About Mark Howard and The Race

The Race: Building Democracy in the Age of AI is an independent research and writing project by Mark Howard. It examines how artificial intelligence is changing the distribution of power—and whether democratic institutions, communities, workers, and smaller organizations will retain the capacity to shape what comes next.

My name is Mark Howard. I created The Race to examine a question that will shape the coming decades:

As artificial intelligence develops, will it concentrate power—or expand the capacity of people and democratic institutions to act?

I came to that question through three long-standing interests: history, technology, and democracy.

History taught me that powerful technologies do not determine their own consequences. Their effects depend on the institutions, laws, markets, public investments, organizational choices, and social habits that grow around them.

I am a technology optimist, although I hope a realistic one. I have seen technology extend human capability, make knowledge more accessible, and help organizations work more effectively. But useful technology does not automatically produce broadly shared benefits or broadly distributed power.

My Perspective

My approach is grounded in practical experience with institutions and technological change.

I spent approximately ten years in city government, including service as a city manager. That work taught me that public policy is not only legislation and regulation. It is also budgets, contracts, staffing, utility systems, planning decisions, public meetings, administrative capacity, and the everyday work of turning policy into practice.

Later, in leadership roles at Accenture, much of my job involved anticipating what was coming next. I worked to help clients prepare for technological and economic change while helping ensure that Accenture had the capabilities and trained people needed to respond. I began discussing the likely significance of machine learning with clients as early as 2014 and 2015.

Those experiences shape how I view AI. Its consequences will not be decided only in research laboratories or corporate headquarters. They will also be determined through decisions about electricity, water, land, infrastructure, public procurement, education, employment, economic development, and access to essential services.

What The Race Does

The Race follows concrete developments in AI and asks what they are doing to the distribution of power.

It looks beyond whether a particular system is impressive, whether AI is simply “good” or “bad,” or which company or country appears to be ahead. It examines who gains the ability to decide, build, participate, challenge decisions, and shape the conditions under which AI operates.

The project does not assume that large institutions are inherently undemocratic. Governments need enough authority and competence to govern. Companies often need scale to invest and build. Regulation can protect the public, but it can also entrench the organizations best equipped to comply with it.

The more useful question is whether power remains visible, accountable, and open to meaningful challenge.

The Race is an evolving framework, not a claim to have settled the answers. Its categories and judgments will change as the technology develops and the evidence becomes clearer.

How AI Is Used in This Project

ChatGPT is part of how The Race is produced.

I choose the questions, set the direction, make the analytical and editorial judgments, and take responsibility for the final work. ChatGPT helps locate and organize information, compare developments, test interpretations, and prepare early drafts.

Its use requires care. Sources must be checked, arguments tested, and language revised.

That is also part of the project: exploring how AI can help one person conduct sustained public-policy research while identifying where human experience, judgment, and responsibility remain essential.

Mark Howard is the founder and author of The Race: Building Democracy in the Age of AI. He writes about artificial intelligence, democracy, public policy, institutional capacity, infrastructure governance, organizational change, and the shifts in political and economic power accompanying AI.