When you think of the name Steve who do you think of? Steve Jobs? Steve Carrell? Stone Cold Steve Austin? Sandwich eating Steve from Full House?
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Well, in the future you could be thinking of an AI politician in the UK.
According to Wired, “AI Steve, an avatar of real-life Steven Endacott, a Brighton-based businessman, is running for Parliament as an Independent.”
Now, this isn’t the first time this has happened. That an AI entity has tried to run for office. It’s happened before in a mayorial race in Japan with Michihito Matsuda and even with an enitre Danish political party. And it’s an idea I’ve had since 2015. But has the time finally come for an AI politican to win an election? AI Steve will look to become the first.
Wired explains:
“AI Steve was designed by Neural Voice, an AI voice company of which Endacott is the chair. According to Jeremy Smith, the company’s cofounder, AI Steve can have up to 10,000 conversations at once. ‘A key element is creating your own database of information,’ says Smith. ‘And how to inject customer data into it.’
The idea for AI Steve came from Endacott’s own frustration with trying to enter politics in order to advocate for issues he cared about. ‘I’m very concerned about the environment. We need a lot of change in government to actually help control climate change,’ he says. ‘The only way to do that is to stop talking to the outside and get inside the tent and start actually changing policy.’ When Endacott attempted to stand for office in years past, he said he felt like it was all about party jockeying and worrying about which seats or districts were “safe” rather than responding to the needs of real people.
AI Steve, he claims, will be different. AI Steve will transcribe and analyze conversations it has with voters and put issues of policy forward to ‘validators,’ or regular people who can indicate whether they care about an issue or want to see a certain policy enacted.”
Personally, I would be willing to hand the keys to the city over to an AI to make our decisions for us. Clearly, we’re not doing much better on our own and our current political system is polarizing and divisive. At the very least we could be using AI to parse through vast quantities of data about our electorates and find out what people really want like AI Steve plans to do. Being able to carry on hundreds of conversations with concerned citizens as the same time could be very useful as well.
Now, I get that some people won’t want to vote for an AI. After all, AI has its own trust issues. Just ask Elon Musk. Wait a second. Come to think of it that actually makes AI perfectly suited for politics. It’ll fit right in.
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Is AI Steve the Greatest Idea Ever?
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