There’s nothing like ‘quiet change’
Published: 20 Nov. 2024, 20:07
Lim Jong-ju
The author is the political news editor of the JoongAng Ilbo.
Generative AI assistants led by standard-bearer ChatGPT are awesomely executing tasks beyond normal human capacity in legal, medical, financial and almost all other fields. As AI becomes more powerful and ubiquitous, it poses a serious trust problem as the internal workings of deep learning systems and how they arrive to their astounding decisions remains a mystery, making them “black boxes.”
We can no longer trust a self-driving car if it caused an accident by failing to stop when it should and yet we are not explained of the reason why. AI confidently answers a question or completes its assignment in a split second, but how it derives such answers and on what reasoning and basis cannot be known, which causes complicated issues related to trust, fairness and transparency.
State management can be no different. The composition in the government will be questioned if we cannot be persuaded by the choices of key figures and detect a fishy smell behind the decision-making. If the fallouts are repeated and unaddressed to cause perpetuating risks, state management can slide into a quagmire upon losing public confidence.
The alarms went off when the presidential office suddenly replaced President Yoon Suk Yeol’s secretaries of protocol and diplomacy followed up by his chief security adviser just a month before his crucial state visit to the United States in April last year.
The abrupt changes to key presidential aides on foreign and security affairs ahead of Yoon’s trips to the United States and Japan stoked speculation about first lady Kim Keon Hee’s involvement in the reshuffle. The emergence of a self-proclaimed power broker, Myung Tae-kyun, accused of meddling in the governing party’s nomination process before a by-election pointed to the possible involvement of the presidential couple, pushing public fury to the brink of boiling point.
Two weeks have passed since Yoon bowed to the public to apologize for the troubles the first couple caused in a televised press conference. He vowed to double down on overhauls. A secretariat to oversee the affairs of the first lady was installed, and Kim didn’t accompany Yoon in his recent state visit to Latin America. But the so-called overhauls stopped at that. The presidential office claims the president is too busy addressing the launch of Trump 2.0 in January, overseas trips and the passage of next year’s budgetary outline. In short, we cannot find any sense of urgency from the presidential office.
Scientists and engineers have been investigating deeply into AI “black boxes” and what goes on the inside of artificial neural systems. AI startup Anthropic in May claimed it made some discoveries in parts of the map of the AI brain by studying artificial neurons. If the artificial brainwork can be cracked in one day, many of the trust issues related to AI may be mitigated. But we know the minds of a human or a machine cannot be fully comprehended.
Yoon’s approval rating rebounded to a 20 percent level following the press conference. He still receives a negative rating of 71 percent. He has a long way to go to reverse the soured public sentiment. The gains from the legal risks related to Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung can be limited. Without sweeping changes in his governance style, he has no other remedial means.
An experiment by University of Cambridge researchers earlier this year discovered that AI can perform a CEO role better than a human. Machine learning systems were able to put together a combination of optimal decisions better than humans whose decisions can be influenced by personal biases and tastes. But AI struggled with black swan events — unpredictable events and challenges often occurring in real life. In the end, AI CEOs got fired before human CEOs.
Everyone — including, hopefully, the president himself — knows Yoon cannot sail through the latter half of his term without significant overhauls. The question is the willpower to execute them. Even if humans have the ability to take up challenging roles that AI lacks, they will be wasted if they are not put into use. If a human CEO hesitated in the crucial moment, he or she may have gotten the sack before the AI.
Translation by the Korea JoongAng Daily staff.
with the Korea JoongAng Daily
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