CONCEPT
Who Gets to Speak
The first-order procedural question of AI governance — identified by Young's framework as structurally prior to every distributive question the public debate foregrounds.
Who gets to speak is the question Young's framework insists on placing first. The dominant AI policy discourse is organized around distributive questions: how should the economic gains from AI be shared? Should there be a universal basic income? Should AI companies pay a tax on displaced labor? Young's communicative democracy insists these questions are structurally downstream. They accept the existing decision-making architecture and ask only how to redistribute its outputs. The upstream question — who is in the room where the decisions are being made, whose voices count as authoritative, whose perspective shapes the terms of the debate — is the procedural question that determines whether distributive outcomes can claim democratic legitimacy at all.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The current answer to the procedural question is stark. Decisions about AI development are made by a remarkably small and homogeneous group: predominantly male, predominantly white or East Asian, predominantly educated at a handful of elite universities, predominantly located in a handful of cities, predominantly