This post by John Werner, an MIT Senior Fellow, 5x-founder & VC investing in AI, on a Davos Imagination in Action panel was featured in Forbes with excerpts below. Read the full article online.
Navigating New Frontiers in Politics | Imagination In Action | Davos 2024
We’re still learning about what artificial intelligence can do in the field of public discourse…and in the places in which we talk to each other these days.
It’s a big question – how will AI factor into our sense of debate, and the polemics that we use in connection with each other about our political beliefs?
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At a Davos Imagination in Action panel facilitated by MIT Connection Science professor Sandy Pentland, we had a number of important voices talking about these issues, including Gabriele Mazzini, who is not only a member of the European Commission who worked on the AI Act, but also an MIT Connection Science fellow, having spent time in Boston researching IT.
In the panel, we talked about some of these possibilities…
Sandy started with Lily Tsai, Director of MIT’s GOV/LAB program and a Ford Professor of Political Science.
“There’s a lot of economic and social uncertainty,” she said of the current era in which AI is emerging. “We’re in a period of global polycrises – this makes people anxious and vulnerable to to populists and demagogues who want to take advantage of our vulnerability, and it means that if they promise us social and moral order, we might take their offer, and be okay with dismantling democratic institutions.”
Social media companies, she suggested, have also impacted the scenario in their own ways. “(They) have stumbled into creating the perfect conditions for autocrats and demagogues to take advantage,” she said.
When platforms like Facebook and Twitter make people angry and afraid, she added, they are often prevented from coming together to look at solutions to problems. She talked about how a “moderate majority,” exhausted from the online flame wars and anxious of being scapegoated by extremes, will possibly draw away from public discourse altogether.
“We need different kinds of online spaces that are slower, cooler and less viral,” Tsai said.
At MIT, she noted, scientists are looking at genAI tools for online spaces that foster deliberation and democracy, where, for example, chatbots may advise people on how to craft effective rhetoric or more cohesive responses to questions.
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Photo by Mishaal Zahed on Unsplash.