Takayuki Ito, Ph.D
	Professor, Kyoto University (Japan)
Toward Hyperdemocracy: An AI-Mediated Consensus-Building Platform for Human-Agent Social Networks
We are developing a consensus-building platform "Hyperdemocracy" for next-generation democracy in which AI agents and humans participate together within social networks. Rapid advances in AI, smartphones, and the internet, accelerated by the societal disruptions of COVID-19, have made such a reimagined social system increasingly feasible. Our approach embeds multiple AI agents persistently within social networks, acting as personal proxies that mediate decision-making and interactions to support better consensus formation and collective decision-making. These agents collect opinions and preferences while remaining sensitive to each participant's emotional state, enabling efficient yet genuinely satisfying agreement. A central challenge we address is the trade-off between human agency and subjective satisfaction on one hand, and the efficient and rational consensus achievable by agents on the other. Furthermore, the platform is designed to mitigate well-known social media pathologies, i.e., flaming, fake news, group polarization, and gerrymandering, through human-agent collaboration. This talk presents our project vision, progress to date, and future directions.