Tokyo
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After years of threatening to upset industries around the world, artificial intelligence could soon enter the corridors of power, if a marginal political party in Japan is making its way.
Upstart Party Path to Rebirth unveiled plans earlier this week to install a chatbot penguin as “AI leader”, after disappointing electoral results, its founder has given up abandoning the bar.
The human candidate Koki Okumura won the leadership race that followed, but the doctoral student – who specializes in research on AI – announced at a press conference earlier this week that he had another plan.
“The new leader will be AI,” said the 25 -year -old student from Kyoto University, while describing himself as his assistant.
“The party will entrust decision -making at AI.”
The new figurehead will take the form of an avatar penguin, a nod to the love of the Japanese for animals, said Okumura. But he will not throw his hat in the ring for the elections, because the electoral law requires that the candidates be Japanese citizens.
“Legally, the representative must be a natural person, therefore formally, a human serves as a representative,” he said.
He told CNN that he considered that AI finally took all the decision -making processes relating to party operations.
“I believe that it has the potential to achieve things with greater precision than humans. This approach allows us to carefully consider votes that are often overlooked by humans, potentially creating a more inclusive and human environment for political participation,” said Okumura.
There is no calendar for the ascent of AI to this role, although Whitemura said that a preparatory committee was in preparation. The appearance of the penguin was also not revealed.
The party, which according to its website is based on the conviction that anyone interested in politics should have a shot, was launched in January by Shinji Ishimaru, former mayor of Akitakata, a city of nearly 26,000 inhabitants in western Japan.
Ishimaru was famous after being second in second position in the elections to the Governor of Tokyo last year, thanks to a successful online campaign. But he left party leaders in August after having succeeded in obtaining seats in the election of the local assembly of the capital or in the national elections of the higher chamber in the beginning of this year. It lasted more than 50 seats in total.
Although the programmed political penguins are not what it had in mind, the Japanese government has intensified a desire to encourage the use of AI in recent years, which, according to experts, could be a key to mitigating the prison labor of the aging nation.
Several government services have adopted tech to help aspects of labor, office tasks with abandoned buns and detection of abandoned houses, but to the extent that Okumura suggests to his party.
The observers have expressed reserves on the plan of Okumura, saying that it can – a bit like a real penguin – difficult to take off.
Hiroshi Shiratori, professor of political science at Hosei University in Tokyo, said that Japanese voters are not ready for a party which therefore depends on AI.
“Voters choose the person who can be invoked and who also chooses the party who conforms to people’s feelings,” he told CNN. “The AI is totally outside this.”
He said it is unlikely that Okumura’s experience will become a broader trend, saying that Japan is a pluralist democracy that enhances various opinions.
If the political parties leave AI to make all the decisions, said the professor, all the parties can end up being similar if not the same, the appellant “anti-democratic by nature”.
Okumura is not the first to try to put the AI according to political function.
Last year, Victor Miller, candidate for the mayor of Cheyenne, Wyoming, put his cat Vic on the ballot, while a man in the United Kingdom entered a parliamentary election in the southern city of Brighton as Ia Steve, also planning to delegate the authority to a neural network.
The two men – whose models initially ran on Chatgpt – said they had seen in AI the main advantages of ingenuity and an ability to communicate with the public at any time of the day.
Their actions prompted the owner of Chatgpt Openai to reduce their access to the software, while the managers of the Wyoming recalled that a “bot AI is not a qualified voter”.
Thomas Ferretti, a senior speaker in ethics and sustainable business at the University of Greenwich in the United Kingdom, says that, as much as AI technologies can speed up data analyzes and stimulate government efficiency, they cannot make political decisions alone and risk becoming an ethical problem.
“If AI systems help political decisions, the problem is that people have different values and disagree on our societal objectives,” he told CNN.
Theodore Lechterman, president of UNESCO in ethics and governance of AI at IE university in Spain, also said that the relationship between politicians and voters exceeded the simple delegation of power.
“We expect human politicians to act independently, taking measures on their own initiatives and operating in a physical and social world – where they must interact with colleagues politicians and human voters, examine the conditions on the ground, attend ceremonies, etc.,” the professor told CNN.
He said that any use of AI should be “deliberately approached, honestly and in a transparent manner” and that it is important for voters not to forget who will be responsible.
But for Okumura, it is a question of looting as much as political participation.
“We are heading towards a world where we will interact with AI. If this happens, how should we carry out social systems and political systems that have been taken for granted so far? ” He said at the press conference.
“We want to be the first to carry out this experience at the forefront.”
