César A. Hidalgo is a Chilean physicist, author, and entrepreneur. He is an Associate Professor at MIT and the director of the Collective Learning group at The MIT Media Lab.
In this provocative talk, César outlines a bold idea to bypass politicians by empowering citizens to create personalized AI representatives that participate directly in democratic decisions.
César A. Hidalgo – TED Talk TRANSCRIPT
Is it just me, or are there other people here that are a little bit disappointed with democracy?
So let’s look at a few numbers. If we look across the world, the median turnout in presidential elections over the last 30 years has been just 67%.
Now, if we go to Europe and we look at people that participated in EU parliamentary elections, the median turnout in those elections is just 42%.
Now let’s go to New York, and let’s see how many people voted in the last election for mayor. We will find that only 24% of people showed up to vote. What that means is that, if “Friends” was still running, Joey and maybe Phoebe would have shown up to vote. And you cannot blame them because people are tired of politicians.
And people are tired of other people using the data that they have generated to communicate with their friends and family, to target political propaganda at them. But the thing about this is that this is not new.
Nowadays, people use likes to target propaganda at you before they use your zip code or your gender or your age, because the idea of targeting people with propaganda for political purposes is as old as politics. And the reason why that idea is there is because democracy has a basic vulnerability. This is the idea of a representative.
In principle, democracy is the ability of people to exert power. But in practice, we have to delegate that power to a representative that can exert that power for us. That representative is a bottleneck, or a weak spot. It is the place that you want to target if you want to attack democracy because you can capture democracy by either capturing that representative or capturing the way that people choose it.
So the big question is: Is this the end of history? Is this the best that we can do or, actually, are there alternatives?
Some people have been thinking about alternatives, and one of the ideas that is out there is the idea of direct democracy. This is the idea of bypassing politicians completely and having people vote directly on issues, having people vote directly on bills.
But this idea is naive because there’s too many things that we would need to choose. If you look at the 114th US Congress, you will have seen that the House of Representatives considered more than 6,000 bills, the Senate considered more than 3,000 bills and they approved more than 300 laws. Those would be many decisions that each person would have to make a week on topics that they know little about.
So there’s a big cognitive bandwidth problem if we’re going to try to think about direct democracy as a viable alternative. So some people think about the idea of liquid democracy, or fluid democracy, which is the idea that you endorse your political power to someone, who can endorse it to someone else, and, eventually, you create a large follower network in which, at the end, there’s a few people that are making decisions on behalf of all of their followers and their followers.
But this idea also doesn’t solve the problem of the cognitive bandwidth and, to be honest, it’s also quite similar to the idea of having a representative.
So what I’m going to do today is I’m going to be a little bit provocative, and I’m going to ask you, well: What if, instead of trying to bypass politicians, we tried to automate them? The idea of automation is not new. It was started more than 300 years ago, when French weavers decided to automate the loom.