Democracy is not a static thing. It is constantly being made and reshaped by every possible force. In the twentieth century, the idea of self-governance by the people was threatened by new shifts in media, as radio and then television emerged, followed by the early internet at the end of the millennium. These shifts in technology happened alongside war, disease and economic unsettlement, leaving people trying to make sense of a society moving faster than it ever had before. AI has arrived at another such moment, bringing with it a technological revolution unlike anything we have seen before. It is a fundamentally different kind of technology, one that can operate outside of direct human control and using levers that humans can no longer understand or see. If politics is the art of making things possible, AI, through algorithms and generative forms, has added a kind of unknowable alchemy to that process. As with past shifts, this has required a new generation of scholars, writers, critics, and advocates to emerge as society grapples with this question of the impact of AI on democracy. Among them is Northeastern University’s Beth Simone Noveck, who is also chief AI strategist for the US state of New Jersey. Noveck’s Reboot is a serious book about a real problem. It is also, in important ways, the wrong book for this moment. It looks at AI as an institutional problem of democracy, not a framing I had encountered in any meaningful way before, and certainly not from someone with the experience and knowledge to speak with real authority. The book is essentially a cross-stitch of case studies showing how AI can be implemented in the public sector to improve service delivery and help citizens engage more meaningfully with a government that has grown monstrously in its remit