South Korea’s former business minister Young-sun Park and social media CEO Will Hohyon Ryu discussed the potential applications of artificial intelligence in democracy during a speech at the Harvard Kennedy School Tuesday.
The event – sponsored by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation in collaboration with the Harvard Korea Institute – was moderated by Jeeyang Rhee Baum, an adjunct lecturer at HKS. The discussion centered around the massive language model ChatGPT, Ryu’s social media platform OXOPolitics, and AI in general.
More than 50 people attended the event, which was held in the Kennedy School’s Land Hall.
Park, a former minister of small and medium enterprises and startups in South Korea and a fellow at the Rajawali Foundation Institute for Asia, opened the event by discussing the concept of “liquid democracy,” a form of direct democracy in which the voters can directly weigh in on policy decisions or choose to delegate their vote to a representative.
“Liquid democracy empowers direct participation,” Park said.
Many democracies are currently experiencing crises of polarization, according to Park. In countries like the US and South Korea, the sharp divide between left and right in politics means that politics “does not represent the voice of all the public,” he said, fueling disillusionment with politicians and systems of representation.
To address this, Park said, governments must turn to new technological advances to make politics more representative. By facilitating “direct communication between the people and the gathering of public opinion,” technology “compensates for the shortcomings of representative democracy.”
Ryu, the founder of OXOPolitics, said that one shortcoming of representative democracy is the “middlemen” who stand between voters and their representatives.
“It’s not always that the words of my representatives really represent me,” Ryu said.
Park said AI could augment representatives, synthesizing voters’ opinions in a quick way.
“AI is the most efficient way to make direct democracy possible,” Park said.
For example, Park discussed how a South Korean startup recently used ChatGPT to collect the views of South Korean citizens on South Korea’s relationship with Japan — sifting through hundreds of thousands of online posts. to create a comprehensive summary of public opinion.
“This system opens up a new possibility for determining the politics of the majority by analyzing the opinion of conservatives and progressives in the minority. [than] one minute,” he said. “This is the first step closer to digital democracy.”
Similarly, Ryu said he developed the social media platform OXOPolitics to connect voters directly with politicians. The platform collects users’ opinions on political issues and visualizes the data for politicians to see.
Ryu says OXOPolitics is a form of liquid democracy because it allows each individual to weigh in on political issues for themselves.
“Imagine having an AI that understands me better than I understand myself,” he said. “We are trying to bring AI-assisted liquid democracy to reality.”
Ryu acknowledges, however, the dangers of introducing artificial intelligence into political systems.
“We’re doing a dangerous thing,” he said. “Bringing AI — not human intelligence but artificial intelligence — into politics is likely to be disruptive.”
Park argues that developers can avoid these dangers by following five ethical principles: transparency, safety, responsibility, fairness, and goodwill. Ryu agrees that it’s important to hold AI accountable for behavior.
“We can follow AI recommendations, but ultimately, people have the responsibility as citizens to make the right decisions,” he said.
To ensure that the algorithms make useful decisions for the public, Ryu’s platform includes an explanation of where the algorithm’s recommendations come from.
“With transparency, you can trust AI,” he said.
In the end, Ryu said, AI is just a tool whose users should decide how it contributes to democracy.
“AI will be a dictator telling us what to do,” Ryu said. “But at the same time, it can be representative.”