Cooperative AI

This seminar unpacks the design choices behind computational frameworks that seek common ground among collective preferences. From established frameworks (like polls) to emerging frameworks (like the Habermas Machine). It situates today’s AI-assisted methods of preference elicitation within a longer history of opinion polling, reminding us that preferences are not fixed data points but products of their decision-making contexts.

From this perspective, our speaker Manon Revel will explore when and how AI-based democratic innovations might act as discovery tools, helping societies make sense of disagreement, surface shared reasons, and seek informed agreement. Yet she’ll also point to their darker potential: enabling binding decisions without reflection, normalising gradual disempowerment, or post-rationalising political outcomes.

The aim is to ask not only what these systems can do, but what they should be designed to reveal (and what they must never replace).

This work was conducted while Manon was at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center and Meta FAIR.

We’re delighted to host this fourth seminar in our 'Updates in Cooperative AI' series. We're running these seminars monthly, and you're welcome to subscribe to our Google Calendar to stay up-to-date on all upcoming events.

Speakers
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Manon Revel (Google DeepMind)

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Discussants

Time

16:00 - 17:00 UTC 20 November 2025

Links

This seminar has now finished

Manon Revel is a Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. She builds mathematical and computational models for collective agency in a networked, AI-mediated world. Her work brings together applied mathematics, AI, and political theory to design and analyse systems for collaborative decision-making—across human groups, democratic institutions, language models, and recommender systems. During her PhD at MIT, she developed new probabilistic frameworks for multi-agent decision-making, with a particular focus on liquid democracy. Manon was an adjunct professor at Notre Dame University, a lecturer at MIT, and a Democracy Doctoral Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance at the Harvard Kennedy School. She also led the research agenda on AI and democracy at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard Law School and worked at Meta, Palantir, the Responsible AI Institute, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Bell Labs.

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Updates in Cooperative AI

The aim is to ask not only what these systems can do, but what they should be designed to reveal (and what they must never replace).

This work was conducted while Manon was at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center and Meta FAIR.

We’re delighted to host this fourth seminar in our 'Updates in Cooperative AI' series. We're running these seminars monthly, and you're welcome to subscribe to our Google Calendar to stay up-to-date on all upcoming events.

AI-Enhanced Deliberative Democracy and the Future of the Collective Will