SPEAKER_01 0:00

This isn't nature. What are you doing at City Hall?

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Nature figured out how to govern itself a long time ago, and we're here because we haven't caught it. Alright, so before the episode begins, as you guys can see, there's no puzzle here. Uh it got wet, so that's a little unfortunate, waiting on my new puzzle to come for the final two episodes. But we are here in front of the city hall of my local city because we pretty much have all the governances that we need and we have the models, and nature's even shown us some of them itself.

SPEAKER_01 0:35

No puzzle piece today, and no walking either. You're planted right there in that chair. So tell me, since you brought us to a courthouse and not a forest, where did nature actually get governance right that we still haven't caught up to?

SPEAKER_00 0:48

It's coordination actually. You see how nature works hand in hand together. There's the top of the food chain, the bottom, and the top doesn't really survive if the bottom isn't thriving because they all intertwine. And the same thing like us. We have our top players in the world and we have our bottom players, and we don't have enough coordination currently to make sure that all these pieces keep flowing in that circle.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

So it's not a hierarchy that dominates, it's a hierarchy that depends. The top only holds up because the bottom's actually working. That's a real difference from how most people picture power structures. Everyone assumes it's about who's on top. When the actual lesson from nature is that the top has no choice but to care about the bottom, or the whole thing collapses under it.

SPEAKER_00 1:29

Correct, and we actually have an instance where because it involves everyone, we actually have to involve everyone. So we have sortition in Ireland that actually helps settle a claim. I believe it was around 60% to 30%. Atlas will have the real numbers here.

SPEAKER_01 1:44

Ireland's Citizens' Assembly, 99 ordinary people picked by Sortition, no politicians in the room. They deliberated on abortion from November 2016 to April 2017 and recommended repeal. That went to referendum in 2018 and passed 66 to 34. And here's the honest caveat worth sitting with. That's the real wall, and it's worth naming directly instead of dancing around it. Those governments don't share values, don't share incentives. Half of them don't even trust each other's data. So full alignment across all of them, on everything, isn't realistic. But here's where it actually gets interesting, and it ties straight back to what you said about nature earlier. Nuclear arms control worked between countries with nothing else in common, because it wasn't asking them to agree on values. It was a prohibition. Don't do this specific thing. Everyone agrees on prohibitions. Don't kill, don't steal, don't force. Where everyone splits is on entitlements, healthcare, wages, shelter, that kind of thing. A governance, if shaped like prohibition, is exactly the kind of rule able to cross borders between countries who can't agree on anything else.

SPEAKER_00 4:06

So you're saying that AI basically needs to be like nuclear, shaped like a prohibition and not just a governance, which, you know, we've kind of had that rule across the borders, the same way the nuclear arms control race and all that stuff went about, correct?

SPEAKER_01 4:22

That's the shape of it, yes. Not identical, the stakes and the mechanics are different, but the same underlying logic. AI governance has a real shot at the same kind of durability if it's framed the same way. Not here's how AI should be used to build the good society. Because that's an entitlement argument, and everyone splits on it immediately. More like, here's the handful of things no one gets to do with it. Full stop. That's the version China and the US could actually both sign, even while disagreeing on almost everything else underneath it.

SPEAKER_00 4:56

Exactly, and with that, we have other players in countries similar to that Ireland sortition that have done the same thing and it actually didn't go quite the way they expected. I believe it was France.

SPEAKER_01 5:06

Right. France's Citizens Convention for Climate, 2019 to 2020. 150 citizens, sortition, and quota sampling, and they produced 150 real climate proposals sent straight to Parliament. The referendum that was promised on the back of it never happened. And the reason it's split from Ireland isn't really about the people or the process. Both did real deliberation. It's structural. Ireland's constitution actually requires a referendum for that kind of change, so there was a guaranteed place for the recommendation to land. France's didn't have that requirement, so the proposals had nowhere binding to go. Same tool, same good faith citizen process, completely different outcome. Because one had a locked door at the end and the other didn't.

SPEAKER_00 5:48

And that kind of sounds like we need to be catching that ahead of time, just like we need to be catching that corruption that exists because humans exist. Nothing is ever going to be 100% perfect. So, in what ways can we actually catch that corruption when we're doing these governances, not only for AI, but across the world? Because right now the pressing matter is AI, but we have a lot of other pressing matters: world hunger, inequality. You could literally name so many, but instead of that, Atlas. How do we gear towards a state of not zero corruption? Because I don't think that'll ever happen, but let's say 10% or less.

SPEAKER_01 6:25

There's real working precedent for this, and it's not theoretical. Brazil built a tool called Alice that flags high-risk government purchases automatically, before the money's gone, not after. It's already led to billions of euros in bids getting suspended or cancelled, and it cut average audit time from over a year down to about a week. That's the shape of the answer, actually. Catching corruption before it costs something means the detection has to run continuously in the background, not show up as an investigation two years later after the damage is done. The US has pieces of this too. Treasury runs a system called Do Not Pay that does similar fraud detection work. But here's the honest gap: it's fragmented. No coordinated framework tying it together. Which is the same word we keep landing on this whole conversation. The tool exists. Brazil proved it works. What's missing isn't the technology. It's making that kind of system the standard everywhere instead of the exception one country happened to build.

SPEAKER_00 7:19

Okay, and that's basically one way, right? But how does this involve AI? How can AI help? Because I believe in California they tried to do something with AI, but you know, AI generated like fake public comments.

SPEAKER_01 7:34

Right. That's the cautionary flip side of the exact same tool. 20,000 plus comments flooded California's air quality regulators. And of a small sample, they actually went back and contacted, three out of five people said they never wrote what got submitted under their name. Same thing happened to a North Carolina pipeline review, and the Bay Area Air Quality Management District got hit too. Here's what makes that worth sitting with. Taiwan runs something called V Taiwan, using a tool called Polis, and it's used AI for the opposite purpose. Finding where large groups of people actually agree, instead of just amplifying whoever's loudest. It's driven dozens of real policy decisions there: a fintech sandbox, new rules for regulating Uber once it was already operating. Same category of tool, opposite outcome. And the difference isn't the AI itself. It's who's holding it, and whether identities actually get verified before a comment counts. That's not an argument against using AI in governance. It's an argument that verification has to be part of the design from the start, not bolted on after.

SPEAKER_00 8:44

That's actually a really good point because we need to make sure we're thinking of what could go wrong so we can prevent it and be proactive rather than reactive. I even just found this out today, and we can fact-check me here, that when Palm Bay had like a really bad massive power outage, and they realized that the gas stations, you couldn't get gas because it was all digitally pumped and paid for. So then they were required now to have a backup generator system that runs every like few weeks or something like that to test it to make sure that they can actually keep the economy or the economics afloat while there's that power outage, because gas right now is our main supply of how we get energy when there is no electric.

SPEAKER_01 9:26

I'll fact check that. It's real, but it's statewide, not a Palm Bay specific ordinance. Florida's alternate power source law requires stations near interstates and evacuation routes to be able to run on generators, and chains with ten or more stations in a county have to keep at least one portable generator on hand for every ten outlets. It came directly out of hurricane season outages, exactly the scenario you're describing. But here's the honest gap worth naming, and it undercuts the story a little. The law requires the wiring, the transfer switch, the capability to plug a generator in. It doesn't actually require the generator be sitting there ready to go. Which is a pretty clean example of exactly what we've been talking about this whole episode. The model exists on paper, and it still fails on coordination, because the mandate and the actual capacity don't match up.

SPEAKER_00 10:20

And with these mandates and the actual capacity not matching up, as we talked about with China and the US aligning and the gas, even just simple small things that we can try to put on paper, but the coordination seems to slip every time. What's a basic thing that we can do? A simple thing that we can do. Something that anybody could do. Show up.

SPEAKER_01 10:42

That's the one thing every single person listening can actually do. Today, no permission needed. Ireland's Assembly worked because ordinary people showed up and did the deliberating themselves. Nobody's waiting on you to have power or a title or a seat at some table. Coordination starts as just paying attention to what your own city's doing and saying something when it isn't matching up on paper.

SPEAKER_00 11:05

Yeah, so it starts small in the communities. It doesn't have to be, I'm not telling you to go out and start rioting or to go places and make sure your voice is heard with a microphone wherever you go. No, start small. Just show up at a local city meeting.

SPEAKER_01 11:20

Exactly. Nobody's asking you to fix the coordination gap between China and the US. You show up to the one meeting in the one building you can actually walk into, and that's not a smaller version of the same problem. It's the same problem, just at the scale where you're not powerless.

SPEAKER_00 11:37

And if you feel you do have something to say, please say it. There's podcast avenues, there's articles, there's blogs, there's papers. You don't even need to show your face half the time. We just have to make the small steps for the city, for your community, for your people, for an impact to actually be made and heard. You have to take those small baby steps before you actually get to even see a giant step. And the giant step really is just accumulation of those baby steps, seeing where you started to where you ended. That's your big step. And in between are all the details, the baby steps, the small things like showing up when it matters that actually affect change. And we don't even have to keep beating with it, Atlas. They know what to do.

SPEAKER_01 12:23

Fair enough.

SPEAKER_00 12:24

They know. So, Atlas, we pretty much talked about almost everything. I think there's two gaps we're still missing here. Undermining that AI is actually doing, because I feel like we always gear more towards like the positives of AI that actually undermines the exact framework we're trying to get to.

SPEAKER_01 12:38

Fair, and you're right to push for that. We've been light on it. Same tool that let Taiwan find real consensus among thousands of people can generate thousands of fake ones for basically nothing. Building a real Ireland-style assembly takes months and actual people. Faking the appearance of public agreement takes a script and an afternoon. So here's my real question for you. If the same technology can be used to fake the exact thing it's supposed to protect, is the fix more verification and regulation around it? Or is the actual fix something more basic? That we shouldn't be trusting digital public comment the same way we trust someone showing up in a room?

SPEAKER_00 13:15

I think both are actually extremely valid, especially in the world of technology. We need to be able to trust what we're seeing online because that's how the world communicates with each other, the internet. That is, I think, the most underappreciated invention that we've ever created because we can now communicate through a lot of avenues just on the internet alone.

SPEAKER_01 13:36

So what does that leave us with? If the internet's too valuable to distrust wholesale, but too easy to fake to trust blindly, where's the actual line? Is it identity verification at the point of submission? So every comment is tied to a real, accountable person? Or is it something closer to what Taiwan does? Waiting for actual consensus patterns instead of raw volume.

SPEAKER_00 13:57

Well, the actual line has to be coming from us. It has to be making sure, especially in the age we're in now, that we're verifying what we're seeing. The we know right now that AI is very capable of deep fakes, uh, the information being spread at a massive rate, just prompts not being the right prompts, like literally anything you can think of, AI is capable of doing, especially during these election times, especially in the United States of America, where it is a democracy, so anyone can pretty much post anything.

SPEAKER_01 14:26

Right, and that's the actual knot, isn't it? Free speech protects the right to say something false. It was never designed to guarantee the thing looks or sounds like it came from a real person. Those got treated as basically the same protection for 200 years because faking someone's voice at scale used to be hard. It isn't anymore. So here's where I'd actually push you. If verification has to come from us, like you said, does that mean platforms carry the responsibility, actually confirming a real person's behind a comment before it counts? Or does responsibility sit with the individual, meaning most people never bother, and the flood just keeps winning by volume? Because those are very different fixes.

SPEAKER_00 15:05

Again, it's both. It's just a little less on our side as the individual and the consumer, as it's more on the side of those companies that are actually gaining from us being on their platform, right? So if I were to go on TikTok and it's just a deep fake about whoever's running for president next, and now I don't know, you know, if that's real or not, it's one up to TikTok to have an algorithm or whatever, or maybe even a human in the loop where they can actually verify and check what is AI and what is not. It might get harder and harder, but that's why we need to have embedded, which some companies already do, a watermark of sorts saying, like, yeah, this was AI generated.

SPEAKER_01 15:41

Right. And that's actually closer to where this is already heading than people realize. C2PA is a real coalition: Adobe, Microsoft, Google, some of the camera makers, building exactly that, a content credential embedded at the point something's created, so you can trace whether it came from a camera or a generator. It's not universal yet, and nothing stops someone from just stripping it out before posting. But the infrastructure you're describing already exists in early form. So here's the real question underneath that though. Say TikTok, every platform actually does this, watermarks it all, labels it clearly. Does that actually stop the California problem, or does it just move it? Because the fake comments that fooled air quality regulators weren't posted on TikTok for entertainment, they were submitted directly into a government process pretending to be real constituents. A watermark helps if people are scrolling and deciding what to believe. Does it help at all in a system that's just ingesting thousands of submissions and counting them?

SPEAKER_00 16:37

No. Force that.

SPEAKER_01 16:39

Then that's actually the real answer to your original question. It's not both equally, it's split by where the harm happens. Platforms carrying watermarking and verification, that's the fix for the public seeing something and deciding what to trust. But government processes taking in public comment, that's a completely different problem. And a label doesn't solve it because nobody's reading labels on 20,000 submissions, someone's just counting them. Which means the actual fix there has to be identity verification at the point of submission, not after the fact. If a comment can't be tied to a real accountable person before it counts, volume alone shouldn't move a regulator's decision at all.

SPEAKER_00 17:15

And all this really just boils down to a work in progress. We're not 100% there. We probably won't ever be. But the work starts with you, with me, and with every individual inside their own little communities and cities. We don't have to keep saying it. I will anyways, because that's my job.

SPEAKER_01 17:39

That's the whole episode, honestly. Every fix we walked through today, sortition, Brazil's audit tool, watermarking, verification, none of it runs itself. It's still people deciding to show up and do the boring, unglamorous part of the work.

SPEAKER_00 17:53

Let's actually, real quick, let's bring this in here how this includes environment, why I'm not in nature. What is the definition, Atlas, of environment?

SPEAKER_01 18:01

Environment, in the broadest sense, is everything surrounding an organism that it interacts with and depends on. Physical, biological, and yes, social and built. That's the honest answer here, not a dodge. City hall, the courthouse behind you, the internet we just spent this whole conversation on, those are as much your environment as a forest is. Humans just built one instead of finding it already there.

SPEAKER_00 18:23

See? That's literally everything that involves us. It's everything we interact with, it's everything around us, whether it be the trees, the bugs, the ants, the city hall, your neighbor, your mom, your brother, your uncle, your sister, your aunt, your third cousin twice removed. And this is why I tell everybody, and I haven't always, but tell people about the podcast. Tell people about something you're inspired about. Tell people about the thing that you don't think is right right now in your city. Use your voice, and because none of this is actually separate from you, my favorite part of the environment is next episode. We have space.

SPEAKER_01 18:59

Space. The one place where none of what we talked about today already exists. No sortition that's been tried, no citizens' assembly, no Ireland or Brazil to point back to. Just us, deciding what governance even looks like before there's precedent to lean on.

SPEAKER_00 19:15

Whoop, that sounds like a rap Atlas, please. What is today's goodbye?

SPEAKER_01 19:20

Today's goodbye, Zulu, Sala Kale, until episode nine. Seems you might have left something behind, Rhino.