These are the presentations of Professors Alex “Sandy” Pentland and Lily Tsai, MIT at the BGF Conference on April 30, 2024. They discussed utilizing AI in constructive, ethical, and democratic manners for a better world and civic life.
Alex Sandy Pentland
From my perspective, AI is another wave in a long chain of technological advancements. The physical world and evolution have shaped humans into a social species, collaborating in groups of around 150, according to Dunbar’s number. Traditionally, these tribes would come together into clans or larger groups, which varied up to about 1500 people. We often discuss social capital, which has two types: bonding capital within smaller groups to establish cultural norms, and bridging capital that fosters innovation and interaction between larger groups, moving our society forward. However, these interactions are limited by numbers, physical distances, and communication barriers.
Human history is a testament to our efforts to transcend these physical limits. For example, the early Sumerians used marks to count sheep and convey information over distances. The Egyptians used papyrus spreadsheets to build pyramids, similar to tools we use today. Other inventions, like dual-ledger accounting by the Medici, enabled error correction and fraud detection in trade. Printing, radio, TV, and the internet all aimed to transcend our physical limitations but also centralized power, marginalizing communities and leading to inefficiencies. Variation between communities is necessary to discover better ways of operating and to remain robust to unexpected changes.
The history of AI reflects similar patterns. In the 1950s, AI focused on optimal resource allocation, foundational to the Soviet system, which was flawed due to the need for good data and clear objectives. Despite its limitations, optimal resource allocation remains a common computation today. The next wave was expert systems, codifying human rules into systems, bringing efficiency but also decimating local communities and control. In the 2000s, data harvesting and maximal estimation led to feedback mechanisms in social media responsible for misinformation and societal distress.
Today, AI is evolving to analyze everything online, raising copyright issues and concerns about uniformity. For instance, other countries worry that current AI reflects primarily English and American values, or Chinese values, with little choice in between. To address these challenges, we are editing a series of volumes, akin to The Federalist Papers, envisioning a future with AI.
Lily Tsai
I’m going to switch gears from discussing the governance of AI to exploring governance with AI. I want to share some insights from the work that Sandy and I have been doing on what pluralist societies might need from digital civic infrastructure and the potential for digitally mediated civic engagement.
As Sandy mentioned, humans developed in an era when collective decision-making was limited to small groups with similar concerns. As societies grew and needed to coordinate across larger distances, it became necessary to send representatives. However, representatives, even those democratically elected, don’t always share the interests of their constituents. When they diverge, opportunities for corruption and elite capture can arise.
With technologies that enable large numbers of people to communicate and make decisions on the same platform, we now have new opportunities for digitally enabled direct democracy at scale. Quantitative experiments, sometimes involving tens of millions of individuals, have examined scaling inclusiveness and efficiency in decision-making via digital networks. These studies suggest that large networks of non-experts can make practical and productive decisions and engage in collective action.
Some might warn against technology that could further reinforce the nationalization of politics. In the United States, citizens have increasingly turned away from local community issues, such as students skipping school or empty storefronts on Main Street, and become fixated on national politics. This shift has led to partisan mega-identities, where a single vote can indicate a person’s partisan preference as well as their religion, race, ethnicity, gender, neighborhood, and even favorite grocery store.
Polarization, which didn’t arise solely because of social media, plays out on platforms that increase the speed and scale of interaction, ramping up the emotional intensity of confrontation. Some people retreat to spaces with like-minded individuals, while others get drawn into conflicts, neither of which is conducive to negotiating disagreements or reaching compromises.
One potential solution is to revitalize place-based identities and engagement. However, focusing only on local politics might inadvertently reinforce local political blocs. Instead, we should aim to break up these blocs with cross-cutting cleavages and bridging social capital to connect people across localities. Studies suggest that connections between diverse groups and communities are a major source of innovation and change.
Unfortunately, we’ve seen a decline in institutions like churches and fraternal organizations that once facilitated these connections. Our research team is working on building new kinds of intermediating digital spaces that provide perspective, moderation, and focus on shared, rather than personal, problems. These spaces can accommodate discussion and deliberation at a large, even national, scale.
Can we design digital civic infrastructure to enable direct democracy for a national public while also dampening polarization? To achieve this, we need to address several problems. First, how do we get people to want to engage in civic participation, given the decades-long decline in engagement? Second, how do we encourage people to understand and consider the needs and concerns of others when making decisions that affect everyone?
We believe we need to create new kinds of mediated civic engagement that make people more comfortable and curious about engaging with difficult public issues. Alexis de Tocqueville often praised town meetings as schools for teaching people how to use and enjoy liberty. Today, however, we no longer attend town meetings at the same rates, and when we do, we don’t enjoy them. Many online spaces for public discussion are even worse, with people or bots yelling at each other and inciting virtual mobs.
To make engagement in collective discussions and decision-making tolerable or even enjoyable, we need to design digital platforms that allow for a measure of safety and autonomy. In physical spaces, like balconies on apartment buildings overlooking the street, people can engage with public events at a distance, deciding whether to get involved. Similarly, digital platforms should enable reserved sociability, where people can observe and engage at their own pace.
Urban planner Jane Jacobs noted that the diversity of city life is wonderful when it brings people together without forcing them to be too close. When people are too close, they tend to withdraw into their private spaces. Online platforms for discussion and deliberation could provide the same benefits by allowing people to dip their toes in first and gradually wade into discussions as they become interested.
Two examples of online platforms that illustrate this kind of digital intermediation are the School of Possibilities, an AI-enabled platform for public engagement on school reform piloted in Romania, and the Pol.is platform, widely used for public deliberation. Our research team is building on these examples to design and test features that enable reserved sociability and civic engagement.
However, digital innovations also raise questions about mitigating potential risks and harms. In a recent paper published by MIT in their AI Impact Series, our team discussed the importance of integrating generative AI into platforms in ways that uphold fundamental democratic commitments. We don’t want AI chatbots nudging people towards agreement just because they can write in friendlier or more authoritative voices. The principles of agency and respect must be upheld.
Generative AI can increase the speed of consensus by suggesting policy statements and solutions likely to be agreed upon. While this can be helpful, we don’t want efficiency to reduce the emergence of new ideas and creative solutions. Participants must not become too dependent on AI, leading to a lack of critical engagement with issues and other viewpoints.
Moreover, we need to guard against over-censorship or differential censorship, which can silence certain viewpoints. AI models can have biases due to algorithmic design decisions and training data, and external entities can manipulate discussions. Protecting and preserving minority interests and views is crucial.
Successful engagement infrastructure must ensure identity authentication, confirming that participants are real people entitled to engage. This can be achieved without compromising anonymity, allowing for secure and reserved civic engagement.
Digital intermediation can also help focus on public issues, avoiding emotional reactions and personal biases. Platforms can provide summaries and visualizations of discussions, allowing users to engage from different vantage points and decide when and how to participate.
Finally, digital platforms for civic engagement should tap into our natural curiosity and playfulness, encouraging people-watching and eavesdropping in a way that strengthens social bonds. These platforms can improve both local and national public discussion and deliberation.
In summary, we need to develop digital technologies that offer new opportunities for civic engagement while upholding democratic principles. By making people feel safe and protected and giving them control over their engagement, we can help them fully use and enjoy their liberty
The Shinzo Abe Initiative for Peace and Security is rooted in the principles articulated by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that emphasized the need to for peace and security, especially in the Indo-Pacific region, against rising authoritarian and revanchist powers, and for the rule of law and the rules-based order to be preserved with connecting democracies against these authoritarian threats.
To achieve this vision, Abe introduced the Free and Open Indo-Pacific Strategy, aiming to promote and preserve the freedom of navigation and the rule of law across. This strategy seeks to foster a stable and democratic regional order that benefits all nations in the Indo-Pacific region.
In honor of Abe’s vision, the Boston Global Forum contributes to this initiative by proposing the Four Pillars: a grouping of the US, EU-UK, Japan, and India. This coalition aims to strengthen the four pillars for peace and security in the region:
Multilateral Cooperation: The Four Pillars would cooperate on various security and economic issues in order to better counter China and Russia, examples being joint defense development programs or through deepening trade ties, rather than conduct policy alone and thus more ineffective.
Human Security: Addressing transnational challenges such as terrorism, climate change, and humanitarian crises through collaborative efforts. The BGF proposed the AI World Society Model for a new democracy.
I was drafting a little Four Pillars article on some statements and proclamations made over the week, but a notable event just had to happen in the Middle East again.
Not to make a mockery of a death, but Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi is confirmed dead following a helicopter crash in the middle of thick fog and mountainous regions. The helicopter also carried the foreign minister and some other staffers and officials. While conspiracies may fly, it can be assumed that this was more likely an incident than sabotage – it does not take much to see how a helicopter could fail to function in bad weather conditions and through risky terrains. If foul play was likely, it would be allowing the helicopter to take off, and allowing multiple officials to board that craft too. If I were a world leader, I would never get in helicopters ever. Although he was more of a mouthpiece of the hardliners than a power broker, Raisi was also the heir apparent to Khamenei, the current Ayatollah of Iran, and these deaths can throw Iranian politics in flux due to the sheer number of top officials lost, but it is unclear what direction the government will take from here.
The tariffs the Biden administration was reportedly imposing on China, most importantly on Chinese EVs, was officially announced earlier this week – to some controversy. It seems that the EU, another of the Pillars, is debating following the same route against China that the US has taken. It may be unwise economically to engage in a trade war, but it is necessary to not allow CCP-subsidized exports to dominate a market in the Pillars – especially in automobiles, as that gives the CCP a leverage over the Pillars when it comes to, say the South China Sea or Taiwan.
In Europe, while Ukraine was able to repel the Russian incursion into Kharkiv last week, members in NATO’s eastern flank continue to raise alarms about the potential need for them to deploy troops within Ukraine. Estonia has made such an announcement, and countries like Poland may follow too. Possibilities of NATO troops on the ground in Ukraine seems to increase every week, even if only marginally.
AP: In this photo provided by Islamic Republic News Agency, IRNA, the helicopter carrying Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi takes off at the Iranian border with Azerbaijan after President Raisi and his Azeri counterpart Ilham Aliyev inaugurated dam of Qiz Qalasi, or Castel of Girl in Azeri, Iran, Sunday, May 19, 2024. (Ali Hamed Haghdoust/IRNA via AP)
Minh Nguyen is the Chief Editor of the Boston Global Forum and a Shinzo Abe Initiative Fellow. She writes the Four Pillars column in the BGF Weekly newsletter.
Before the conference to honor Dr. Alondra Nelson with 2024 World Leader in AIWS on April 30, BGF Chief Editor Minh Nguyen interviewed Dr. Nelson. Watch the full conversation on YouTube.
“Science and technology policy affects everything.”
When I threw an icebreaker question to Dr. Alondra Nelson in our conversation, I did not realize her response would encapsulate her governance philosophy so well. It may sound like a very obvious remark, but contained within is an insight that unfortunately not all lawmakers across the world understand.
This hidden importance of science and technology governance was the underpinning current carrying our conversation on April 30.
Nelson already knew she was foraying into policymaking and governance, as her appointment to the OSTP was already announced by the then-President-elect Biden in Delaware. This was the first time she would be involved in policy making.
But we were not not there to talk about public health or epidemiology, as vital as that field is, AIWS after stands for Artificial Intelligence World Society – and Nelson’s most renowned expertises were technology, AI, and society. In fact, one of the reasons she was appointed to the OSTP was due her possession of insights into the intersections of the aforementioned fields.
As deputy director, she had already begun advocating heavily for a framework on AI that would protect democratic principles, but a turnover at the office created an opening to turn her idea into reality. Nelson was appointed acting director after her predecessor’s resignation, but she was not there to be a lame duck. The AI Bill of Rights, which she had already envisioned in a Wired magazine op-ed in 2021, was finally put together and published in early October 2022. Although she did not express it verbally that day, one could tell that Nelson is extremely proud (and deservedly so!) of bringing the framework to the public. It was one of the first guidelines on AI governance and its impact vis-a-vis society and democracy issued by the government.
Perhaps interestingly, this framework was published a month before OpenAI released ChatGPT for public consumption and that phenomenon took the public debate and discourse by storm.
While her tenure was a short one, Nelson was firm in her belief that she had fulfilled her vision and stood proud of her achievements at the OSTP, as aforementioned. In fact, many of the guidance established during her leadership were beginning to get implemented in federal departments – the foundations she laid out are starting to come to fruition. The Boston Global Forum would agree with her self-assessment, as she was honored with the World Leader in AIWS Award for her work as deputy and acting director of the OSTP.
As scientists know though, both social and material, that progress can’t just be measured in years, but rather decades and even longer. At time of writing, the AI Bill of Rights was issued only two years ago. When I asked what she hope would become of the foundations her and the Biden administration planted this term, she wish that their AI policies will ultimate harness the power of AI in helping global issues in health and climate change, but still mitigate the externalities and harms that are already impacting livelihoods, such as racial bias in facial recognition or disempowerment of workers.
Even if she returned to academia after her time at the OSTP concluded, Nelson remains deeply involved in AI governance and policymaking. Rather than working for the White House, she was appointed to be the US Representative to the UN High Level Advisory Board, effectively switching DC for New York.
While working in this space, Nelson founded areas of potential cooperations for global AI governance – that “fundamentally, across different kinds of economic systems, political systems, political ideologies, when you’re thinking about AI, emerging technologies, I think what people agree on, and certainly in the US in a bipartisan way is they want the benefits of these technologies and they want to mitigate the harms,” she explained to me. Even though there are differing visions or geopolitical rivalries amongst member-states, this baseline of common understanding and aspiration can help bridge gaps of political divide and mistrust into a true global AI governance framework. In essence, the foundation of common humanity should be channeled into these global initiatives, Dr. Nelson believed. A desire for a common global framework is no less what one expects from a scientist.
These technologies do not inherently drive themselves toward an ethical or moral direction, but effective tech public policy and governmental guidance have the potential to enhance livelihood. In an era where the debate is dominated and polarized by opinions of AI doomerism and accelerationism, Dr. Nelson frames a third way: the synthesis to guide these technological and AI developments toward moral and ethical outcomes for society. One should not have to fear new technologies or AI, but civil society and government still need to mitigate their harms, for that could have disastrous consequences as well on the public and democracy. I recall a short exchange we had towards the end of our conversation:
MN: “From technology and science policy comes progress.“
AN: “Yes, sometimes.”
MN: “Hopefully, most of the time, that’s where we try to get.”
AN: “That’s where we’re at, got to go at. That’s what policy does, right? They steer towards this direction rather than that direction.”
After all, science and technology policies affect everything.
BGF Chief Editor Minh Nguyen and Dr. Alondra Nelson
This is an excerpt of the article originally published in ScienceAlert.
You probably know to take everything an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot says with a grain of salt, since they are often just scraping data indiscriminately, without the nous to determine its veracity.
But there may be reason to be even more cautious. Many AI systems, new research has found, have already developed the ability to deliberately present a human user with false information. These devious bots have mastered the art of deception.
“AI developers do not have a confident understanding of what causes undesirable AI behaviors like deception,” says mathematician and cognitive scientist Peter Park of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
“But generally speaking, we think AI deception arises because a deception-based strategy turned out to be the best way to perform well at the given AI’s training task. Deception helps them achieve their goals.”
One arena in which AI systems are proving particularly deft at dirty falsehoods is gaming. There are three notable examples in the researchers’ work. One is Meta’s CICERO, designed to play the board game Diplomacy, in which players seek world domination through negotiation. Meta intended its bot to be helpful and honest; in fact, the opposite was the case.
Francesco Lapenta is the Founding Director of the John Cabot University Institute of Future and Innovation Studies. Currently, he is also a Mozilla-Ford Research Fellow. and the Technical Editor of the I.E.E.E. P7006 standard on Personal Data Artificial Intelligence Agents. His research focuses on emerging technologies, innovation, technologies’ governance, and standardization processes, ethics and impact assessment, and future scenario analysis.
He holds a Ph.D. In Sociology from the University of London, joint supervision Goldsmiths College and the London School of Economics. The Ph.D. was awarded a research grant by the E.S.R.C. (Economic and Social Research Council, UK). He has worked as Associate Professor in New Media Studies and Business Innovation at the Department of Communication, Business and Information Technologies at RUC University, Denmark (2009-2019), and Assistant Professor (2007-2009). Visiting Professor at New York University (2011-2012) and John Cabot University (2019).
He has organized many international conferences in the United States, Latin America, and Europe and participated in, and organized, countless academic and public events worldwide influencing the debate on emerging technologies. He has for years served on the executive board of the IVSA association. His latest works include the influential books: Research Methods in Service Innovation (F. Lapenta and F. Sørensen, Elgar 2017)), in which he explores the use of future-oriented scenario analysis for technology and innovation research. The 2016 book Data Ethics – The New Competitive Advantage by G. Hasselbalch and P. Tranberg (editor: F. Lapenta, Publishare) was one of the first books to describe the concept and establish privacy and the right to control one’s own data as key positive legal and business parameters. In 2011 he published Locative Media and the Digital Visualization of Space, Place, and Information, (Lapenta Ed. Taylor and Francis).
Prof. Lapenta has been teaching courses and seminars in Business and Information Technologies, Digital Rights and Media Ethics, New Media Studies, Advanced Media Based Research Methods, Ethics and Impact Assessment of Emerging Technologies. He has supervised countless student-industry collaborative projects. as part of his Master’s courses.
Member of AIWS Standards and Practice Committee, Michael Dukakis Institute
Former Prime Minister of Peru
Beatriz Merino was the first female Prime Minister of Peru. She held office between June 23, 2003 and December 12, 2003. Before serving as Prime Minister, she graduated from Harvard with a Master’s degree in law and had a successful career at Procter & Gamble. After her time at Procter & Gamble, she was elected as Senator from 1990-1992 and Congresswoman from 1995- 2000. During that time she served as President of the Environmental Committee and the Women’s Rights Committee.
Merino is widely recognized for her expertise and work with women’s issues. She was the Director of the Women’s Leadership Program, now known as Gender Equality in Development Unit, at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington D.C. which aims to support and finance projects to enhance women’s leadership in Latin America. She was also a member of the board of directors for the International Women Forum and a steering committee member for the Business Women’s Initiative against HIV/AIDS. Merino also worked extensively in commercial, labor, corporate, and environmental legislation. She was the first Peruvian woman to serve on the Commission of Andean Jurists. At Lima University, she was the Director of Foreign Cooperation and of the Master’s program on tax revenue and fiscal policies.
She has authored two books, “Peruvian Women in the XX Century Legislation” and “Marriage and Rape: Debate of Article 178 of the Peruvian Criminal Code.” She served as Peru’s public ombudsman from September 2005 until March 2011.
She is honored as Women Political Leaders Trailblazer Award 2019.
Chairwoman of the Board of Latvian Transatlantic Organization (LATO).
Žaneta Ozoliņa is a Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science, University of Latvia. Her research interests focus on European integration, Transatlantic security, strategic communication, regional cooperation in the Baltic Sea Region.
Žaneta Ozoliņa is the author of more than 100 scholarly articles and editor of several books, including such as “Rethinking Security” (2010), “Gender and Human Security: a View from the Baltic Sea Region” (2015), “Societal Security: Inclusion-Exclusion Dilemma. A portrait of Russian-speaking community in Latvia” (2016), “Re-defining Euro-Atlantic Values: Russia’s Manipulative Techniques” (2017), “Stratcom Laughs. In search of an Analytical Framework” (2017). She is a member of the editorial boards of several journals, such as Journal of Baltic Studies, Defence Strategic Communications, Lithuanian Annual Strategic Review, and is Editor in chief of the journal Latvijas intereses Eiropas Savienībā (Latvian Interests in the European Union).
She lectures at the Baltic Defence College, the Lithuanian Military Academy, Beijing Foreign Studies University, and many others. She was a chairwoman of the Strategic Analysis Commission under the Auspices of the President of Latvia (2004-2008) and a member of the European Research Area Board (European Commission, 2008-2012).
She was engaged in different international projects commissioned by the European Parliament, the European Commission, NATO, the Council of the Baltic Sea States and other international bodies. She chairs the Foreign Affairs Council of the Latvian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Latvian Transatlantic Organization Association, is a member of the ECFR (European Council of Foreign Affairs).
Visiting Professor of International and Public Affairs at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University.
Before joining Columbia University, Karlsson was the Director of the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, and previously served as World Bank Vice President of External Affairs and United Nations Affairs, and as World Bank Country Director for Maghreb (region West and North Africa).
In his most recent post Karlsson was the Director of the Marseille Center for Mediterranean Integration (CMI) where he was responsible for coordinating the World Bank’s cooperation of the Mediterranean region.
As country director at the World Bank he was instrumental in the realization of modern coordinated partnership, from supporting Ghana’s development, growth and poverty reduction, to post-conflict reconstruction in Liberia and Sierra Leone.
As World Bank Vice President of External Affairs, Karlsson pursued strategic policy dialogue with the Bank’s partners and stakeholders. With the UN he worked on the Millennium Development Goals and he also led the World Bank’s engagement with civil society in debating globalization, as part of new UN cooperation.
Early in his career, Mats Karlsson worked at the Swedish Foreign Ministry as Chief Economist, he served as Foreign Policy Advisor to Swedish Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson’s Commission on Global Governance (1992-1994), as well as the Swedish State Secretary for international development cooperation (1994-1999). He began his career in development when he joined the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) in 1983.
