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CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS article
Front. Polit. Sci.
Sec. Politics of Technology
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpos.2025.1504520
This article is part of the Research Topic Leadership, politics and society in the digital age View all 7 articles
Opportunities and challenges of AI-systems in political decisionmaking contexts
Provisionally accepted- Philosophische Fakultät und Theologische Fakultät. Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany
Political decision-making is often riddled with uncertainties, largely due to the complexities and fluid nature of contemporary societies, which make it difficult to predict the consequences of political decisions. Despite these challenges, political leaders cannot shy away from decision-making, even when faced with overwhelming uncertainties. Thankfully, there are tools that can help them manage these uncertainties and support their decisions. Among these tools, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has recently emerged. AI-systems promise to efficiently analyze complex situations, pinpoint critical factors, and thus reduce some of the prevailing uncertainties. Furthermore, some of them have the power to carry out in-depth simulations with varying parameters, predicting the consequences of various political decisions, and thereby providing new certainties. With these capabilities, AI-systems prove to be a valuable tool for supporting political decision-making. However, using such technologies for certainty purposes in political decision-making contexts also presents several challenges -and these challenges are not addressed, the integration of AI in political decisionmaking could lead to adverse consequences. This paper seeks to identify these challenges through analyses of existing literature, conceptual considerations, and political-ethical-philosophical reasoning. The aim is to pave the way for proactively addressing these issues, facilitating the responsible use of AI for managing uncertainty and supporting political decision-making. The key challenges identified and discussed in this paper include: (1) potential algorithmic biases, (2) false illusions of certainty, (3) presumptions that there is no alternative to AI proposals, which can quickly lead to technocratic scenarios, and (4) concerns regarding human control.
Keywords: artificial intelligence, uncertainty, Decision support systems, Democracy, Technocracy, Complexity, Leadership
Received: 30 Sep 2024; Accepted: 24 Feb 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Tretter. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Max Tretter, Philosophische Fakultät und Theologische Fakultät. Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany
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