Keio University, together with the Association of Pacific Rim University (APRU), co-published a new open access publication "AI for Social Good", in partnership with the United Nations ESCAP (UN ESCAP) and Google in September. The book is a collection of eight policy recommendation papers by scholars from all across the Asia Pacific under the academic lead of Keio's Vice-President Professor Jiro Kokuryo, with the support of Google and UN ESCAP, and APRU.
Our centre director, Professor Mark Findlay, contributed a chapter titled "AI Technologies, Information Capacity, and Sustainable South World Trading" to this book.
This paper represents a unique research methodology for testing the assumption that AI-assisted information technologies can empower vulnerable economies in trading negotiations. This is a social good outcome, enhanced when it also enables these economies to employ the technology for evaluating more sustainable domestic market protections. The paper is in two parts. The first presents the argument and its underpinning assumption that information asymmetries jeopardize vulnerable economies in trade negotiations and decisions about domestic sustainability. We seek to use AI-assisted information technologies to upend situations where power is the unfair discriminator in trade negotiations because of structural information deficits, and where the outcome of such deficits is the economic disadvantage of vulnerable stakeholders. The research question is the following: How is power dispersal in trade negotiations, and consequent market sustainability, to be achieved by greater information access within the boundaries of resource limitations and data exclusivity? The second section is a summary of the empirical work which pilots a more expansive engagement with trade negotiators and AI developers. The empirical project provides a roadmap for policymakers convinced of the value of the exercise to then adopt the model reflections arising out of the focus groups and translating these into a real-world experience. The research method we propose has three phases, designed to include a diverse set of stakeholders – a scoping exercise, a solution exercise, and a strategic policy exercise. The empirical achievement of this paper is the validation of the proposed methodology through a “shadowing” pilot method. It explains how the representative groups engaged their role plays, and summarizes general findings from the two focus groups conducted.
The paper can be downloaded from the APRU website.
Last updated on 22 Sep 2020 .