A Danish political party led by an AI
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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.
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.
> The demarchists were only several 100 people if I understood correctly
Demarchist society at/around Yellowstone was supposed to involve many millions of people, but the catch was the Glitter Band of federated space stations allowed a high degree of local control: different stations could vote themselves into being hippie communes or dictatorships or whatever, and one of the main roles of the overarching Demarchist organization (heh) was to make sure these little fiefs didn't violate the fundamental principles of the whole thing by preventing their inhabitants from voting in the broader hivemind or from leaving the station. That broader hivemind held together by largely staying out of hyperlocal concerns, focusing on the advancement of the overall system.
> they definitely ran into some problems
Yeah, though The Bad Thing that happens roughly halfway through the universe's chronology (some books set before The Event, some after) affects all the different polities and one of the more interesting aspects of the novels, at least personally, is how the different systems deal with this external shock; it's not quite that the Demarchist political system caused the event, although it did get itself into a variety of lesser scrapes.
It is a fun concept: representative democracy is indeed kind of a workaround for laggy, low-bandwidth communications. What's possible when that stops being a constraint?
The Demarchists were probably the most successful offshoot of Earth and are billions across multiple solar systems. They are not an hive mind and their societies are not exactly an utopia (but not dystopian either).
That may be true if your vote is also your guess. But if they are two different things (i.e. I vote for candidate A but guess candidate B will win) I don't see an issue. In theory it simply favors a well-informed citizenry.
I would be curious if exit pollsters have ever asked this question. Ask people who they voted for, but also who they think will win. It would be interesting to see how accurate guesses are.
This is a terrible "theory." No voter can be fully informed. I'm not even talking about the asymmetric information that leaders have (information from spy networks, experts, etc). Literally no single person can comprehend all these connections and complexities involved in many things. This is what representatives are supposed to resolve, but they frequently fail us. Your vote always is and always will be a guess. There may be a handful of subjects you're qualified to be an expert on, but the rest are effectively guesses. An "informed" voter is one that knows they are uninformed and doing their best.
This isn't a comment encouraging autocracy, but one against this myth of "education is the end all be all solution." We should inform people as much as possible but also be encouraging nuanced discussions. Wisdom of the crowds is powerful, but we also need to recognize the limitations.
> I would be curious if exit pollsters have ever asked this question. Ask people who they voted for, but also who they think will win. It would be interesting to see how accurate guesses are.
Absolutely not! We want to protect the secrecy of the vote. This can only encourage the degradation of that privacy. There are many ways to extract more information from votes without revealing identity. Cardinal methods, especially Score and STAR, give you a lot more information that you can use infer voter preferences. These methods also allow you to vote honestly, which defeats the entire purpose of your poll question.
The problem is that most people are biased towards thinking their favorite candidate will win, so if it's a close election then most people will guess the same as their vote.
> I would be curious if exit pollsters have ever asked this question. Ask people who they voted for, but also who they think will win. It would be interesting to see how accurate guesses are.
Political betting markets are kind of like that. Though, with money on the line, participants have a stronger incentive to avoid bias than they would in a poll.
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.
Aside from that, i agree with you, the "right or wrong opinion" mindset is dangerous.
How does one even do this? Wait a hundred years? It's still probably impossible to determine the outcome of alternative policies. The right/wrong mindset is not only dangerous, but impossible in principle. But the autocrats won't tell you that.
How? This is absolutely impossible. You can't run trials. Yes, we can analyze the effects of policies (which we should certainly be doing more of) but these results can also take decades. We can only do a singular experiment and so our sample is biased to all hell. There is no objective truth here, only results of a single experiment.
It is possible to use GPT-3 to impersonate someone. You give it a profile and it assumes the personality, then speaks from that point of view replicating its biases with uncanny ability. So what they did was to create a simulated poll using GPT-3 by aligning the model to personality profiles distributed identically to the real population.
The result? GPT-3 can predict how an idea would poll, how a population would react to a situation. So you can simulate various policies without actually having to test in reality. You can do MCMC like AlphaGO and see ten moves ahead.
This looks to be one of the most astounding uses of large language models. It would be of immediate interest to politicians, investors, advertisers, music and movie produces or any influencer.
It gives me heavy 'Matrix' and 'Psychohistory' vibes.
https://jack-clark.net/2022/10/11/import-ai-305-gpt3-can-sim...
The existence of adversarial attacks shows that most neural networks have pretty bad worst-case performance. Thus sticking GPT-3 into alpha-beta or MCTS could just as easily give you an ungeneralizable optimum, because optimizers are by nature intended to find extreme responses. Call it a Campbell's law for neural nets.
The actual AlphaZero nets are probably more robust because they were themselves trained by MCTS, although they still don't generalize very well out-of-sample: IIRC AlphaZero is not a very strong Fischer Random player.
Policy making is not about truth, it is about values and priorities.
https://blog.pol.is/uber-responds-to-vtaiwans-coherent-blend...
Also, a paper on the vtaiwan process: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/xyhft/
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.
*Edit: Another counterargument that generally applies to neural nets making decisions for human activities is the argument of accountability. While you can put on trial a bad politician for their harmful-to-society decision making, who is to blame when the neural net will inevitably spew the wrong output on an issue that it has not encountered before and a policy decision will be made based on that? Will we put the developers on trial?
> GPT3 can simulate real people, Jack Clark
https://jack-clark.net/2022/10/11/import-ai-305-gpt3-can-sim...
Funny, as a biochemist, I always took it that minds had essentially been through unfathomable numbers and levels of iteration through cultural and biological evolution cycles, and that ANNs were the untrustworthy new kids on the block :)
> 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.
Just wanted to second your thought here, as we seem to have converged on this independently. I've been speaking similarly about the framing of Polis. Facilitative processes often require cycles of expansion of possibility and then collapse into singular options (whether the options to vote between, or the yay/nay decision). This expansion/collapse is often called the double diamond process.
For example, civil society discussion is often expansion, deliberative assembly in parliament is also ideally about expansion. Putting forward electorial candidates is expansion. Voting (electorial or parliamentary) is purely collapse. Who participates in either the expansion or collapse is a critical feature that differs in all these.
Different levels of expansion/collapse of possibility space are stitched together in our old process, often built on technology of their era, usually created to suit the era of postal mail and telegraphs (communicating electoral results) and horse-drawn carriage (attending parliamentary proceedings). In its prime, Roberts Rules of Order was a cutting-edge social technology that (coupled with other parliamentary democracy infra), allowed as many people as possible to have their views enshrined in governing law.
Most digital innovation focusses on modernizing the collapse process inherent in voting, but it is the less interesting part imho.
Polis is a tool that involves new technology that potentially unseats Roberts Rules of Order as the universal technology of deliberation (expansion). It's dimensional reduction allows for a lightweight process that accepts TONS of participation. It facilitates larger processes where people can participate more directly in issue-based expansion of the possibilities on the way to collapsing into a singular decision or compromise.
It is a deliberation-support tool (expansion), not a decision-making tool (collapse).
Hope this helps others trying to grapple with the significance of tools like Polis :)
Hit me up on Twitter if this stuff is up your alley: https://twitter.com/patcon_
EDIT: Or there's an unofficial "Polis User Group" discord server for aspiring facilitators or server hosters: http://link.g0v.network/pug
I discovered AR in the last couple of years and find his world building and imagination incredible.
Loved his short stories collections and House of Suns.
I started the Revelation Space novels this year.
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.
There is also Delamaine, who most definitely is an AGI, who has a nice quest line about it.
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.
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.
this is a good argument against AI direct democracy, but I think it relies on the presumption that political representatives provide a moderating function on the lizard brain. Seems to me that they actually amplify it, just look at political campaign promise, it's all promise no real talk. Perhaps there is a way to program in hangovers, so that lizards and the AI can learn together what is a good or bad idea, from feedback. In time, we might even be able to model this and accurately predict what a good or bad idea might be
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.
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.
Another piece of information that I've never been able to find out about Tay is how was it constructed. Nearly all progress in AI since that point has occurred with a frozen model. Once a model is trained, that's it, no more learning, no more optimizing. Sure you can fine tune it, but that's not nearly the same as learning on the fly like Microsoft claimed Tay was able to do, and even so those concepts only became popular several years after Tay was around. If anyone knows more about how Tay worked under the hood, I'd be really interested in knowing because this has been an unsolvable mystery just lingering in the back of my mind for years now.
The idea of Joe Manchin wouldn’t really make sense there, nor would the idea of having multiple factions within a party voting against each other.
As a result people from across the country appear much more similar. A Queenslander and a Victorian don’t politically differ the way a Californian and Texan do.
Maybe not the same way. But One Nation and Clive Palmer are based in one state and not the other. There are political differences between QLD and VIC.
It is my understanding that in most (all?) democracies MP's legitimacy arise from the electorate, not the party. The party may strip the membership from an MP but can't strip them from the elected office.
This may be more likely to happen in proportional representation[2] parliaments than in majoritarian systems of representation, specially for up and coming and small parties. Denmark follows [2].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIVRE
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation
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.
Every regulation could have annotated associated/assumed costs and benefits, with links to measurement of outcomes.
>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.
Optimizing to win the election and then provide status quo?
Here in [insert country], it's a grim struggle against the forces of [disliked party] who want to destroy our way of life, and it's dangerous to risk losing a few voters to silliness.
Media personalities, politicians, high level executives, and leaders of any kind generally aren't real people. They're figureheads. They're simulations of human beings occupied by a real human playing the character. And when the human behind the scene starts deviating from the character they're supposed to play in service of the institution or the meme it leads, they get replaced and a new pilot takes over running the simulation.
We individual humans aren't in charge. We are all just hosts for memes. https://wearehostsformemes.com/
There's a word for that: actors.
Consider a community of mathematicians, all trying to discover some high-hanging proof (e.g. Goldbach). It's true that the mathematicians come up with strategies that then spread to the rest of the community if they're useful. But the mathematicians aren't mere vessels for these ideas. They decide which strategies to pursue, and whether the strategies they receive from others seem (to their mind) useful in pursuing the ultimate goal.
From a strictly formal perspective, memetics is true in that the mathematical community may behave like a peer-to-peer system using a gossip protocol. But I don't think anyone would say that the individuals aren't "in charge" but are "just hosts for proof strategies".
Granted, media personalities may not be that contemplative: a scientific community is kind of one extreme. But the example shows that it's not possible to determine whether the tail is wagging the dog or vice versa, just by appealing to the concept of memetics.
Humans might claim we want fairness but our policies inevitably favor the people who make the policy. AI as an ostensibly objective party might be able to be more fair.
Of course we probably won’t like it because when presented with objectively fair policies we’ll wonder why we can’t have policies that unfairly favor our group anymore. For example a fair housing policy will probably favor people who don’t have a lot of power.
Think for a moment about who that is and you’ll prove my point.
This is the imagery that John of Patmos was pulling from, not visions of microchips, barcodes, vaccines, or AI. He was under Roman oppression and all the imagery used in Revelation is directly relevant to it's writer's own context - no need to editorialize and fear monger