-
Is it just me,
-
or are there other people here
-
that are a little bit
disappointed with democracy?
-
(Applause)
-
So let's look at a few numbers.
-
If we look across the world,
-
the median turnout
in presidential elections
-
over the last 30 years
-
has been just 67 percent.
-
Now, if we go to Europe
-
and we look at people that participated
in EU parliamentary elections,
-
the median turnout in those elections
-
is just 42 percent.
-
Now let's go to New York,
-
and let's see how many people voted
in the last election for mayor.
-
We will find that only
24 percent of people showed up to vote.
-
What that means is that,
if "Friends" was still running,
-
Joey and maybe Phoebe
would have shown up to vote.
-
(Laughter)
-
And you cannot blame them
because people are tired of politicians.
-
And people are tired of other people
using the data that they have generated
-
to communicate with
their friends and family,
-
to target political propaganda at them.
-
But the thing about this
is that this is not new.
-
Nowadays, people use likes
to target propaganda at you.
-
Before, they used your zip code
or your gender or your age
-
because the idea of targeting people
with propaganda for political purposes
-
is as old as politics.
-
And the reason why that idea is there
-
is because democracy
has a basic vulnerability.
-
This is the idea of a representative.
-
In principle, democracy is the ability
of people to exert power.
-
But in practice, we have to delegate
that power to a representative
-
that can exert that power for us.
-
That representative is a bottleneck,
-
or a weak spot.
-
It is the place that you want to target
if you want to attack democracy
-
because you can capture democracy
by either capturing that representative
-
or capturing the way
that people choose it.
-
So the big question is:
-
Is this the end of history?
-
Is this the best that we can do
-
or, actually, are there alternatives?
-
Some people have been thinking
about alternatives,
-
and one of the ideas that is out there
is the idea of direct democracy.
-
This is the idea of bypassing
politicians completely
-
and having people vote directly on issues,
-
having people vote directly on bills.
-
But this idea is naive
-
because there's too many things
that we would need to choose.
-
If you look at the 114th US Congress,
-
you will have seen that
the House of Representatives
-
considered more than 6,000 bills,
-
the Senate considered
more than 3,000 bills
-
and they approved more than 300 laws.
-
Those would be many decisions
-
that each person would have to make a week
-
on topics that they know little about.
-
So there's a big cognitive
bandwidth problem
-
if we're going to try to think about
direct democracy as a viable alternative.
-
So some people think about the idea
of liquid democracy, or fluid democracy,
-
which is the idea that you endorse
your political power to someone,
-
who can endorse it to someone else,
-
and, eventually, you create
a large follower network
-
in which, at the end, there's a few people
that are making decisions
-
on behalf of all of their followers
and their followers.
-
But this idea also doesn't solve
the problem of the cognitive bandwidth
-
and, to be honest, it's also quite similar
to the idea of having a representative.
-
So what I want to do today is
I'm going to be a little bit provocative
-
and I'm going to ask you, well:
-
What if, instead of trying
to bypass politicians,
-
we tried to automate them?
-
The idea of automation is not new.
-
It was started more than 300 years ago,
-
when French weavers decided
to automate the loom.
-
The winner of that industrial war
was Joseph-Marie Jacquard.
-
He was a French weaver and merchant
-
that married the loom
with the steam engine
-
to create autonomous looms,
-
and in those autonomous looms,
he gained control.
-
He could now make fabrics that were
more complex and more sophisticated
-
than the ones they
were able to do by hand.
-
But also, by winning that industrial war,
-
he laid out what has become
the blueprint of automation.
-
The way that we automate things
for the last 300 years
-
has always been the same:
-
we first identify a need,
-
then we create a tool
to satisfy that need,
-
like the loom, in this case,
-
and then we study how people use that tool
-
to automate that user.
-
That's how we came
from the mechanical loom
-
to the autonomous loom,
-
and that took us a thousand years.
-
Now, it's taken us only a hundred years
-
to use the same script
to automate the car.
-
But the thing is that, this time around,
-
automation is kind of for real.
-
This is a video that a colleague of mine
from Toshiba shared with me
-
that shows the factory
that manufactures solid state drives.
-
The entire factory is a robot.
-
There are no humans in that factory.
-
And the robots are soon
to leave the factories
-
and become part of our world,
-
become part of our workforce.
-
So what I do in my day job
-
is actually create tools that integrate
data for entire countries
-
so that we can ultimately have
the foundations that we need
-
for a future in which we need
to also manage those machines.
-
But today, I'm not here
to talk to you about these tools
-
that integrate data for countries.
-
But I'm here to talk to you
about another idea
-
that might help us think about how to use
artificial intelligence in democracy
-
because the tools that I build
are designed for executive decisions.
-
These are decisions that can be cast
in some sort of term of objectivity --
-
public investment decisions.
-
But there are decisions
that are legislative,
-
and these decisions that are legislative
require communication among people
-
that have different points of view,
-
require participation, require debate,
-
require deliberation.
-
And for a long time,
we have thought that, well,
-
what we need to improve democracy
is actually more communication.
-
So all of the technologies that we have
advanced in the context of democracy,
-
whether they are newspapers
or whether it is social media,
-
have tried to provide us
with more communication.
-
But we've been down that rabbit hole
-
and we know that's not
what's going to solve the problem
-
because it's not a communication problem,
-
it's a cognitive bandwidth problem.
-
So if the problem is one
of cognitive bandwidth,
-
well, adding more communication to people
-
is not going to be
what's going to solve it.
-
What we are going to need instead
is to have other technologies
-
that help us deal with
some of the communication
-
that we are overloaded with.
-
Think of, like, a little avatar,
-
a software agent,
-
a digital Jiminy Cricket --
-
(Laughter)
-
that basically is able
to answer things on your behalf.
-
And if we had that technology,
-
we would be able to offload
some of the communication
-
and help, maybe, make better decisions
or decisions at a larger scale.
-
And the thing is that the idea
of software agents is also not new.
-
We already use them all the time.
-
We use software agents
-
to choose the way that we're going
to drive to a certain location,
-
the music that we're going to listen to
-
or to get suggestions
for the next books that we should read.
-
So there is an obvious idea
in the 21st century
-
that was as obvious as the idea
-
of putting together a steam engine
with a loom at the time of Jacquard.
-
And that idea is combining
direct democracy with software agents.
-
Imagine, for a second, a world
-
in which, instead of having
a representative that represents you
-
and millions of other people,
-
you can have a representative
that represents only you,
-
with your nuanced political views --
-
that weird combination
of libertarian and liberal
-
and maybe a little bit
conservative on some issues
-
and maybe very progressive on others.
-
Politicians nowadays are packages,
and they're full of compromises.
-
But you might have someone
that can represent only you,
-
if you are willing to give up the idea
-
that that representative is a human.
-
If that representative
is a software agent,
-
we could have a senate that has
as many senators as we have citizens.
-
And those senators are going to be able
to read every bill
-
and they're going to be able
to vote on each one of them.
-
So there's an obvious idea
that maybe we want to consider.
-
But I understand that in this day and age,
-
this idea might be quite scary.
-
In fact, thinking of a robot
coming from the future
-
to help us run our governments
-
sounds terrifying.
-
But we've been there before.
-
(Laughter)
-
And actually he was quite a nice guy.
-
So what would the Jacquard loom
version of this idea look like?
-
It would be a very simple system.
-
Imagine a system that you log in
and you create your avatar,
-
and then you're going
to start training your avatar.
-
So you can provide your avatar
with your reading habits,
-
or connect it to your social media,
-
or you can connect it to other data,
-
for example by taking
psychological tests.
-
And the nice thing about this
is that there's no deception.
-
You are not providing data to communicate
with your friends and family
-
that then gets used in a political system.
-
You are providing data to a system
that is designed to be used
-
to make political decisions
on your behalf.
-
Then you take that data and you choose
a training algorithm,
-
because it's an open marketplace
-
in which different people
can submit different algorithms
-
to predict how you're going to vote,
based on the data you have provided.
-
And the system is open,
so nobody controls the algorithms;
-
there are algorithms
that become more popular
-
and others that become less popular.
-
Eventually, you can audit the system.
-
You can see how your avatar is working.
-
If you like it,
you can leave it on autopilot.
-
If you want to be
a little more controlling,
-
you can actually choose that they ask you
-
every time they're going
to make a decision,
-
or you can be anywhere in between.
-
One of the reasons
why we use democracy so little
-
may be because democracy
has a very bad user interface.
-
And if we improve the user
interface of democracy,
-
we might be able to use it more.
-
Of course, there's a lot of questions
that you might have.
-
Well, how do you train these avatars?
-
How do you keep the data secure?
-
How do you keep the systems
distributed and auditable?
-
How about my grandmother, 80 years old
and doesn't know how to use the internet?
-
Trust me, I've heard them all.
-
So when you think about an idea like this,
you have to beware of pessimists
-
because they are known to have
a problem for every solution.
-
(Laughter)
-
So I want to invite you to think
about the bigger ideas.
-
The questions I just showed you
are little ideas
-
because they are questions
about how this would not work.
-
The big ideas are ideas of:
-
What else can you do with this
-
if this would happen to work?
-
And one of those ideas is,
well, who writes the laws?
-
In the beginning, we could have
the avatars that we already have,
-
voting on laws that are written
by the senators or politicians
-
that we already have.
-
But if this were to work,
-
you could write an algorithm
-
that could try to write a law
-
that would get a certain
percentage of approval,
-
and you could reverse the process.
-
Now, you might think that this idea
is ludicrous and we should not do it,
-
but you cannot deny that it's an idea
that is only possible
-
in a world in which direct democracy
and software agents
-
are a viable form of participation.
-
So how do we start the revolution?
-
And we don't start this revolution
with picket fences or protests
-
or by demanding our current politicians
to be changed into robots.
-
That's not going to work.
-
This is much more simple,
-
much slower
-
and much more humble.
-
We start this revolution by creating
simple systems like this in grad schools,
-
in libraries, in nonprofits.
-
And we try to figure out
all of those little questions
-
and those little problems
-
that we're going to have to figure out
to make this idea something viable,
-
to make this idea something
that we can trust.
-
And as we create those systems that have
a hundred people, a thousand people,
-
a hundred thousand people voting
in ways that are not politically binding,
-
we're going to develop trust in this idea,
-
the world is going to change,
-
and those that are as little
as my daughter is right now
-
are going to grow up.
-
And by the time my daughter is my age,
-
maybe this idea, that I know
is today very crazy,
-
might not be crazy to her
and to her friends.
-
And at that point,
-
we will be at the end of our history,
-
but they will be
at the beginning of theirs.
-
Thank you.
-
(Applause)