Let me vote for an AI politician

We must prepare for a new era, for it is sure to come.

Jaung HoonThe author is a political science professor at Chung-Ang University and a columnist for the JoongAng Ilbo. What if artificial intelligence were applied to politics? People might first worry about the possibility of AI being used to oversee and control humanity. Others would brush that off as wild conjecture to avoid the never-ending dirty politics around them.

Despite those concerns, I would like to discuss the intriguing emergence of AI politicians ahead of the April 10 parliamentary elections. Our political parties continue evolving into perennial monsters, as clearly seen in their perpetual rule violations and aberrant practices each day. Without what Schumpeter called “creative destruction,” the free fall will not stop.

Second, the jaw-dropping advancement of AI — perfectly exemplified by ChatGPT, Sora and Copilot — is a drastic change, the first of its kind since the Industrial Revolution, that will bring fundamental changes to jobs, caregiving, leisure and even war.

Given the number of modern institutions that originate from the Industrial Revolution two centuries ago, such as modern election systems and party politics, the AI revolution will naturally prompt profound changes to our contemporary political systems. Just like the democracy for the chosen few morphed into the democracy for all in just 200 years, the AI revolution could elevate our democracy to levels beyond imagination.

Let’s first talk about the self-destructive behavior of our political parties, which has begun to unfold before April’s general election. There could be many reasons for our degraded politics, but I attribute the abysmal malfunctioning of our politics to populists — who dominate our political parties, big and small — and the political hooligans who fervently root for them.

Populists have many faces, but their commonality can be found in their sheer dismissal of the democratic process and the rule of law. Such examples are plenty. Our lawmakers should have determined their electoral districts for this election by March 2023. But they protracted the process for nearly a year because of the majority Democratic Party’s belated decision to maintain the current — and utterly weird — proportional representation system to grant itself more of the 46 proportional seats in the 300-member National Assembly. The subsequent nonsensical nomination process, the abrupt emergence of satellite arms of the liberal party and the governing People Power Party (PPP), and their obvious absorption into the two major rivals after the election all reflect the dismal state of our electoral system.

But the problem is that there are no leading forces to stop the ominous fall. Voters are either sucked into partisan politics, or they become “political bystanders.” Only innovation, or creative destruction, can slow that miserable plunge.

To the 18th century British people who successfully launched the industrial revolution and started to build their modern democratic systems, the right to vote in elections would surely have been perceived as a dream come true. Likewise, AI politicians — more specifically, a combination of human politicians and AI who can apply its unique quantitative ability to all aspects of the political process, from communication with voters to policy decisions — may look like a mirage at first glance.

But innovative countries have already conducted bold political experiments. In 2022, New Zealand developed public SAM, the world’s first virtual politician. SAM can canvass vast historical data and gather people’s opinions on issues of the times through its powerful language model. The government plans to answer questions from citizens and help officials to make policy decisions based on the AI agent’s findings.

Despite the plethora of challenges lying ahead, we can expect at least two innovations from AI politicians. First, they can put an end to the biases and hatred that currently stain our politics. As AI has no emotion, it does not show animosity toward rivals or adhere to fanatical obsessions with allies. Therefore, AI could help restore reason to our unceasing politics and put it back on track.

Second, we can allow AI politicians to learn our Constitution, the March 1 Independence Movement Declaration and political classics at home and abroad to help the government to make policy decisions when needed. If AI can automatically reflect the spirit of our Constitution in decision-making, couldn’t it reduce our legislators’ deep-rooted disrespect for the rule of law and their abuse of it? Most people feared an end to human labor after the revolution in 18th century Britain. But humanity was able to achieve economic prosperity and universal democracy by adroitly demonstrating homo technicus’ capability to manage — and control — machines.

An AI-led era may evoke deep concerns about the supremacy of machinery over mankind. But the gargantuan tide of training and cooperating with such models is already sweeping Big Tech offices, medical labs, cutting-edge smart factories and elsewhere. AI politicians are not just a pipe dream. We must prepare for a new era, for it is sure to come.

Translation by the Korea JoongAng Daily staff.