Politics and AI

Let me start this by saying I am tremendously ignorant about politics and everything I say here is likely to change if I ever become more informed. That being said, I think I know the bare minimum to warrant an opinion about the future of politics.

It's hard to get an accurate view on what the state of politics actually looks like. Are political affairs as chaotic and emotional as we see them? Or is that what it is made to appear like due to polarizing media? For example, was there really any major threat between North Korea and the US? Or was this a very calculated game from the start being played by 2 very rational players? I'm going to assume that the answer lies somewhere in between; democracies can be somewhat chaotic, prone to populism and indecisive about long term issues.

If this is the case, then I think we should be a bit worried. I think the tango between traditional politics and technology is a dangerous one. Our advanced military capability and our economic dependence on oil and the internet has created a very unstable peak in prosperity. Several hundred years ago, if a king made a horrible decision, an empire would fall, thousands would die and some knowledge would be lost. Now, if a horrible decision is made by the United States, the whole world will crumble due to how interconnected we all are.

Now I know what you're saying. The president isn't a dictatorship; his views are checked and counter balanced by other members of his party. Surely it would take a miracle for everyone involved to make a horrible decision like this. I actually think this isn't true, I think that due to the stunning complexity of today's interconnected world, it has become remarkably difficult to predict the long term consequences of any action. I also think humans are very prone to biases and logical fallacies that can make it hard to think rationally about heated political issues.

Let me be clear about what I'm not saying. I'm not saying we can expect a 'butterfly event' (a mathematical description of chaos; where the flapping of a butterflies wings in Texas can cause a hurricane in Japan). I'm not saying that due to the super complexity of the world, adding one more immigrant into the US will be the cause of world peace or world destruction. I'm saying there are big political decisions that will be made in the future, and it'll be increasingly hard for human politicians to tell what the optimum decision should be.

This is where AI comes in. At the moment AI is in it's early stages, but it's only an amount of time until it gets developed enough to pattern seek far better than we can. I think a gradual, controlled phase-in of AI to help predict the long and short term consequences of political decisions could be a necessary next step for humanity. I think if it's done right, and we define our values in the right way, then we don't need to worry about a 1984 like scenario.

I suspect some time in the next 100 years, humanity will be pressing against an upper limit of human ingenuity and foresight. I think for the sake of progress, we will need to do away with revamped political structures, no matter how much we currently currently cherish them, and start building our benevolent babysitter.