Digital Democracy

Artificial intelligence, young people want to have a say

Stanford University detects a concentration of power over Ai. And the younger generation wants a say

by Paolo Venturi

20 April 2026

La gente fa la fila per votare fuori da un seggio elettorale durante le elezioni parlamentari ungheresi a Budapest, Ungheria, il 12 aprile 2026. Molti i giovani, i quali dopo il voto sono scesi in piazza a festeggiare l’esito del voto (REUTERS/Elisabeth Mandl)

3' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

Key points

High performance
Power concentration
Young people want to have their say

3' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

Stanford's AI Index Report 2026 tells of an outsized acceleration, but the most striking fact is not technical, it is political. 73% of AI experts expect positive effects on work, only 23% of citizens share this expectation. Fifty-point gap between those who build the future and those who live in it. It is not a communication problem but a power gap.

High performance

The report's numbers tell us that the adoption of Ai in organisations is now close to saturation, that generative has spread faster than the speed with which the internet and personal computers spread, and that the most advanced models have outperformed humans in several cognitive tasks. All this alone, however, does not tell us where we are going, because the point is not what machines can do but who decides what they should do, for whom, and according to what idea of society.

Whoever governs the algorithms also governs, indirectly, the field of possibilities. It decides which answers come first, which priorities are made visible, which correlations become choice criteria. Artificial intelligence, we know, is not neutral: it works on data sedimented in the past and tends, by its very nature, to return the world as it found it. Thus the bias become predictions, the predictions guide decisions, and the decisions end up consolidating the very arrangements they were only supposed to describe. It is here that efficiency risks becoming conservation disguised as innovation.

Power Concentration

The Stanford University report shows a very relevant fact: the most advanced part of development is increasingly concentrated in the hands of large private players. We are not just witnessing a technological leap, but a redefinition of power. A power that is less visible than traditional political power, but no less incisive for that. On the contrary: the more it penetrates the invisible architectures that organise reality, the more we struggle to recognise it as such. And yet, just as power becomes concentrated, something is moving in the opposite direction.

Young people want to have their say

In Hungary, the vote on 12 April 2026 marked the end of the Orbán era with a record turnout of around 80%, also driven by youth mobilisation. In Italia, a few weeks earlier, the referendum on justice recorded an unusually high turnout of close to 60%, showing that the demand for involvement is by no means exhausted. Outside Europe, Iranian women and young people continue to represent, albeit under very harsh conditions, a demand for freedom that no longer accepts to be postponed.

These are signs that cannot be read as isolated episodes, since they all say the same thing: democracy can no longer limit itself to being a procedure. If it remains confined to the moment of voting, it comes too late. That is why the demand that is coming from young people in particular is more radical than it seems. It is not only asking for electoral participation, but also for economic democracy, access to the governance of digital infrastructures that produce value and knowledge.

Freedom today is being able to participate in defining ends, not just selecting means. It is to be able to take part in the construction of alternatives, not just consume them. It is to escape the homologation that threatens to creep in when the answers come before the questions are really ours. Because a society can become very intelligent from a computational point of view and, at the same time, very poor from a human point of view. It can multiply the capacity to compute and reduce the capacity to desire. It can optimise everything but sense. This is where artificial intelligence is not enough. Because we can have ever more powerful systems, ever more accurate predictions, ever more pervasive automations.

The real question is not whether AI will be useful or harmful, it is who decides what counts as useful and who has a voice in defining the ends. Perhaps this is exactly what young people are saying, in the ballot box as well as in the streets: it is not enough to be included in a system, we want to help write it. It is not enough to be users of an intelligent world, we want to be its co-authors. Because freedom, even in the age of algorithms, still stems from something that no model can fully capture: the human capacity to desire something else, to imagine differently, to not settle.