The problem of reliable democratic governance is important for the survival of any community, and it will be more and critical over time communities with levels of social connectivity in a society rapidly increasing with speeds and scales of electronic communication.
This might become critically important with the emergence of so-called “Smart Cities” powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) like it has been presented by Ben Goertzel recently. The core of any city is its human population and if the operations at human-level interactions are broken, any AI running on the basis of broken human interactions can make things worse rather than improving them.