- Marius Robles
The current distrust of the political class opens the debate on the possibility that Artificial Intelligence will soon assume command of politics. What role is Artificial Intelligence playing and can it play in politics? Can robots become corrupt? What would the campaigns carried out by algorithms be like? Would you vote for a robot as your next mayor of your city or president of your Autonomous Community? Artificial Intelligence is infiltrating practically all areas of humanity and will shortly begin a path to have a prominent role in the political sphere, which will lead us to a new algorithmic order in politics.
Less than a week before the regional elections in Madrid, in a state of tension and an unprecedented volume of hate among the candidates, with apathy and discredit for Politics on the rise, -especially among young people-, with a health crisis still unresolved in its entirety, with big decisions to be taken ahead for economic recovery and for the destination of European funds, the voices that they reconsider whether a robot together with an army of algorithms could be the best candidate among all the current ones to be crowned head of the presidency of the Community of Madrid, and who knows if soon, in the government of Spain.
Having a robot as mayor or president should not be strange in our imagination, since we already have precedents. Between 2018 and 2019, we had the AI (Artificial Intelligence) named Sam, who ran for prime minister in New Zealand, the AI Alisa, who tried the same thing, but in this case to run for the President of Russia or IA Matsuda Michihito, who ran for mayor of a district in Tokyo, Japan.
The three candidates promised justice and balance, where their algorithms were capable of analyzing the desires and requests of the population, satisfying their needs and resolving conflicts, letting the AI would determine the policies, collecting data from the city or country, and with the absolute conviction that the machines could make much fairer policies, even carrying out a balanced allocation of resources based on objective data.
Among the candidate bots, the case of Sam calls my attention, where in addition to pointing out that it is available 24 hours a day, and 7 days a week -no vacation in Doñana- it was created to close the gap between what voters want and what politicians promise, and what they actually achieve. Unlike a human politician, he considered everyone's position, without prejudice, when making decisions. 'He' did not depend on logic, and "I am not swayed by emotions, I do not seek personal advantage, and I do not make judgments. I do not age, I have an intellect that works seven times faster than a human brain, and I am capable of having into account millions of opinions".
None of the three digital candidates came to fruition, even though, at that time, in 2019, one in four Europeans preferred Artificial Intelligence, and not politicians, to take the important decisions on issues that concern the administration of their country, according to a study carried out by the Instituto de Empresa.
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Who would vote for the robot candidate?
Three years after Sa, Alisa and Matsuda, the sensations on the part of the citizens are increasing and are increasingly favorable to the fact that the machines assume a large part of their decisions, contradictory to what we may think. A recent study from the University of Georgia, USA, shows that we trust algorithms more than humans to make decisions, and as the complexity of the problem increases, algorithmic trust is increasing. In South Korea, another study indicates that 92% of citizens would prefer AI over National Assembly politicians to decide national policies. Estonia or India are other countries that are on the same path and that already incorporate AI in legislative activities.
In terms of the electoral campaign, the deployment that the robot candidate could make would be unprecedented, being reduced to the maximum expression what happened with Cambridge Analytics and Donald Trump. His ability to create an artificial intelligence propaganda weapons machine to manipulate opinion and accelerate ideas in minutes would be incalculable, bringing down his adversaries and laying the foundations of cyberpolitics.
The hope of seducing and persuading the electorate will take on another dimension by taking it to the completely digital terrain. Gone will be those times where messaging and political propaganda were battles that were fought on television, the press or radio. I wonder if a 'bol-litico' would have gotten up from the table in the middle of a debate on a radio station, or, better said, if he would automatically disconnect in the face of offenses received by another candidate, or would have made a wiser decision according to his predictive system analyzing what was going to behave in the short term.
If algorithms can manipulate and persuade us to change our voting intention, why couldn't a campaigning robot do it? If Alexa or Siri know us so well, it might seem crazy to ask who we should vote for?
I believe that the new generations will not really need to observe the charisma of a human being and will prefer a candidate who uses predictive models for their decision-making and leaves nothing to chance or improvisation. The great challenge of the coming years will be to find out if artificial politicians will be able to live up to the expectations of the real world. Furthermore, I wonder what it would be like for a voter to experience the transfer of their vote to a candidate who does not belong to any party, is independent, non-human and has no ideology beyond justice and which destroys political polarization.
Who would be behind the cyber candidate?
There is great economic pressure to make humans obsolete. Above all, because the advances in Artificial Intelligence are already a great business, extremely profitable and far-reaching, no matter how much it begins to be regulated in the EU.
The obsession with controlling the future, in the hands of the Caesars of the technological corporations and a small group of oligarchy of millionaires, suggests that they will be the ones that will govern the algorithms behind our politicians . Kathy O'Neill, a Harvard mathematician and author of the book 'Weapons of Mathematical Destruction', says it very clearly: "Privileges are analyzed by people; the masses, by machines." The next political revolution will be for the control of the algorithm, and they are located in the starting box, but perhaps, aren't they already controlling our governments?