Making democracy work is not easy, as recent events have shown. Some critics argue that technology is making the problem worse. But one startup believes artificial intelligence could help bridge differences instead of widening them.
Tommy Lorsch, co-founder and CEO of Complex Chaos, described his inspiration. He had a realization when he saw people asking AI to explain complex topics in simple terms. He wondered if the same technology could act as a facilitator to help people understand each other and find common ground.
He and his co-founder, Maya Ben Dror, are developing tools to help groups reach a consensus. One of their early tests involved climate negotiations, though the specific issue is not important. The primary goal is to foster cooperation and reduce the time it takes for groups to agree.
Lorsch noted that many software tools are built for collaboration, like Slack or Google Docs. He emphasized that cooperation is a different challenge. Facilitating cooperation does not scale easily, he explained. Typically, trained facilitators work with groups to build consensus, but this process can slow down when negotiations happen across different time zones or locations.
Lorsch was encouraged by a recent large language model from Google called the Habermas Machine, which was designed with this exact purpose. He described it as an AI that generates group consensus statements where both majority and minority viewpoints feel represented.
The startup recently tested its tool with young delegates from nine African nations. They were preparing for climate-related negotiations at a United Nations campus in Germany. The tool uses both Google’s Habermas Machine and OpenAI’s ChatGPT to generate questions, set conversation goals, and summarize long documents.
According to Ben Dror, the aim was to help the delegates reach a consensus as a bloc before negotiating with others. The tool could also speed up negotiations themselves. When blocs, which are groups of aligned countries, encounter new information during a large session, they often must pause to renegotiate their position. This creates significant friction, and the startup hopes its tool can shorten that delay.
In the trial with African delegates, participants reported up to a sixty percent reduction in coordination time. Ninety-one percent of participants said the AI tool helped them see perspectives they would have otherwise missed.
Complex Chaos is also offering its cooperation tool to companies, including tech firms and large consultancies. Lorsch compared it to strategic planning, which often takes companies about three months of back-and-forth negotiations across different teams and time zones.
But Lorsch and Ben Dror are most excited about the potential for climate negotiations. Ben Dror stated that if AI can shorten and simplify these processes, we would be much better off. This applies not just to climate, but to any major sustainability challenge or other significant problem we face.