Former South Korean Economy Minister Park Yong-sun and social media CEO Ryu Ho-hyun discussed the potential application of artificial intelligence to democracy during a speech at the Harvard Kennedy School on Tuesday.
The event was hosted by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation in partnership with the Harvard Korea Institute and moderated by HKS Adjunct Lecturer Jeeyang Rhee Baum. Discussions focused on the large language model ChatGPT, Ryu’s social media platform OXOpolitics, and AI in general.
More than 50 people attended the event, which was held at the Kennedy School’s Rand Hall.
Park, former minister of SMEs and Startups in South Korea and a fellow of the Rajawali Foundation Institute for Asian Studies, at an event to discuss the concept of “fluid democracy,” a form of direct democracy that allows voters to speak directly to each other. It was started. He chooses to delegate policy decisions or votes to representatives.
“Fluid democracy allows direct participation,” said Park.
According to Park, many democracies are now facing a crisis of polarization. In countries like the United States and South Korea, the sharp division between the political left and right means that politics “does not represent the voice of all the people”, leading to dissatisfaction with politicians and systems of representation. is causing
To combat this, governments need to look to new advances in technology and make politics more representative, Park said. By facilitating “direct communication between citizens and the convergence of public opinion,” technology can “compensate for the shortcomings of representative democracy.”
OXOpolitics founder Liu said the drawback of representative democracy is the “middleman” that stands between voters and their representatives.
“My representative’s words don’t really describe me,” Ryu said.
Park said AI can complement delegates and integrate voter opinions in an accessible way.
“AI is the most efficient way to enable direct democracy,” said Park.
For example, Park recently found that a Korean startup used ChatGPT to aggregate public opinion on relations between South Korea and Japan, filtering hundreds of thousands of online posts to produce a comprehensive summary of public opinion. I explained how it was created.
“This system opened up new possibilities for making broader political decisions by analyzing less conservative and progressive opinions. [than] 1 minute,” she said. “This is the first step towards getting closer to digital democracy.”
Similarly, Liu said he developed OXOpolitics, a social media platform that directly connects voters and politicians. The platform collects user opinions on political issues and visualizes the data for politicians to see.
Liu said OXOpolitics is a form of fluid democracy.
“Imagine there is an AI that understands me better than I do,” he said. “We are making AI-assisted fluid democracy a reality.”
But Liu acknowledged the dangers of introducing artificial intelligence into the political system.
“We are doing something really dangerous,” he said. “Bringing AI, which is artificial intelligence rather than human intelligence, into politics is potentially disruptive.”
Park argued that developers can avoid these dangers by adhering to five ethical principles: transparency, safety, responsibility, fairness, and good faith. Ryu agreed that it is important to hold AI accountable ethically.
“We can follow AI recommendations, but ultimately humans are responsible as citizens for making the right decisions,” he said.
To help algorithms make useful decisions for the public, Ryu’s platform includes a description of where the algorithm’s recommendations come from.
“With transparency, you can trust AI,” he said.
Ultimately, Ryu said AI is just a tool and users should decide how it contributes to democracy.
“AI can become a dictator telling us what to do,” Liu said. “But at the same time, it can be representative.”
