I can’t tell if this post is serious or not, and this is the mark of bad satire.

Despite an ambitious and widely praised first term in office, he is currently trailing in polls to a man who incited an insurrection and was recently convicted on 34 felony counts. Something needs to change, and much to the chagrin of West Wing fanatics in the beltway, it won’t be the Democrats’ 2024 nominee. Modern technology offers a clear solution. AI can be used to polish how the president comes across, allowing voters to focus on his substance. How many times have we heard voters and pundits alike gripe that “Biden would be the perfect candidate if he were just 10 years younger?” With modern technology, this exact deliverable is possible.

huffpost.com

I sincerely hope this is intended as irony. I have thought however about an AI-based experiment in direct democracy. In this concept, an AI agent would represent me, the individual citizen. It could spend time patiently interviewing me about my views and opinions, and then it could go to Congress and negotiate and vote on legislation with the AI agents of the 328 million other Americans. If I really have time, I could take over control of the agent at any time I want, then hand the keys back over to it any time I want.

A watered down version of this could be AI constantly talking to an elected representatives constituents about their views on various issues and the content of proposed legislation, patiently explaining to the elected representative how his or her actual constituents would like him or her to vote (the pronoun thing is exhausting, and yes I know I have only scratched the surface of potential pronouns), and patiently explaining to the constituents how it all turned out. Imagine if a politician made it a campaign pledge to always vote according to the wishes of a majority of their constituents (as interpreted through the AI agents) no matter what.

I thought of this a long time ago, with the idea that it could be done through polls or through an app, but the natural language AIs could make this much more practical and achievable by just chatting with humans for a few minutes each day and providing constant feedback.

Now, of course the problem with direct democracy is always that 51% of the people might want to exterminate or enslave the other 49%, which is one way to achieve consensus but not what we are looking for. So you obviously have to couple this with protections for the rights of minorities and human rights in general.