AI让精英更易操控民意，可能加剧或缓解政治极化。
Polarization by Design: How Elites Could Shape Mass Preferences as AI Reduces Persuasion Costs
- 建模分析精英如何用低成本精准说服民众，影响公众偏好分布。
- 单个精英掌权时，技术进步会加速社会极化；两派轮替则可能形成稳定半锁定状态。
- 揭示极化不再是自发结果，而是可被设计的治理工具，适合关注民主与AI的读者。
在民主体制中，重大政策需多数支持，因此精英必须争取民众认同。历史上，精英仅能通过教育和大众媒体等有限手段影响民意；而基于AI的说服技术显著降低传播成本、提升精准度，使偏好分布本身成为可主动设计的目标。本文构建一个动态模型，分析精英在说服成本与多数决约束下，如何决定重塑公众政策偏好的程度。当由单一精英主导时，最优干预往往推动社会趋向更极化的意见格局——即‘极化拉力’，且说服技术越先进，这种趋势越明显。当两派对立精英轮流执政时，同一技术反而激励他们将社会推向‘半锁定’区域：意见趋于一致，且难以被对手颠覆。因此，更低廉的说服技术将极化重新定义为一种战略性治理手段，而非单纯的社会副产品，对民主稳定性带来深远影响。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
In democracies, major policy decisions typically require some form of majority or consensus, so elites must secure mass support to govern. Historically, elites could shape support only through limited instruments like schooling and mass media; advances in AI-driven persuasion sharply reduce the cost and increase the precision of shaping public opinion, making the distribution of preferences itself an object of deliberate design. We develop a dynamic model in which elites choose how much to reshape the distribution of policy preferences, subject to persuasion costs and a majority rule constraint. With a single elite, any optimal intervention tends to push society toward more polarized opinion profiles - a ``polarization pull'' - and improvements in persuasion technology accelerate this drift. When two opposed elites alternate in power, the same technology also creates incentives to park society in ``semi-lock'' regions where opinions are more cohesive and harder for a rival to overturn, so advances in persuasion can either heighten or dampen polarization depending on the environment. Taken together, cheaper persuasion technologies recast polarization as a strategic instrument of governance rather than a purely emergent social byproduct, with important implications for democratic stability as AI capabilities advance.
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