Agent-Mediated Social Choice

Proposes autonomous AI agents (“voting avatars”) that debate and vote on behalf of citizens, addressing the cognitive burden of direct democracy in complex societies through compact preference representation. Umberto Grandi argues these systems would leverage AI research in multiagent systems and computational social choice to compactly represent voter preferences and values while creating voting procedures suitable for autonomous agent use. This approach attempts to reconcile the democratic ideal of widespread participation with the practical reality that citizens cannot deeply engage with every policy decision.