AI was once defined as the imitation of human intelligence. We’ve now achieved that—Generative AI (GenAI), powered by large language models (LLMs), can easily pass the famous Turing Test for machine intelligence.
Yet the deeper story is far more significant: AI has become our shared gateway to human intelligence—the accumulated knowledge of civilization, organized, connected, and accessible to everyone.
Artificial intelligence research has long explored what it means for a machine to “think.” Modern large language models learn much as children do—through language. They form relationships between words, ideas, and experience, allowing them to communicate and reason in ways that often surpass most teenagers in fluency and clarity.
That genuine capability is real intelligence in its own right. But for Democracy 2026, the greater importance lies elsewhere: AI connects us to the vast treasure trove of human knowledge, distilling it and returning it to us in usable form.
Think about how our access to human knowledge has evolved:
The last leap took us from just finding information (and leaving the hard work for the humans) to synthesizing information—summarizing, comparing, drafting, integrating, and answering specific questions.
Democracy depends on an informed public. By turning human knowledge into accessible, conversational form, modern AI systems offer the missing infrastructure for global citizenship: complete, comprehensible information available to all.
When citizens can explore facts, perspectives, and possibilities through open AI tools, participation deepens and collective decision-making improves. This is the foundation of the people-first AI economy that Democracy 2026 promotes.
Researchers will continue to ask how far machine intelligence can go.
For Democracy 2026, however, the real future lies in steadily increasing the quality of tools available for everyday people, effectively improving what is called “collective intelligence”—the effective sum of the intelligence of all humans.
Return to the main document