[HN Gopher] A Danish political party led by an AI
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       A Danish political party led by an AI
        
       Author : bubblehack3r
       Score  : 42 points
       Date   : 2022-10-16 18:26 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.vice.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.vice.com)
        
       | RobotToaster wrote:
       | I for one welcome our new robot overlords democratically elected
       | politicians.
        
         | cloudking wrote:
         | Smart comment for when it's parsed later to determine your
         | alignment :)
        
           | kthejoker2 wrote:
           | His username suggests he might be doing the determining :)
        
       | hunglee2 wrote:
       | logical conclusion will be to skip political representation and
       | go directly to policy. Interesting experiment, look forward to
       | seeing more, as we definitely need to upgrade our political O/S
        
         | mtgx wrote:
        
         | parminya wrote:
         | If you skip representation, you don't know what you're
         | optimising for. If you include representation, then you will
         | not exclude groups you didn't know existed in the process (or
         | even groups who are generated by AI's policy development
         | process). Skipping representation would be an awful,
         | authoritarian distopia.
        
       | kbob wrote:
       | Ah, to be in a stable democracy where political campaigns can be
       | whimsical!
       | 
       | 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.
        
         | hypertele-Xii wrote:
         | Well they have only 11 of the required 20_000 signatures to be
         | an eligible voting target in elections, so this new party isn't
         | even part of the political process yet.
        
       | cpeterso wrote:
       | This reminds of "liquid democracy": voters can delegate their
       | votes (including fractional votes) to other people
       | (representatives, friends, caregivers, etc), organizations, or,
       | in this case, an AI. I'd say most voters already do this,
       | referencing voter guides from their preferred political
       | organizations or local newspapers.
       | 
       | 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.
        
         | alexvoda wrote:
         | How is the last example different from an incumbents paradise?
         | To me it looks like a road to autocracy.
         | 
         | 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.
        
       | Taniwha wrote:
       | We all know how this ends: put your AI on to the internet and it
       | becomes a nazi
        
         | antegamisou wrote:
         | Can't tell if this is tongue-in-cheek, but a few years back an
         | AI bot by Microsoft ended up spewing racist replies after a
         | while online!
         | 
         | https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35902104
        
           | Mockapapella wrote:
           | This pops up every few years and I always leave frustrated by
           | a lot of the discussion around it. Tay had a feature where it
           | would repeat things that were tweeted at it/sent in a DM
           | (can't remember which, but that feature was 100% present),
           | 4chan users caught whiff of this, and if I remember correctly
           | that is where a lot of the overt "holocaust-denying racist"
           | comments came from.
           | 
           | 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.
        
             | roywiggins wrote:
             | GPT-3 is susceptible to a variant of this. User input that
             | masquerades as instructions will get it to parrot you.
             | 
             | https://simonwillison.net/2022/Sep/12/prompt-injection/
        
           | Taniwha wrote:
           | exactly
        
       | ohiovr wrote:
       | The image of the beast will be AI.
        
         | thedorkknight wrote:
         | The "Beast" was Nero. Like that was actually his nickname. It
         | adds up to 666 in gematria, which John of Patmos was using. The
         | image of the beast was literally his image on Roman coins,
         | which was the only legal currency, so they needed it to buy and
         | sell. Also, branding of slaves was sometimes done on their
         | hands.
         | 
         | 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
        
         | more_corn wrote:
         | I could have sworn you said "best". One of the images sci-fi
         | authors hold of AI is an intelligence you can direct to be
         | fair. "Design a housing policy so it's fair to the highest
         | number of people"
         | 
         | 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.
        
         | yrgulation wrote:
         | Gotta fix all them bugs first.
        
       | ginko wrote:
       | What is the political process/oversight on updates and upgrades
       | to the algorithm?
        
         | Genbox wrote:
         | What is the process/oversight on changes in human politicians?
        
       | noduerme wrote:
       | It won't end well if Leader Lars is stolen by the Pirate Party
       | next door...
        
         | teddyh wrote:
         | Digital pirates don't steal, they _copy_.
        
       | pstuart wrote:
       | It would be interesting to pair this with the legal code being an
       | annotated spec.
       | 
       | Every regulation could have annotated associated/assumed costs
       | and benefits, with links to measurement of outcomes.
        
       | greenbit wrote:
       | Wasn't this an episode of Black Mirror?
        
         | anonporridge wrote:
         | My read of that episode is more about the non human nature of
         | public figures.
         | 
         | 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/
        
           | guerrilla wrote:
           | > 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.
           | 
           | There's a word for that: actors.
        
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       (page generated 2022-10-16 23:00 UTC)