About SD-AI
Adrian Zidaritz
FounderAdrian Zidaritz is the founder and principal of SD-AI. The notes from his career have been the basis for a collection of 18 articles about Artificial Intelligence on the website aibluedot. Since its publishing in February 2020, the website has been read daily by hundreds of people around the world and much of the impetus behind SD-AI comes from communications originated on aibluedot. Links to Adrian's various profiles are here.
At this time (March 2024) the SD-AI website is just a template and it is still undergoing structural changes. New developments in AI as well as new political developments in the US require these changes, as well as an updated evaluation of our mission. The increasing impact of the Large Language Models (LLMs) and the Congressional hearings about AI are examples.
Secondly, because democracy is at the center of all that we do, we want to grow our organization through a grass-roots effort instead of a top-down approach. With that wish in mind, we are now more active on social media and are collecting input from people of various backgrounds, some technical most others not.
Personal Reflections
I want to share some informal notes about how I plan to divide my future work. First, I will dedicate a small proportion of my time to refreshing the articles on aibluedot.com. Second, most of my work will be about the effects of AI on democracy. Third, I may throw my hands up and switch to a small farm and a beat-up truck in California's El Dorado hills 😄.
Expounding on the second item, SD-AI will be about technical ways of using AI to strengthen democratic governance. I have added tools for contributors to post general-purpose notes, research notes and application code. I have designed the roles and the permission sets that are associated with those roles: author, developer, researcher, etc. We also have a small set of social media tools: messaging, groups, etc. All of this form a bare minimum, we'll add things as we go.
Hopefully there will be people who would assume more and more of the SD-AI responsibilities, especially executive responsibilities, allowing me to fade into the background and focus on a project which is pie-in-the-sky at this time but which is very dear to me and which has been a consistent thread in my career. I elaborate on this in the THEORETICAL PROGRAM: Context and Formalism and in the Formalism section of the Library. Oh, and by the way, that project is somehow related to the small farm and the beat-up truck.
I am putting less technical thoughts about the interaction between AI and democracy on Medium and Substack, taking advantage of their writer communities and the feedback I hope to get within those communities. The emphasis within both Medium articles and Substack articles is on the humanitarian, not technical, side of the interaction between AI and democracy, as the wheel below shows.
Links to my "AI, Democracy, and Human Values" publications on Medium and Substack are following below.
You can read all of the articles freely, none of them are behind a paywall.
