The main focus of this week was supposed to be the NATO Summit, but some Pennsylvanian man had other ideas. Regardless, since the incident at Trump’s rally is moreso about domestic politics, we will not go in-depth about it here, until it directly affects the Four Pillars. The issues with Biden’s press conferences, gaffes, and internal party drama are covered under this policy as well.
There are some takeaways from the NATO Summit this week vis-a-vis the Four Pillars:
Unfortunately, the content and headlines of these articles are mainly doom and despair. It seems that even despite the Pillars and its associated organizations and partners’ best efforts to maintain the rules-based international order, the world appears headed toward a democratic backsliding – a return to the status quo of bloody interstate conflicts and the return of strongman politics. If anything, events in the past weeks and months should be wake-up calls to those invested in this unprecedented era of relative global peace (with an asterisk) on the importance of what needs to be done to preserve it. The enemies of the liberal democratic order and the Four Pillars are more openly cooperating with each other, emboldened by polarization within the Pillars. More and more sabotage operations by Russia and China within the Pillars’ own borders are found, and that’s only speaking on a physical level – we have not even covered their operations on the Internet. Even though history does not repeat or rhyme (or whatever the pop history saying is), it is interesting that a century on since 1924, the world is once again staring into the abyss of conflict and totalitarianism amidst the domestic malaise of liberal democracies.
Doug Mills/The New York Times
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.
Pope Francis sends a message to a Hiroshima conference on “AI Ethics for Peace,” emphasizing the symbolic importance of discussing peace in a city scarred by atomic tragedy.
The BGF presented the paper “Spiritual Values of Religions to Build the Knowledge Platform for AI” at the Inter-Religious Dialogue conference June this year, hosted in Castelgandolfo, the summer estate of the Vatican.
The Boston Global Forum announces the “Boston Areti AI (BAI)” project, an innovative initiative aimed at designing the concepts and architecture of a special assistant AI to support leaders. The name Areti, meaning “virtue” in Greek, reflects the project’s core values. BAI is a virtue-oriented AI, designed for leaders and humanity, embodying principles of transparency, fairness, and human-centricity. It will serve as a peaceful, sincere, intelligent, and knowledgeable companion, aiding leaders in making ethical, compassionate, and informed decisions. BAI will act as a moral compass, reminding leaders of the consequences of harmful actions such as violence, environmental destruction, and the erosion of human values.
BGF calls on companies, organizations, and individuals to join and contribute to creating this landmark sample of a virtue AI Assistant, “Boston Areti AI,” setting a new standard for ethical and responsible AI in leadership.
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.
