Brexit, the rise of Donald Trump, the concerning popularity of far-right leaders in parts of Europe – it’s enough to make one question democracy.
Sure, each of these developments are in their own ways reflective of the will of their respective peoples, but do the voters behind them actually know what’s good for them? In each case, many experts and members of the intelligentsia are aghast at the sudden and apparent evaporation of the public’s good sense and long-term thinking capabilities.
So, in an age where algorithms are trading stocks, running traffic grids, deciding who gets loans and making just about every other major decision that humans used to, it’s fair to ask whether it has to be this way.
Could we not let computers – rational machines untouched by base emotions and easily manipulated desires – pick our leaders for us? Think about it: rather than visiting the apocalypse on us, as depicted in so many dystopian science-fiction films, perhaps robots can save us from our next self-inflicted disaster.
Imagining how such a system might work is not difficult. It could be a lot like online dating, with a touch of video-game-like simulation and sports statistics mixed in.
Candidates for a given office would create profiles listing their qualifications, platforms and promises. Algorithms could then weigh their experience, calculate the odds of promises succeeding, sniff out untruths versus truths – and add all those results together into one final score.
The winner – a new president, prime minister or leader who would be rational, truthful and likely to achieve positive, society-benefiting results. Wouldn’t that be a better outcome than President Trump?
It’s a nice fantasy but as anyone attuned to political history or technology can attest to, reality is unfortunately not as simple.
Mark Brown, a professor at the department of government at California State University in Sacremento, sums it up succinctly: “Using algorithms for making major policy decisions like the Brexit vote sounds to me like yet another version of the ancient and futile yearning to escape politics.”
Algorithms can be useful tools, even in elections, but they’re not as free from bias as we’d like to believe. They still have to be programmed by humans, who can ultimately inject their own leanings and opinions.
“Such design decisions would be challenged by anyone who disagrees with the outcome, leading right back to the same political conflicts the algorithm was meant to avoid,” Mr Brown rightly says.
That doesn’t mean algorithms have no role to play in the democratic process, either in the short term or the long term.
An intermediate step towards computers picking leaders would be to first have them evaluate politicians – and it’s already happening.
In 2014, the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto launched the Majlis Monitor, or what’s billed as the first comprehensive attempt to monitor the performance of parliamentarians in Iran.
The platform, in Farsi, keeps track of bills that elected officials have signed and supported, their speeches, media interviews and announcements on current issues. The monitor does not yet calculate overall scores but the idea is to provide voters with comprehensive profiles of the individuals who are trying to muster their votes, warts and all.
“There are all sorts of ways that data could be leading us to better government,” says Peter Loewen, the director of the University of Toronto’s school of public policy and governance. “Inserting good data into all those decision points could arguably improve democracy.”
There’s no reason to expect that algorithms won’t continue their intrusion into and influence on politics, to the point where they may indeed some day pick our leaders for us. The more realistic question in that case might be not if it will happen, but when.
“There may be a paradigm shift where we find a new way of thinking about things and that will allow us to move beyond humans choosing,” Mr Loewen says. “But I don’t know that we have anything better yet.”
Peter Nowak is a veteran technology writer and the author of Humans 3.0: The Upgrading of the Species.
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