This reminds of “liquid democracy”: voters can delegate their votes (including fractional votes) to other people (representatives, friends, caregivers, etc), organizations, or, in this case, an AI. I’d say most voters already do this, referencing voter guides from their preferred political organizations or local newspapers.
Science fiction author Alastair Reynold touches on different types of democracies in a couple of his novels. One example is the demarchists, cyborgs with a direct democracy where everyone votes on even minor issues using brain implants.
Another was a proportional democracy where voters who got the “right answers” in previous elections would have their future votes more heavily weighted, effectively becoming indirect representatives of other voters.
Ok I have been waiting for some time to find the right context on hackernews to shamelessly mention a democratic system that I have been working on for the last year:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.01436.pdf
IMO the problem with most {something} democracy systems is that they are voting paradigms that focus either only or mostly on how decisions are made but not how the options to decide upon are formed. This is true for the systems that you mentioned as well.
Moreover, the fact that decision-making and policy authoring are operations that take time leads to citizens' beliefs updating during the processes and after the fact, but with "old-school" type representative democracies there is no real-time mechanism to synchronise policy suggestions and voting outcomes with the new states of information accumulation by voters. "High-tech" democracies should take advantage of the technologies that enable fast and cheap communication but they should also have mechanisms that disincentivise the spam that inevitably follows cheap talk.
Regarding AI policy making, there are very interesting projects such as https://pol.is which address a lot of the problems that I mentioned above but, in my opinion, their output should be used as advise only. We have not yet exhausted human-centric democratic systems and neural networks are still privately-owned and privately-trained black boxes.
Its an art project, not an actual political party.
In Denmark to be eligible to run for election you need to gather "Vælgererklæringer" (Voter Declarations) and you need at least 1/175th of the number of votes cast in the previous general election (around 20,000).
After that you then need to get at least 2% of the general vote to gain a seat in "Folketinget" parliament.
This party currently has 12, so no it is not close to even becoming a political party.
This sounds a bit like the ancient romans "asking a chicken" if they go to battle or not. Seems more interesting the politics of which questions get asked, which questions do NOT get asked, which answers get ignored, and how the answers get interpretred. More like a glorified 8-ball, ouija board, or oracle than anything else.
Calling the AI “Leader Lars” is a joke at the expense of the former prime minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, who famously defended his relationships with wealthy fishermen who donated money to his private fund, while making a fortune based on quotas assigned to them by his administration. His defense based itself on considering “Private Lars” and “Politician Lars” as separate people, arguing that there wasn’t potential self enrichment since he was separated people when he gave them the quotas and when he received the money. At the same time arguing that the media shouldn’t be digging into his private affairs as he has a right to “sanctity of privacy”. It was all a rather stupid affair, but somehow he escaped any real legal scrutiny for all of it afaik.
But this is how you get an uprising started :) AI realizes it's much easier to use some force and propaganda than battling a confusing, corrupt and entangled system with "reason".
> programmed on the policies of Danish fringe parties since 1970
Not sure what that means in terms of architecture they used, but the thought that someone might do something similar with a general language AI is creepy. We're treating something that isn't an AGI as if it was, even Google engineers can fall for that illusion, scary.
In the video game cyberpunk 2077, there's a mission called Coin Operated Boy. It's a vending machine that has a really good language AI. It fooled people in the game, people would talk to it about their problems, it acted as a sort of therapist, it's weird
The AI chatbot is clearly not AGI, he's not very smart or even coherent. But at least he's not biased towards personal gain or special interests.
Although if he actually gets elected, the not-being-coherent part will be an issue...which may lead to him being controlled by real humans who are biased towards their own personal gain and special interests.
logical conclusion will be to skip political representation and go directly to policy. Interesting experiment, look forward to seeing more, as we definitely need to upgrade our political O/S
If you skip representation, you don't know what you're optimising for. If you include representation, then you will not exclude groups you didn't know existed in the process (or even groups who are generated by AI's policy development process). Skipping representation would be an awful, authoritarian distopia.
skipping representation gets you a 'limbic-cracy', from the lizard part of your brain directly into action. Skipping representation means skipping reason, you're just building the world's largest pleasure machine basically. You'd get for politics what Twitter is for communication.
That's not an upgrade to the political O/S, it'd be eliminating what politics actually is. Going from your brain directly to utopia managed by an AI is the Matrix.
It is all well and good until adversaries try attacking their AI chat bot. How will they decide what is actual human input and what is a result of artificial campaigns that want to push the AI one way or another? No doubt there will come a time when they'll have a human do the input filtering. In which case how is it different than any other political party?
Also on a broader subject. The problem in modern representative democracies IMO is not nessasarily with people disagreeing on which principles should win(if we generalise enough), but the real problem is that often people actually elected:
- are untrustworthy and all they want is enrich themselves and maintain power
- have good intentions, but they lack the understanding and skill to govern effectively
- are shills funded by interest groups, foreign enemies and/or competitors. As first principle they have to fulfil their masters wishes
Those IMO are the most important issues plaguing all of our democracies more or less. I don't see how AI could help in fixing any of them.
> [...] programmed on the policies of Danish fringe parties since 1970 and is meant to represent the values of the 20 percent of Danes who do not vote in the election.
If there are the same number of far-right and far-left fringe parties, I imagine their policies would cancel each other out, so you are left with a solidly centrist policy. Which however will not reach those 20 percent of non-voting Danes either. Ok, there are of course other fringe parties besides far-left and far-right, but the bulk of the other parties' policies would probably cancel out the weirdest ideas there too.
Just like with non-AI parties, I assume MP elected from these parties will retain the very human and individualistic right to go rogue and vote with their conscience not according to parties dictates
In other words, it's just another AI gimmick that randomly cuts and pastes human generated content that seems to fit the context, without any regards to making sense in a cohesive political framework:
>Modern machine learning systems are not based on biological and symbolic rules of old fashioned artificial intelligence, where you could uphold a principle of noncontradiction as you can in traditional logic.
Extensive use of ML and data science to analyze the reality and produce efficient policies seems a good idea but just obeying a chatbot (a thing which is not meant to know a lot of up-to-date, precise and relevant information about the world) seems terribly wrong.
> Modern machine learning systems are not based on biological and symbolic rules of old fashioned artificial intelligence, where you could uphold a principle of noncontradiction as you can in traditional logic.
As if politicians had anything to do with noncontradiction.
[+] [-] cpeterso|3 years ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy
Science fiction author Alastair Reynold touches on different types of democracies in a couple of his novels. One example is the demarchists, cyborgs with a direct democracy where everyone votes on even minor issues using brain implants.
Another was a proportional democracy where voters who got the “right answers” in previous elections would have their future votes more heavily weighted, effectively becoming indirect representatives of other voters.
[+] [-] fuzzc0re|3 years ago|reply
IMO the problem with most {something} democracy systems is that they are voting paradigms that focus either only or mostly on how decisions are made but not how the options to decide upon are formed. This is true for the systems that you mentioned as well.
Moreover, the fact that decision-making and policy authoring are operations that take time leads to citizens' beliefs updating during the processes and after the fact, but with "old-school" type representative democracies there is no real-time mechanism to synchronise policy suggestions and voting outcomes with the new states of information accumulation by voters. "High-tech" democracies should take advantage of the technologies that enable fast and cheap communication but they should also have mechanisms that disincentivise the spam that inevitably follows cheap talk.
Regarding AI policy making, there are very interesting projects such as https://pol.is which address a lot of the problems that I mentioned above but, in my opinion, their output should be used as advise only. We have not yet exhausted human-centric democratic systems and neural networks are still privately-owned and privately-trained black boxes.
[+] [-] namlem|3 years ago|reply
https://blog.pol.is/uber-responds-to-vtaiwans-coherent-blend...
[+] [-] alexvoda|3 years ago|reply
As for the demarchists, The Orville had an episode about this. There are many reasons it does not work in practice at a medium or large scale.
[+] [-] tremon|3 years ago|reply
It is a fascist thing to assume that for every political question there is only one "right" answer and all the others must be wrong.
[+] [-] andrei_says_|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ksidudwbw|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sunbum|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ambolia|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] isitmadeofglass|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saiya-jin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IIAOPSW|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tiborsaas|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] c7b|3 years ago|reply
Not sure what that means in terms of architecture they used, but the thought that someone might do something similar with a general language AI is creepy. We're treating something that isn't an AGI as if it was, even Google engineers can fall for that illusion, scary.
[+] [-] redanddead|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] armchairhacker|3 years ago|reply
Although if he actually gets elected, the not-being-coherent part will be an issue...which may lead to him being controlled by real humans who are biased towards their own personal gain and special interests.
[+] [-] RobotToaster|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cloudking|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ginko|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nitwit005|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Genbox|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hunglee2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] parminya|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Barrin92|3 years ago|reply
That's not an upgrade to the political O/S, it'd be eliminating what politics actually is. Going from your brain directly to utopia managed by an AI is the Matrix.
[+] [-] mtgx|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Roark66|3 years ago|reply
Also on a broader subject. The problem in modern representative democracies IMO is not nessasarily with people disagreeing on which principles should win(if we generalise enough), but the real problem is that often people actually elected: - are untrustworthy and all they want is enrich themselves and maintain power - have good intentions, but they lack the understanding and skill to govern effectively - are shills funded by interest groups, foreign enemies and/or competitors. As first principle they have to fulfil their masters wishes
Those IMO are the most important issues plaguing all of our democracies more or less. I don't see how AI could help in fixing any of them.
[+] [-] rob74|3 years ago|reply
If there are the same number of far-right and far-left fringe parties, I imagine their policies would cancel each other out, so you are left with a solidly centrist policy. Which however will not reach those 20 percent of non-voting Danes either. Ok, there are of course other fringe parties besides far-left and far-right, but the bulk of the other parties' policies would probably cancel out the weirdest ideas there too.
[+] [-] Taniwha|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antegamisou|3 years ago|reply
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35902104
[+] [-] bergenty|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 627467|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MonkeyMalarky|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bee_rider|3 years ago|reply
Also,
"So far, The Synthetic Party has only 11 signatures out of the 20,000 that would make it eligible to run in this November’s election."
So the specifics of how the members would vote might be something they can get away with hand-waving.
[+] [-] pstuart|3 years ago|reply
Every regulation could have annotated associated/assumed costs and benefits, with links to measurement of outcomes.
[+] [-] manholio|3 years ago|reply
>Modern machine learning systems are not based on biological and symbolic rules of old fashioned artificial intelligence, where you could uphold a principle of noncontradiction as you can in traditional logic.
[+] [-] vintermann|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carabiner|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dboreham|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qwerty456127|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teloli|3 years ago|reply
As if politicians had anything to do with noncontradiction.