(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Kitchen Table Kibitzing 8/12/23: When AI makes voting obsolete [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-08-12 It’s Election Day, 2032. And you don’t even have to get out of bed. Because there’s no more pesky voting! At 11:00 pm Eastern, after all the (former) polls have closed (Okay, not Alaska and Hawaii, but we’ll already have a good idea how they’ll go), AI will announce the winner of 2032 election. It’s time to see whether all the hard work, canvassing, messaging, TV ads, social media memes, have paid off! But this time you didn’t have to trudge down to the high school or church basement and wait in line, or even fill out a ballot and mail it in. I mean, that’s a lot of work, and who really enjoyed that anyway? There are no lines because there are no voters. No more disputes about alleged “fraud,” no more interminable recounts and lawsuits. The actual act of voting is a thing of the past, a dim memory, a vestige of unhappier times. It's been this way ever since someone slipped that provision into the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 2029. You know, that one that nobody read? Well, OK, it was a little long and there was that hilarious cat video being passed around on YouTube and TikTok at the time, taking up everyone's attention. The weird thing, though, is that even today, no one knows who wrote the AI election provision into the Act! So many drafts bouncing back and forth between laptops, even AI itself claims it has absolutely no clue how it got in there. Anyway… the following may get a little technical, but bear with me. Right up to the very second when the 2032 “polls” close, in every Congressional District, every state and every town, AI will have predicted with 99.999376 % accuracy who “won” the presidency, who won each Congressional race, and each local race for every conceivable office, right down to your local Register of Wills and county council. Following the law enacted in 2029, every candidate for any office, national, state or local, has “opted in” to a mandatory consent form allowing AI to calculate and assess his/her electoral chances and projected outcome based on a massive cornucopia of election-related data, thus obviating the need for any voter's physical presence at the polls or any actual effort to cast a vote, be it mail-in, early voting or otherwise (Once one candidate opted in, everyone understandably jumped on the bandwagon; no sense pissing off your constituents by forcing them to vote when no one else is, right?). So, sit back and relax! AI has reviewed every national and local published and internal poll, reviewed past voting patterns for the last twenty years (allowing for voters who statistically may have passed away or sustained debilitating injuries making them unable to physically vote). It’s also accounted for past polling discrepancies and errors by determining (again, based on past data), each poll’s methodology and error rate, its sample size and demographic makeup, its wording, and how many and what kind of voters will not tell the truth in response to such polls, which ones and how many will “shade” the truth, and which ones will Hey, former voters! AI has got your number! actually vote the way they said they would in the poll. It’s assessed the influence of social media based on a complex algorithm analyzing page hits, actual and probable usage of social media and a long list of voter demographics, including age, sex, race, prior voting history, and political persuasion, all weighed against prior (pre-programmed) analyses of social media persuasiveness with each respective voting demographic, and the percentage of likely voters by population, in every congressional and state district. It’s analyzed up-to-the minute weather patterns which (historically speaking, based on prior data) have influenced whether people will or will not vote on Election Day, for every square inch of the United States. It’s also considered the statistical patterns of early and mail-in voting demographics and outcomes with pinpoint accuracy, based on similar data, in order to obviate those obsolete voting methods. It’s analyzed the number, length and persuasive content of every TV and social media ad, its target audience and their susceptibility to persuasion based on a trove of psychological data and determined, again with irrefutable accuracy, the real-world (i.e., voting) impact and persuasiveness of such advertising on a complex, sliding scale. It’s analyzed every nuance of these ads, their frequency, placement, forum, and timing relative to Election Day itself, with a view toward predicting how many voters will be influenced by them and whether/how they’ll subsequently vote. AI has sifted through reams of pre-programmed socio-economic, age, racial and sexual orientation data (again, in every region, up to the minute that the “polls” open and until they close), which historically has impacted people’s decision to and willingness to vote, and their political persuasion. It’s analyzed each candidate’s personality traits, positive and negative, to determine voters’ responsiveness to such “intangibles” as likeability, charisma, and trust, with a pre-programmed psychological analysis algorithm. It’s determined in painstaking detail the statistical appeal of each candidate’s public positions, their refutations or contrasting positions, and compared them to their past records to predict whether voters actually trust what they say, again, factoring in traits of susceptibility to such messaging based on age, race, sex, and level of education. AI has also taken into account each candidate’s campaign apparatus, its number of field workers and extent of their GOTV efforts, phone calls, canvassing, analyzing them with respect to past effectiveness and probable outcome data, and factoring in key economic data such as each campaign’s financial “war chest” (Under the terms of the 2029 law, any significant errors or misrepresentation in providing this data to the AI algorithm will result in immediate disqualification from the election). It’s also allowed for statistically significant (and even insignificant) intervening factors that might impact voter preference and actual voter action on Election Day such as personal economic travails, domestic disputes, fear, anger, intoxication, traffic patterns, illicit sexual trysts and other “unpredictable” factors. Given the paltry task of accurately predicting U.S. election outcomes (compared to what it is actually capable of) all of the above analysis took AI approximately fifteen milliseconds. To correct for any conceivable error, the process was repeated approximately 15 million times on Election Day itself, at regular intervals, factoring in predicted and already “counted” voter turnout (again based on past data for weather, time of day, etc.). Ted Lechterman, writing for PublicEthics.org, explained all this for us a decade ago, back in 2021: [A] more extreme proposal is to replace democratic processes entirely with sophisticated algorithms, resulting in an alternative political regime that we might call algocracy. (I borrow the term from John Danaher, who uses it slightly differently.) Different visions of algocracy, both utopian and dystopian, appear in books by Hiroki Azuma, Yuval Noah Harari, and Jamie Susskind. The basic idea is that an algorithm would sift through the vast troves of data that we create throughout our daily lives—the traffic patterns tracked by our personal devices, the purchase decisions we make online, our search and social media activity, and so on. It would use these data to infer citizens’ preferences about political questions and aggregate these preferences to impute a “general will” to the population in question. In addition to analyzing citizens’ political preferences, the algorithm would simultaneously be crunching all the available data on economic, social, and environmental indicators to form beliefs about the world...[.] [***] Developments in artificial intelligence will increasingly confront us with ways of altering or revolutionizing political decision-making. What is clear, at least, is that we can’t make well-reasoned choices about these opportunities without deeper reflection on the values at stake, and philosophical literature on these questions can be a helpful guide. To serve this purpose, however, philosophers will need to grapple seriously with the possibilities that new technologies create. To be honest, i can't give you the exact date when that "deeper reflection" about AI technology actually occurred. But I know it did! Anyway, back to our 2032 Election. It’s now 10:59 pm EST. Americans are now literally and figuratively on the edge of their seats, in front of their TV’s, gazing into their phones, all awaiting the very last poll closure time, when AI will announce the winners and losers. Everything up to this point has been simply prelude up to this moment. For the privilege of participating in the election, all candidates are required to accept AI’s decisions (as administered and tabulated by the somewhat opaque but wholly “bipartisan” organization known as the “AI Board” which, by the way, will never share your information) as to who won. And just to be safe, federal law enforcement and local police departments are all on alert to deal with any disturbances or celebrations that may get out of hand. So don’t worry: Your vote will still “count.” AI has taken care of everything. “And the winners are…” [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/12/2186136/-Kitchen-Table-Kibitzing-8-12-23-When-AI-makes-voting-obsolete Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/