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Shkruar nga Ted Lechterman
The dramatic possibilities of integrating AI into politics make the current moment very important for clarifying our political values.
From business and public administration to the daily lives of everyone, Artificial Intelligence is changing the world in many ways. The same could happen with politics in the future. While the idea of robot politicians may worry some people, poll results tell a different story.
A survey conducted by my university in 2021, during the first phase of major advances in this field, revealed broad public support for integrating AI into politics, in many countries and regions.
Most Europeans said they would like to see at least some of their politicians replaced by AI. Respondents in China were even more likely to agree that AI agents could shape public policy in the future, while Americans, who are usually friendly to innovation, were more cautious.
As a philosopher who researches the moral and political issues raised by AI, I think there are 3 main paths to integrating AI into politics, each with its own mix of promises and pitfalls.
While some of these proposals are stranger than others, weighing them makes one thing certain: the involvement of AI in politics will force us to confront the value of human participation in politics and the nature of democracy itself.
Before ChatGPT's sensational arrival in 2022, efforts to replace politicians with chatbots were already underway in several countries. As early as 2017, a chatbot called "Alisa" challenged Vladimir Putin for the Russian presidency.
While a chatbot named “Sam” competed for the post in New Zealand. Denmark and Japan have also experimented with chatbot-led political initiatives. Although experimental, these efforts reflect the growing curiosity about the role of AI in governance and in different cultural contexts.
The appeal for replacing flesh-and-blood politicians with robots is, on several levels, very clear. Chatbots lack many of the problems and limitations typically associated with human-made politics. They are not easily tempted by desires for money, power, or glory.
They don't need to rest, can engage virtually with anyone at once, and offer encyclopedic knowledge along with superhuman analytical skills. However, even digital politicians inherit the shortcomings of today's AI systems.
These chatbots, powered by large language models, are often like the black boxes of airplanes, limiting their reasoning to our knowledge. They often generate inaccurate or fabricated responses, known as hallucinations.
They face cybersecurity risks, require large computational resources, and need constant network access. They are also shaped by biases stemming from training data, social inequalities, and programmer assumptions.
Moreover, chatbot politicians would not be a good fit for what we expect from elected officials. Our institutions are designed for human politicians, with human bodies and moral consciences. We expect our politicians to do more than just respond to requests.
We expect them to supervise staff, negotiate with colleagues, show genuine concern for their constituents, and take responsibility for their choices and actions. Without major improvements in technology, or a more radical re-imagining of politics itself, robotic politicians will remain an uncertain prospect.
Another approach aims to eliminate traditional politicians entirely. Physicist César Hidalgo believes that politicians are cumbersome middlemen that AI will eventually allow us to replace. Instead of electing politicians by vote, Hidalgo wants every citizen to be able to program an AI agent based on their political preferences.
These agents can then negotiate with each other automatically to find common ground, resolve disputes, and write laws.
Hidalgo hopes that this will finally enable direct democracy, giving citizens the opportunity to make a more direct contribution to politics, by overcoming the traditional barriers of time commitment and legislative expertise.
The proposal seems appealing in the context of widespread dissatisfaction with traditional representative institutions. However, eliminating representation may be more difficult than it seems. In Hidalgo's "avatar democracy," the kingmakers would be the experts who design the algorithms.
Since the only way to legitimately authorize their power is likely to be through voting, we could simply replace one form of representation with another. An even more radical idea involves eliminating humans from politics. The logic is simple: if AI technology advances to the point where it makes decisions more reliably than humans, then what would be the purpose of human input? An algocracy is a political regime run by algorithms.
While few people advocate a total handover of political power to machines (and the technology is still far from that point), the shadow of algocracy forces us to think critically about why human participation in politics matters.
What values, such as autonomy, responsibility, or thought, should we preserve in the age of automation of everything, and how do we do this? The dramatic possibilities of integrating AI into politics make the current moment very important to clarify our political values.
Rather than rushing to replace human politicians with Artificial Intelligence, we can focus today on tools that improve human political judgment and close democratic deficits.
Tools like the Habermas Machine, an AI debate broker, have successfully helped test groups reach consensus when voting on divisive and polarizing issues. But more such innovations are needed.
From my perspective, the future of AI in politics lies not in the wholesale replacement of human decision-makers, but in a thoughtful integration that amplifies human capabilities and strengthens democratic institutions. If this is the future we want, then we must be intentional about building it. / Adapted from "Pamphlet" by The Conversation
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