On September 30, 2026, Murmuration brought together researchers, organizers, journalists, and civic leaders in Boston for More Human: Life, Democracy, and Connection in the Age of AI, an exploration of how artificial intelligence is changing the ways we learn, connect, organize, and participate in civic life. Across a series of lightning talks, speakers Sarah Stamper, Abby Binder, Danielle Allen, and Susan Page examined AI’s implications for human connection, trust, learning, and democracy. Grounded in Murmuration’s research supported by the Walton Family Foundation, AI and the Human Future: Americans’ Views on Artificial Intelligence Across Life, Society, and Democracy, the conversations challenged us to look beyond what technology can do and consider what we want it to help us build—and how we can keep people, relationships, and communities at the center of our future.
About Danielle Allen:
Danielle Allen directs the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at Harvard Kennedy School and the Democratic Knowledge Project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. A political philosopher and democracy advocate, she works at the intersection of AI and democracy, focusing on how emerging technologies can be governed to strengthen—rather than erode—self-government, and on renovating democratic institutions for the digital age.
She is the author of numerous books, including Our Declaration, Cuz, Justice by Means of Democracy, and most recently Radical Duke.
Continue reading for the full transcript
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Evening, everybody. It is a pleasure to be here with all of you. Thank you for taking the time. I'm Danielle Allen, a combination of Harvard professor and democracy advocate. Many of you who are here, my Boston friends, know me to be sort of monomaniacally obsessed with the question of the health of our democracy.
But I actually am here tonight to confess about the moment when I lost confidence in our democracy. I think my experience of losing confidence in our democracy is what a lot of people are experiencing right now. They have a sense of urgent issues in their life. For example, data centers. They have a clear view that they want people to have a voice in decisions around data centers, and they have little confidence that that is going to be a possibility.
My loss of confidence in democracy happened in the years between 2007 and 2009. I spent many years trying to support a cousin of mine who had ended up in prison at a young age in Southern California in 1995. He was in prison for about 12 years, and I was his cousin on duty, as I call it, when he got out. I remember sitting in a hot car one July in Los Angeles with him, looking at a map and trying to figure out how we were gonna put the pieces together because school was up here, and the only place that housing was gonna work was over here, and the only place that would consider him for a job was over here.
And we all know what traffic is like in LA and what it means to try to make that circuit on public transportation. And I just literally had this feeling in my bones that it wasn't gonna work. And then two years later, it didn't work. He was shot and killed by somebody he had met while he was in prison.
And a lot of that outcome related to the fact that it was so hard to put the basic pieces of life together. And in that moment, there was something in me that actually broke. I've always had a deep belief in the American promise, that if you work hard, you can get ahead, and that even if you screw up, if you're willing to pay your time, you're willing to work hard, you're willing to start over, you will have a chance.
In that moment, it felt impossible to put those pieces together.
The other thing I registered in that moment was that I'd spent so many years, so much time just trying to help my cousin do things like get schooling while he was in prison. And when he was out, the time trying to find the housing, trying to find a job and all of that. I'd put so much time and energy into that, that I had never been able to actually lift up my head and address the systemic issues that had put him in the situation he found himself in in the first place. And then I multiplied my experience by the millions of people who have incarcerated relatives. And I was like, "No wonder nothing changes," because you're putting so much energy into just trying to help somebody survive to the next day that you cannot actually lift your head up and participate in your democracy. So I made it my mission to lift my head up and try to participate in our democracy.
From 2009 to 2013 I was starting to work on criminal justice reform. That very quickly taught me that even where we had common sense and cross-partisan solutions to things, it was nearly impossible to get them through. And for me, the red alert bell about the health of our democracy came in 2013 when Congress had an approval rating of 9%. Now, Congress is about at that level now, but it has been that way for more than a decade. That's the context in which people are expressing these concerns about agency and data centers. They are expressing these concerns because they don't actually have confidence in the governing capacity of their democratic institutions. We heard in the data that people want human judgment, human connection, human decision-making, AKA healthy democracy. So they're expressing precisely the lack of the governing capacity that we need to tackle the huge, big problem of what we're going to do about AI.
So one of the things that I am here to suggest, and that Murmuration's work helps in so many ways, is that it's actually by renovating democracy, reanimating civic experience, that we can get control of AI. We need the tools to govern AI in order to address the challenges and problems of AI. So what does that mean exactly? It means something about institutions, and it also means something about our civic culture. I want you to keep both of those concepts in mind.
First, on the institutional front, we talk about democracy. But actually, does anybody know how many democracies we have in the United States? Try 37,757. Every municipal jurisdiction, every state and federal territory, and we have to renovate all of them. All of them have a responsibility to hear citizens' voices, to connect citizens' voices to decision-making. And amazingly, AI can help with that. AI does have great capacity for sense-making. It can help us bring people's voices into our governing processes more efficiently, and give people tools to help their decision-makers have more clarity about what they want. All the sense-making that Murmuration is doing is an example of the kind of social listening that is possible.
The point I want to make is that democracy is a technology. It's like 37,000 antique clocks scattered around the country, and every one needs to be upgraded. And we have to figure out how to do that together. Because we have to do it together, not only do we need to deploy new technology to give us capacity to govern more effectively, but we have to literally build those human connections through organization.
So, even while you're thinking about upgrading institutions, you cannot ignore the need to pull grassroots community organizations back together and put tools in their hands to help shape the conversations that are going to flow into governing institutions. Institutions and culture side by side- that's the really important work we have to do, and it ultimately sums up to ensuring that, as people, we have the power to govern the urgent issues, whether it is something like criminal justice reform, in my own experience and situation, or the very, very hard challenge of where to put a data center.