Could the employment of large language models (LLMs) in place of human advisors improve the problem-solving ability of democratic assemblies? LLMs represent the most significant recent incarnation of artificial intelligence and could change the future of democratic governance. This paper assesses their potential to serve as expert advisors to democratic representatives. While LLMs promise enhanced expertise availability and accessibility, they also present specific challenges. These include hallucinations, misalignment and value imposition. After weighing LLMs’ benefits and drawbacks against human advisors, I (...) argue that time-tested democratic procedures, such as deliberation and aggregation by voting, provide safeguards that are effective against human and machine advisor shortcomings alike. Additional protective measures may include custom training for advisor LLMs or boosting representatives’ competencies in query formulation. Implementation of adversarial proceedings in which LLM advisors would debate each other and provide dissenting opinions is likely to yield further epistemic benefits. Overall, promising interventions that would mitigate the LLM risks appear feasible. Machine advisors could thus empower human decision-makers to make more autonomous, higher-quality decisions. On this basis, I defend the hypothesis that LLMs’ careful integration into policymaking could augment democracy’s ability to address today’s complex social problems. (shrink)

The purpose of grant peer review is to identify the most excellent and promising research projects. However, sociologists of science and STS scholars have shown that peer review tends to promote solid low-risk projects at the expense of more original and innovative projects that often come with higher risk. It has also been shown that the review process is affected by significant measures of chance. Against this background, the aim of this study is to theorize the notions of academic judgment (...) and agonistic chance, and to present and analyze situations in which expert reviewers are faced with the challenge of trying to decide which grant proposals to select when there is strong disagreement. The empirical analysis is based on ethnographic observations of ten panel groups at the Swedish Research Council in the areas of natural and engineering sciences. By focusing on disagreement, the study provides a more in-depth understanding of how agonistic chance creeps into the peer review process and becomes part of the consensus that is created. (shrink)

In the current research landscape, there are increasing demands for research to be innovative and cutting-edge. At the same time, concerns are voiced that as a consequence of neoliberal regimes of research governance, innovative research becomes impeded. In this paper, I suggest that to gain a better understanding of these dynamics, it is indispensable to scrutinise current demands for innovativeness as a distinct way of ascribing worth to research. Drawing on interviews and focus groups produced in a close collaboration with (...) three research groups from the crop and soil sciences, I develop the notion of a project-innovation regime of valuation that can be traced in the sphere of research. In this evaluative framework, it is considered valuable to constantly re-invent oneself and take ‘first steps’ instead of ‘just’ following up on previous findings. Subsequently, I describe how these demands for innovativeness relate to and often clash with other regimes of valuation that matter for researchers’ practices. I show that valuations of innovativeness are in many ways bound to those of productivity and competitiveness, but that these two regimes are nevertheless sometimes in tension with each other, creating a complicated double bind for researchers. Moreover, I highlight that also the project-innovation regime as such is not always in line with what researchers considered as a valuable progress of knowledge, especially because it entails a de-valuation of certain kinds of long-term epistemic agendas. I show that prevailing pushes for innovativeness seem to be based on a rather short-sighted temporal imaginary of scientific progress that is hardly grounded in the complex realities of research practices, and that they can reshape epistemic practices in potentially problematic ways. (shrink)