The political class does not go through its best moments. Greater media exposure forces them to launch increasingly hollow speeches, demagogic promises and other herbs of the wooden tongue. In other words, political rhetoric is being simplified because there is more and more democracy, not less, and the political class seems more and more made up of gangsters .
For all this, perhaps, the results of a recent survey on the feasibility of replacing politicians with artificial intelligence should not surprise us.
66% of Spaniards in favor
The survey, carried out by researchers from the IE Center for the Governance of Change, indicates that the majority of people would support the replacement of the members of their respective parliaments by artificial intelligence systems. The researchers interviewed 2,769 Europeans representing different demographic groups . The questions ranged from whether they would prefer to vote via smartphone to whether they would replace existing politicians with algorithms if such a possibility existed. According to the survey:
51% of Europeans support reducing the number of national parliamentarians and allocating those seats to an algorithm. More than 60% of Europeans aged 25-34 and 56% of those aged 34-44 are enthusiastic about this idea.
The study also found that the idea was particularly popular in Spain, where 66% of the people surveyed supported it . Elsewhere, 59% of respondents in Italy were in favor and 56% of people in Estonia. In the UK, 69% of those surveyed were against the idea, while 56% were against it in the Netherlands and 54% in Germany. Outside of Europe, around 75% of respondents in China supported the idea of replacing MPs with AI, while 60% of American respondents opposed.
The problem is that AI is inherently biased , too. Any system designed to bring out data-driven insights that is applied to people will automatically have bias built into its core. The question would be to determine if an algorithmic bias is better than the demagoguery of some politicians . At least, artificial intelligence is capable of identifying some of our biases, even some very subtle ones, to the point that our face can be correlated with our political orientation: