Will Robots Want to Vote?
Originally posted to Medium on May 20, 2016, this piece was adapted from my remarks delivered at the 23rd Annual Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship Awards Dinner held at the National Press Club on Wednesday, May 11, 2016. My project investigated the potential impact of artificial intelligence on democracy and its ability to influence elections. I will be posting over the next few days a summary of my work, as well as the work itself in its enterity as a series. Given the state of affairs, I wanted to publish this to the blockchain.
If you liked this post, please consider sharing, commenting, and upvoting. Thank you in advance for reading,
- Josh
Hello, everyone. For those of you who haven’t met me yet, I’m Josh, and this year I will be writing about how the robots may or may not be coming to kill us all.
And so before I briefly get into that, I just want to say a quick thank you to The Fund for American Studies for this opportunity. I’ve been working toward this fellowship since I first began my journalism career in DC over five years ago, and I am quite excited for the privilege to join the company of some of the best journalists on the planet, many of whom are here in this room tonight.
Bar room jokes about robot uprisings aside, humanity’s storytellers have pondered the question of machines imbued with the human spirit ever since the time of the Ancient Greeks. But what was once relegated to the realm of the fantastical is now becoming science fact.
Currently, human civilization is on the bleeding edge of what many to be a seismic shift not seen since the agricultural revolution allowed us to abandon the necessity of our hunter gather origins.
Major tech companies such Google and Facebook, which have already, some would say, fundamentally transformed our society, are investing in artificial intelligence technologies, and policy makers are seriously considering the potential impact thinking machines will have on the future of work.
As stewards of the great American experiment of self-governance under the rule of law, it would be a mistake to not also consider their power to influence the outcome of elections as well.
I believe we need to consider how these emerging technologies will impact the future of democracy. Do I believe that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s robot assassin doppelgänger is going to be kick down our door? No, not necessarily.
But I do wonder how the minimum wage worker who loses their fast-food job to a self-service kiosk will vote. And I wonder about the decisions of the machines who serve up my search results and newsfeed items, and I wonder about the humans who program them.
And so these are the things that I will be looking into over the next year. Because in reality, as we look to create these machines in our image, it is important to consider what kind of image we want staring back at us.
Thank you.
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Interesting. Thanks for sharing!
Thank you for reading.
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great job.
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