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If you’re like me, you’re pretty damn tired of all the breathless AI talk.
AI’s going to supercharge the economy! No, it’s going to destroy all our jobs! AI will endow us with enhanced intelligence and mind-melded cognitive powers!! No, it’s pulping our brains and killing our ability to think!!1 AI will design medicines that make us live forever!!! No, it’s going to turn on us like Skynet and eventually machines are going to shoot lasers at the last few human survivors from atop a pile of skulls!!!
So I admit, when I agreed to host an expert guest on my podcast to talk about the effect of AI on politics and government, I had…hesitations. I needn’t have worried.
What I was treated to in my discussion with cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier (his new book about this goes on sale on Tuesday, October 21) was a 45 minute tour through not just a fascinating, educated forecast of what could happen, but some astounding examples of what is happening right now. You can watch the video embedded above, or watch/listen to the pod version via this link:
By way of preview: we cover everything in the following list, and a lot more. And as a fun game, some of these things are actually current reality—see if you can guess which:
What if candidates replaced their traditional campaigns and just had voters talk to their authorized AI avatars?
Or what if they ran on a platform of doing what an AI told them was the best thing to do?
How about if instead of deciding on candidates to vote for, we let an AI tell us who best fit our preferences…
Or just let the AI vote…
Or just ran AI candidates in elections…
Or just let the AI interview voters and then make the government decisions?
What if candidates replaced the usual fundraising, polling, and media with AI: AI outreach to donors, AI decisions on voter preferences, AI advertising on platforms optimized by…AI?
What would happen if AI-driven video, photos, and articles became so good they were indistinguishable from real video, photos, and human reporting?
Could AI-moderated assemblies actually get us to compromise decisions that the exhausted majority liked, rather than having everything driven by the polarized extremes?
Or could AI-generated information make decisions—and representative democracy—almost impossible?
I went into this conversation as a determined skeptic about the role of technology in politics—and you’ll hear that. But I came out a lot more unsure, seeing equal parts promise and peril. Or perhaps, that the potential that is beginning to unfold today could truly go either way, and that the decisions we make in the next couple of years about how we regulate and use this technology to govern ourselves will be absolutely essential for the future of American democracy.
Accccctually…there’s some scientific evidence for this one, and I’m working on a longform article about it right now
