WEBVTT

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Is it just me,

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or are there other people here

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that are a little bit
disappointed with democracy?

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(Applause)

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So let's look at a few numbers.

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If we look across the world,

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the median turnout
in presidential elections

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over the last 30 years

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has been just 67 percent.

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Now, if we go to Europe

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and we look at people that participated
in EU parliamentary elections,

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the median turnout in those elections

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is just 42 percent.

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Now let's go to New York,

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and let's see how many people voted
in the last election for mayor.

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We will find that only
24 percent of people showed up to vote.

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What that means is that,
if "Friends" was still running,

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Joey and maybe Phoebe
would have shown up to vote.

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(Laughter)

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And you cannot blame them
because people are tired of politicians.

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And people are tired of other people
using the data that they have generated

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to communicate with
their friends and family,

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to target political propaganda at them.

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But the thing about this
is that this is not new.

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Nowadays, people use likes
to target propaganda at you

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before they use your zip code
or your gender or your age,

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because the idea of targeting people
with propaganda for political purposes

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is as old as politics.

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And the reason why that idea is there

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is because democracy
has a basic vulnerability.

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This is the idea of a representative.

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In principle, democracy is the ability
of people to exert power.

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But in practice, we have to delegate
that power to a representative

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that can exert that power for us.

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That representative is a bottleneck,

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or a weak spot.

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It is the place that you want to target
if you want to attack democracy

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because you can capture democracy
by either capturing that representative

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or capturing the way
that people choose it.

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So the big question is:

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Is this the end of history?

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Is this the best that we can do

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or, actually, are there alternatives?

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Some people have been thinking
about alternatives,

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and one of the ideas that is out there
is the idea of direct democracy.

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This is the idea of bypassing
politicians completely

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and having people vote directly on issues,

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having people vote directly on bills.

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But this idea is naive

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because there's too many things
that we would need to choose.

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If you look at the 114th US Congress,

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you will have seen that
the House of Representatives

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considered more than 6,000 bills,

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the Senate considered
more than 3,000 bills

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and they approved more than 300 laws.

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Those would be many decisions

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that each person would have to make a week

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on topics that they know little about.

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So there's a big cognitive
bandwidth problem

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if we're going to try to think about
direct democracy as a viable alternative.

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So some people think about the idea
of liquid democracy, or fluid democracy,

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which is the idea that you endorse
your political power to someone,

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who can endorse it to someone else,

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and, eventually, you create
a large follower network

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in which, at the end, there's a few people
that are making decisions

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on behalf of all of their followers
and their followers.

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But this idea also doesn't solve
the problem of the cognitive bandwidth

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and, to be honest, it's also quite similar
to the idea of having a representative.

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So what I'm going to do today is
I'm going to be a little bit provocative,

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and I'm going to ask you, well:

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What if, instead of trying
to bypass politicians,

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we tried to automate them?

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The idea of automation is not new.

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It was started more than 300 years ago,

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when French weavers decided
to automate the loom.

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The winner of that industrial war
was Joseph-Marie Jacquard.

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He was a French weaver and merchant

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that married the loom
with the steam engine

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to create autonomous looms.

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And in those autonomous looms,
he gained control.

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He could now make fabrics that were
more complex and more sophisticated

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than the ones they
were able to do by hand.

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But also, by winning that industrial war,

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he laid out what has become
the blueprint of automation.

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The way that we automate things
for the last 300 years

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has always been the same:

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we first identify a need,

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then we create a tool
to satisfy that need,

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like the loom, in this case,

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and then we study how people use that tool

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to automate that user.

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That's how we came
from the mechanical loom

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to the autonomous loom,

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and that took us a thousand years.

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Now, it's taken us only a hundred years

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to use the same script
to automate the car.

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But the thing is that, this time around,

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automation is kind of for real.

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This is a video that a colleague of mine
from Toshiba shared with me

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that shows the factory
that manufactures solid state drives.

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The entire factory is a robot.

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There are no humans in that factory.

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And the robots are soon
to leave the factories

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and become part of our world,

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become part of our workforce.

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So what I do in my day job

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is actually create tools that integrate
data for entire countries

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so that we can ultimately have
the foundations that we need

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for a future in which we need
to also manage those machines.

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But today, I'm not here
to talk to you about these tools

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that integrate data for countries.

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But I'm here to talk to you
about another idea

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that might help us think about how to use
artificial intelligence in democracy.

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Because the tools that I build
are designed for executive decisions.

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These are decisions that can be cast
in some sort of term of objectivity --

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public investment decisions.

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But there are decisions
that are legislative,

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and these decisions that are legislative
require communication among people

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that have different points of view,

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require participation, require debate,

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require deliberation.

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And for a long time,
we have thought that, well,

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what we need to improve democracy
is actually more communication.

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So all of the technologies that we have
advanced in the context of democracy,

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whether they are newspapers
or whether it is social media,

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have tried to provide us
with more communication.

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But we've been down that rabbit hole,

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and we know that's not
what's going to solve the problem.

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Because it's not a communication problem,

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it's a cognitive bandwidth problem.

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So if the problem is one
of cognitive bandwidth,

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well, adding more communication to people

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is not going to be
what's going to solve it.

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What we are going to need instead
is to have other technologies

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that help us deal with
some of the communication

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that we are overloaded with.

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Think of, like, a little avatar,

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a software agent,

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a digital Jiminy Cricket --

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(Laughter)

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that basically is able
to answer things on your behalf.

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And if we had that technology,

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we would be able to offload
some of the communication

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and help, maybe, make better decisions
or decisions at a larger scale.

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And the thing is that the idea
of software agents is also not new.

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We already use them all the time.

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We use software agents

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to choose the way that we're going
to drive to a certain location,

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the music that we're going to listen to

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or to get suggestions
for the next books that we should read.

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So there is an obvious idea
in the 21st century

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that was as obvious as the idea

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of putting together a steam engine
with a loom at the time of Jacquard.

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And that idea is combining
direct democracy with software agents.

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Imagine, for a second, a world

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in which, instead of having
a representative that represents you

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and millions of other people,

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you can have a representative
that represents only you,

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with your nuanced political views --

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that weird combination
of libertarian and liberal

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and maybe a little bit
conservative on some issues

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and maybe very progressive on others.

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Politicians nowadays are packages,
and they're full of compromises.

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But you might have someone
that can represent only you,

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if you are willing to give up the idea

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that that representative is a human.

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If that representative
is a software agent,

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we could have a senate that has
as many senators as we have citizens.

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And those senators are going to be able
to read every bill

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and they're going to be able
to vote on each one of them.

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So there's an obvious idea
that maybe we want to consider.

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But I understand that in this day and age,

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this idea might be quite scary.

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In fact, thinking of a robot
coming from the future

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to help us run our governments

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sounds terrifying.

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But we've been there before.

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(Laughter)

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And actually he was quite a nice guy.

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So what would the Jacquard loom
version of this idea look like?

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It would be a very simple system.

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Imagine a system that you log in
and you create your avatar,

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and then you're going
to start training your avatar.

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So you can provide your avatar
with your reading habits,

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or connect it to your social media,

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or you can connect it to other data,

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for example by taking
psychological tests.

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And the nice thing about this
is that there's no deception.

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You are not providing data to communicate
with your friends and family

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that then gets used in a political system.

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You are providing data to a system
that is designed to be used

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to make political decisions
on your behalf.

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Then you take that data and you choose
a training algorithm,

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because it's an open marketplace

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in which different people
can submit different algorithms

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to predict how you're going to vote,
based on the data you have provided.

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And the system is open,
so nobody controls the algorithms;

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there are algorithms
that become more popular

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and others that become less popular.

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Eventually, you can audit the system.

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You can see how your avatar is working.

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If you like it,
you can leave it on autopilot.

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If you want to be
a little more controlling,

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you can actually choose that they ask you

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every time they're going
to make a decision,

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or you can be anywhere in between.

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One of the reasons
why we use democracy so little

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may be because democracy
has a very bad user interface.

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And if we improve the user
interface of democracy,

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we might be able to use it more.

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Of course, there's a lot of questions
that you might have.

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Well, how do you train these avatars?

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How do you keep the data secure?

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How do you keep the systems
distributed and auditable?

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How about my grandmother,
who's 80 years old

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and doesn't know how to use the internet?

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Trust me, I've heard them all.

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So when you think about an idea like this,
you have to beware of pessimists

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because they are known to have
a problem for every solution.

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(Laughter)

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So I want to invite you to think
about the bigger ideas.

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The questions I just showed you
are little ideas

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because they are questions
about how this would not work.

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The big ideas are ideas of:

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What else can you do with this

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if this would happen to work?

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And one of those ideas is,
well, who writes the laws?

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In the beginning, we could have
the avatars that we already have,

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voting on laws that are written
by the senators or politicians

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that we already have.

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But if this were to work,

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you could write an algorithm

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that could try to write a law

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that would get a certain
percentage of approval,

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and you could reverse the process.

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Now, you might think that this idea
is ludicrous and we should not do it,

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but you cannot deny that it's an idea
that is only possible

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in a world in which direct democracy
and software agents

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are a viable form of participation.

NOTE Paragraph

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So how do we start the revolution?

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We don't start this revolution
with picket fences or protests

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or by demanding our current politicians
to be changed into robots.

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That's not going to work.

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This is much more simple,

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much slower

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and much more humble.

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We start this revolution by creating
simple systems like this in grad schools,

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in libraries, in nonprofits.

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And we try to figure out
all of those little questions

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and those little problems

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that we're going to have to figure out
to make this idea something viable,

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to make this idea something
that we can trust.

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And as we create those systems that have
a hundred people, a thousand people,

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a hundred thousand people voting
in ways that are not politically binding,

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we're going to develop trust in this idea,

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the world is going to change,

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and those that are as little
as my daughter is right now

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are going to grow up.

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And by the time my daughter is my age,

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maybe this idea, that I know
today is very crazy,

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might not be crazy to her
and to her friends.

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And at that point,

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we will be at the end of our history,

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but they will be
at the beginning of theirs.

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Thank you.

NOTE Paragraph

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(Applause)