Making democracy work is not easy, as recent events have shown. Some critics argue that technology is making the problem worse. However, one startup believes artificial intelligence could help bridge differences rather than widen them.
Tomy Lorsch, co-founder and CEO of ComplexChaos, described his inspiration. He noticed people asking AI to explain complex topics in simple terms and 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 now developing tools designed to help groups arrive at a consensus.
Their first test cases involved climate negotiations, though the specific issue is not what matters. Their primary goal is to foster cooperation and shorten the time it takes for groups to reach an agreement. Lorsch pointed out that while many companies build collaboration software, cooperation is a distinct challenge.
He explained that facilitating cooperation does not scale easily. Typically, trained facilitators work with groups to build consensus, but this process can slow down when negotiations occur across different time zones or locations.
Lorsch was encouraged by a recent large language model from Google called the Habermas Machine, which was developed with the explicit goal of generating group consensus statements where both majority and minority viewpoints feel represented.
The startup recently trialed its tool with young delegates from nine African nations who were preparing for climate-related negotiations at a United Nations campus in Germany. The tool incorporates both Google’s Habermas Machine and OpenAI’s ChatGPT to generate questions, establish conversation goals, and summarize long documents.
Ben Dror explained that the goal was to help the delegates arrive at a consensus as a bloc before they began negotiations with other groups. The tool could also speed up negotiations themselves. When blocs encounter new information during a large session, they often must pause to renegotiate their position, which creates friction. ComplexChaos hopes its tool can shorten that time.
In the trial with the African delegates, participants reported up to a sixty percent reduction in coordination time. Ninety-one percent of participants also said the AI tool helped them see perspectives they would have otherwise missed.
ComplexChaos is also pitching its cooperation tool to companies, including tech firms and large consultancies. Lorsch compared it to strategic planning, which often takes companies months of back-and-forth negotiations across different teams and time zones.
But the founders are most enthusiastic about the potential for climate negotiations. Ben Dror stated that if AI can shorten and simplify these processes, we would be much better off, not just for climate, but for any major sustainability challenge or other significant problem we face.