The importance of understanding trust in Confucianism and what it is like in an AI-powered world Ho Manh Tung Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University Oita, Japan September 3, 2020 Since the revival of artificial intelligence (AI) research, many countries in the world have proposed their visions of an AI-powered world: Germany with the concept of "Industry 4.0,"1 Japan with the concept of "Society 5.0,"2 China with the "New Generation Artificial Intelligence Plan (AIDP)."3 In all of the grand visions, all governments emphasize the "human-centric element" in their plans. This essay focuses on the concept of trust in Confucian societies and places this very human element in the context of an increasingly AI-powered world. It is not a secret that public perception plays an important role in determining the success and failure of government and business strategies. The Covid-19 Pandemic in 2020 is a salient example of how crucial public trust plays in fighting the spread of the new corona virus4. Clearly, the long-term success of any organization depends on building credibility and trust with their stakeholders. The literature provides concrete evidence of the importance of trust in forming business partnership5, in participating in political processes6, in forming attitudes toward social and governmental institutions7,8. All of the studies highlight the cultural specificities that influence how people form their trust in different Confucian societies. For example, Vuong and Tran (2009) explain trust in Vietnamese society implies "a relationship in which one can entrust their work to the hands of someone that he/she knows and is confident about" (p.74)5. As such, we would expect in the context of an increasingly AI-powered world, understanding cultural nuances of trust is important to all interested parties: government, private companies, educators, start-ups, etc. For example, although the Social Credit System in China raises so many red flags in Western media, the Chinese public did not have a strong negative reaction as revealed by credible studies of Western academics3. And then, in China, researchers have observed a public perception that the government can collect mass data. In contrast, the public demands the government to admonish private tech companies concerning their use of personal data10. To understand the interplay of trust with the public perception towards AI and AIrelated issues, I propose the following research areas: 1. What is the causal/ correlational relationship between trust and public perception? 2. How is public perception formed with respect to government policies relating to AI? 3. How is trust leveraged to provide legitimacy for certain AI practices, for example, data collection, facial recognition, etc.? 4. Can the nuances of trust in Confucianism help explain how governments in Confucian societies combat fake news and misinformation? Table 1: Difference elements that should be studied in the investigation of trust in Confucianism in the context of an AI-powered society Data Design Governance AI Trust in Confucianism Public perception Stakeholder Consumers, Users, Citizens Businesses Government In table 1, I summarize the different elements that should be studied while we investigate the concept of trust in Confucianism in the context of AI-powered society. It will be an inter-disciplinary project, crossing the boundaries of philosophy, cultural and media studies10,11, affective computing12, digital sociology13, and computational social sciences14,15. References 1. Schwab, K. (2017). The fourth industrial revolution. Penguin Random House LLC, New York. 2. Cabinet Office. (2019). Society 5.0. Council for Science, Technology, and Innovation. Retrieved from https://www8.cao.go.jp/cstp/english/society5_0/index.html (Accessed September 3, 2020) 3. Roberts, H., Cowls, J., Morley, J., Taddeo, M., Wang, V., & Floridi, L. (2020). The Chinese approach to artificial intelligence: an analysis of policy, ethics, and regulation. AI & Society, 1-19. (In press) 4. La, V. P., Pham, T. H., Ho, M. T., Nguyen, M. H., P Nguyen, K. L., Vuong, T. T., ... & Vuong, Q. H. (2020). Policy response, social media, and science journalism for the sustainability of the public health system amid the COVID-19 outbreak: The Vietnam lessons. Sustainability, 12(7), 2931. 5. Hoang, V. Q., & Dung, T. T. (2009). The cultural dimensions of the Vietnamese private entrepreneurship. IUP Journal of Entrepreneurship Development, VI(3/4), 54-78. 6. Liu, Y., & Shen, W. (2020). Perching birds or scattered streams: a study of how trust affects civic engagement among university students in contemporary China. Higher Education, 1-16. (In press) 7. Zhai, Y. (2018). Traditional values and political trust in China. Journal of Asian and African Studies, 53(3), 350-365. 8. Marsh, R. (2019). Social trust in Japan and Taiwan: A test of Fukuyama's thesis. In Sasaki M. (Ed) Trust in contemporary society (pp. 210-229). Leiden, Brill. 9. Sacks, S., & Laskai, L. (2019) China is having an unexpected privacy awakening. Slate. Retrieved from https ://slate.com/technology /2019/02/china -consumer-dataprotection -privacy-surveillance ce.html (Accessed September 3 2020). 10. Vuong, Q. H., Ho, M. T., Nguyen, H. K. T., Vuong, T. T., Tran, T., Hoang, K. L., ... & La, V. P. (2020). On how religions could accidentally incite lies and violence: Folktales as a cultural transmitter. Palgrave Communications, 6(1), 82. 11. Vuong, Q. H., Bui, Q. K., La, V. P., Vuong, T. T., Nguyen, V. H. T., Ho, M. T., ... & Ho, M. T. (2018). Cultural additivity: behavioural insights from the interaction of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism in folktales. Palgrave Communications, 4(1), 143. 12. Poria, S., Cambria, E., Bajpai, R., & Hussain, A. (2017). A review of affective computing: From unimodal analysis to multimodal fusion. Information Fusion, 37, 98-125. 13. Venturini, T., & Rogers, R. (2019). "API-based Research" or how can digital sociology and journalism studies learn from the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica data breach. Digital Journalism, 7(4), 532-540. 14. Huu, N. V., & Hoang, V. Q. (2007). On the martingale representation theorem and on approximate hedging a contingent claim in the minimum deviation square criterion. In: Jeltsch, Li & Sloan (Eds.). Some Topics in Industrial and Applied Mathematics (pp. 134-151). Hackensack, New Jersey: World Scientific. DOI:10.1142/9789812709356_0008 15. Thao, H. T. P, & Hoang, V. Q. (2015). A Merton model of credit risk with jumps. 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