Kyiv Connection: How Will AI Disrupt Societies? Can It Help Ukraine?

This spring, the Davis Center, the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard (HURI), and the Kyiv School of Economics are collaborating on an online series, "Kyiv Connection: Disciplinary Dialogues on Ukraine." The series will feature compelling and contemporary conversations across various disciplines, all from a Ukrainian perspective. Each session will feature a Ukrainian scholar in dialogue with an international counterpart, offering diverse viewpoints and rich insights. 

The inaugural discussion — "How Will AI Disrupt Societies? Can It Help Ukraine?" — will feature Tymofii Brik, sociologist and rector of the Kyiv School of Economics, in conversation with Nicholas Christakis, Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University. They will discuss how artificial intelligence (AI) will improve and/or disrupt our societies. This touches on a critical debate in Ukraine, which is dealing with a labor shortage and the demographic impact of war. Can AI be used to compensate for the loss of human capital? Or should we be wary of its disruptive power? 

Christakis’s research begins from the assumption that the impact of AI transcends the simple case of human-machine interactions and extends to human-human interactions in the presence of machines. Careful yet simple programming of AI agents can enhance the performance of human groups, making people within such groups better able to cooperate, coordinate, innovate, and communicate, ultimately contributing to their superior performance. On the other hand, both simple and complex forms of AI (such as large language models) can also do the opposite, harming groups of people and our society as a whole.  

Experiments show how AI agents can affect social processes and human performance in settings as diverse as people working together online or coordinating their movement on roadways. These findings reveal what the disruptive introduction of AI into our lives means for the future of human social behavior. And they suggest ways to design AI — as a type of “social catalyst” — to make sure it supports a utopian rather than dystopian future.