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship by Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders

A clear-eyed look at how AI is already reshaping the machinery of democracy – and what it will take to keep power in public hands.

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I spend a great deal of my time reading books on technology and artificial intelligence, not just as research for my work, but because I am genuinely curious about how power and responsibility are shifting in this new era. Some books focus on business efficiency, others on looming catastrophe.

Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship is interested in something more specific and, in many ways, more urgent: how AI is being woven into the everyday workings of democracy. Schneier and Sanders are not writing science fiction; they are mapping changes already underway, and asking whether citizens will shape these systems – or merely be shaped by them.

CONTEXT AND BACKGROUND

Rewiring Democracy starts from a simple but unsettling observation: AI is not just another topic that democracies must regulate; it is becoming part of how democracy itself operates. The authors show how AI tools are already assisting with drafting legislation, monitoring compliance, prioritising enforcement, and even informing judicial decisions. This is not the glamorous world of campaign ads and social media memes; it is the quieter plumbing of government, where code and models increasingly mediate the relationship between citizens, officials and law.

Bruce Schneier, a well-known security technologist, and Nathan Sanders, a data scientist focused on participatory policymaking, take an “advisedly optimistic” stance. They argue that AI will inevitably alter every facet of democracy, but insist that we still have agency in how these systems are designed, deployed and governed. Their central concern is power: will AI primarily serve to entrench the influence of corporations, parties and bureaucracies, or can it be used to distribute voice and oversight more widely?

INSIGHT AND ANALYSIS

One of the book’s major strengths is its refusal to reduce “AI and democracy” to a conversation about deepfakes and disinformation. Of course, those threats matter, and Schneier and Sanders discuss them, but they are more interested in the slow rewiring of everyday processes. When AI systems help draft more complex legislation, for example, they can reduce the traditional reliance on the executive branch to interpret vague laws – subtly shifting the balance of power inside the state. When regulators use AI to decide which companies to audit, models can either make enforcement more consistent or quietly encode political and economic biases.

The authors also look at how AI could change the courts. Tools that scan vast case law or suggest arguments might speed up justice, but they could also encourage over-reliance on opaque recommendations. Judges and lawyers might outsource parts of their reasoning without fully understanding the assumptions baked into the systems they use. For countries like South Africa, where access to justice is already sharply unequal, these choices matter: do we use AI to widen the gap, or to support more transparent and accessible legal processes?

Schneier and Sanders frame democracy as an information system: a way of processing preferences, values and facts into collective decisions. From that perspective, AI is both a risk and an opportunity. It can help citizens find relevant information, participate in deliberation at scale and hold officials accountable. It can just as easily segment us into micro-targeted echo chambers and automate forms of surveillance and control that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. The book is at its best when it lays out these tensions in concrete, institutional terms rather than slogans.

IMPLICATIONS

For policymakers, Rewiring Democracy is a call to stop treating AI as a peripheral technical issue. Decisions about procurement, data-sharing, algorithmic transparency and oversight are now democratic choices, not just IT questions. The authors push for institutional designs that give parliaments, regulators and civil society real leverage over how AI is used in public life, rather than leaving those decisions entirely to vendors or executive agencies.

Business leaders and technologists will also recognise themselves in this book. Many of the systems that shape public discourse and policy – from recommendation engines to risk-scoring tools – are built and operated by private firms. Schneier and Sanders argue that companies cannot hide behind neutrality. AI systems encode value judgements about fairness, accountability and acceptable trade-offs; pretending otherwise simply hands more power to those already advantaged in the system. For firms working in or with African governments, the message is clear: technical sophistication without democratic accountability is not progress.

For citizens, including parents thinking about the world their children will inherit, the book is both a warning and an encouragement. It warns that if we disengage, AI will be used primarily to optimise for the interests of those who already hold wealth and influence. But it also sketches ways in which AI could support more participatory forms of democracy – from tools that help people understand complex policy choices, to systems that aggregate public input in more meaningful ways than online shouting matches.

CLOSING TAKEAWAY

Rewiring Democracy is not a despairing book, but neither is it naïve. Schneier and Sanders take AI’s risks seriously, yet they refuse to accept that democratic erosion is inevitable. Their argument is that AI is already busy rewiring our institutions; the only real question is whether we will seize the chance to reroute some of those circuits in the public interest.

For readers in South Africa and across Africa – societies wrestling with mistrust, inequality and fragile institutions – this is more than an academic debate. It is about whether the next generation grows up in democracies where technology deepens their voice, or in systems where decisions about their lives are taken by algorithms and actors they never get to see. That choice is still ours, but not forever.

Author Bio: Johan Steyn is a prominent AI thought leader, speaker, and author with a deep understanding of artificial intelligence’s impact on business and society. He is passionate about ethical AI development and its role in shaping a better future. Find out more about Johan’s work at https://www.aiforbusiness.net