TRASHFUTURE - The MIT Media Lab Automates the Democratic Party

Episode Date: September 27, 2019

That's right, folks! It's a preview the promised second episode in which we discuss the highlights of IT Media Lab's cursed SkyMall. You'll get to hear Riley, Milo, Nate, and Alice take on the true hell world of the Epstein-funded MIT Media Lab creations. If you'd like to hear the whole thing, get the episode on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/30213119 If you want to buy one of our recent special-edition phone-cops shirt, shoot us an email at trashfuturepodcast[at]gmail[dot]com and we can post it to you. (£20 for non-patrons, £15 for patrons) Do you want a mug to hold your soup? Perhaps you want one with the Trashfuture logo, which is available here: https://teespring.com/what-if-phone-cops#pid=659&cid=102968&sid=front

So those are the products and their hat do we want to talk about some of their big ideas because I've got three of them and they're very big because these are bigger. Those are small ideas. I have some big ideas now. Some big ass ideas. This is going to be good cloud ship content I can sell. Some really dummy thick ideas. Some dumb, some dummy thick ideas. Here's the first dummy thick idea. Just jiggle in on over here. Augmented democracy. I never asked for this. This is a very special Russian idea. In the last presidential election in the US, voter turnout hovered around 67%. Oh, no, it actually is this. Oh, I'm afraid it is.

The European Union's elections just saw 42% and NYC's last mayoral election, just 24% of residents cast a ballot. Our collective participation in the project of democracy is quite a bit less than ideal. This issue says Cesar Hidalgo, director of the collective learning group at MIT Media Lab and member of the court of Monte Cristo, indeed, has said during his TED Talk in 2018 in Vancouver, the main problem is that, quote, democracy has a bad user interface. What even is the user interface of democracy? That's why I'm saying, what is the angular momentum of cheese? It doesn't make any sense. Folding up a little bit of paper and putting

it in a little box is not very satisfying. That's why people don't vote. You don't get enough pens that you can steal at the voting booths or you have to use a machine, but they don't use the ones with the big clicky lever anymore. If only there was some kind of hat that could tell them how to vote. Well, here's the Milo, you've done the thing again. Oh, no. Is this also a Harry Potter prop? The only thing is, it's not actually a hat. It's a robot, Professor McGonagall, who explains politics to you. It is a robot. It's a robot. Oh, fucking hell. So, Caesar Hidalgo says, the problem is that we elect and rely on politicians to aggregate the

views and needs of their constituents. Caesar Hidalgo, one of the later Roman emperors. A real post-Germanic emperor. We elect and rely on politicians to aggregate the views and needs of their constituents. But politicians, Hidalgo says, are inefficient packages filled with compromises. Give up your flesh and a new world awaits you. He's better than Doug Ford, but also he's worn blackface. Essentially, they fail to account adequately for the particular needs of their individual constituents. The solution? Every voter is connected to an individualized AI that collects information on our needs, views, and politics by the data we feed into social platforms and searches.

Oh, no. Oh, I can't see this being used for anything bad. Yeah, it's going to scrape my tweets. A complete register of everything you think about politics. Every thought that you have is sent to the government, and this is supposed to help you. And it's not going to have any concept of irony. It's going to learn from Twitter, and the AI is going to be like, well, policymakers, a surprising number of people believe that piss is stored in the balls. Well, this is accused me of being constantly kissing over here, but I'm pretty sure this is a George Orwell 1984. It's also literally one of the endings of Deus Ex. Like, but it's also literally what Steven Pinker used as his evidence that racism

was going down. Everyone's Googling Frank Sinatra better restart slavery. This is literally, you know, I love a government of like fav star. Yeah. So here's what he says. This this in the this AI, which will be matched to you for your entire life, of course, of course, would essentially work as a political Spotify. Oh, fuck me. You'll discover daily, and it's all just like fucking Tommy Robinson. YouTube is just a discovery algorithm for becoming a white supremacist. Hey, yesterday, you briefly had a thought that there's a few more black people around. You might be interested in the musical stylings of Tommy Robinson and the EDL.

That's the thing. We already know what happens when you just have a politics Spotify and it's YouTube. But that's what they say. It doesn't even recommend things that it thinks you might be interested in. It's like, well, I've made no effort to work out where you're interested in. Therefore, I assume you'd like these videos about racism. Algorithms, algorithms, he says, are already very capable of recognizing patterns in our behavior and preferences. And this digital AI agent would read our data in such a way that it would be able to directly vote on issues on our behalf, rendering our participation in democracy non-essential. Holy fucking shit. Did he even read that? Did he even actually read it as he was writing it?

Like, did he just turn away from the computer and just slap at the keyboard with his big, meaty palms? Is that what happened? Is that how that sentence was produced? Because you can't read that sentence without being like, that is fucking insane. No, it's fine. We just put the autopilot on democracy. Yeah. Oh my god. It's a Tesla autopilot and it'll only kill everyone it thinks is a baller. Wait, it's like literally voluntarily being like, no, we're too dumb to govern ourselves. Let's allow the machines to govern us. Well, yeah, also because we're all Ray Pantelliano. It also, it's, is it Ray? Oh, no, it's not, is it? Joe, Joe, we're all Joe Pantelliano in

the matrix. We're all Cypher. We want to go voluntarily into the matrix because we were happier then. Yeah, this is how these fucking stem lords view what politics is where it's just an issue of aggregating and sorting the preferences of every constituent generally. There's no preference say that could be influenced by anything. No, no, it's just all of these preferences emerge whole cloth just from whatever. And then the job of politicians is to make sure that they all get sorted. What's really funny to me is that liberal politicians actually live up to this sometimes. Like you say that this is like the idea that politics works on, oh, we just watch the voters and then do what they want us to do. Marriage equality. It was hilarious

watching every liberal politician in America watch the graph go up and when it hit 57% in favor, suddenly is in favor of marriage equality. So you can live up to this. So we have AI politicians. It's just the Democratic Party. Essentially, yes. It's fewer steps. Like the Nancy Pelosi bot would probably aggravate me less. Oh, so she's already been automated. The politics already has been automated. It's the Democratic Party. You lose your job at the politics factory because they replace you with a big robot arm. Mr. Clinton, I'm afraid to inform you that we have just discovered that 57% of people in America are now in favor of furries. But what are those? Oh, I can explain

that for you. Also, I just, I really, I really, there is a sort of sense of poetic justice to think of like Nancy Pelosi becoming like a fentanyl family because she lost her job at the politics factory. Nancy Pelosi. Yeah, she got fired because of racism against Italians. Well, it's that, it's that she, no, her job got automated. There's now an AI agent that does this. Have a program to like retrain politicians out of their harmful industries and into things like coding. Okay, so I was just going to say this is just as a side note, but there was recently a kind of a ferrari about defense intellectual policy with regard to like nuclear deterrence because somebody two academics published a policy paper saying that a dead hand for like

nuclear strike like mutually assured destruction powered by AI that can just use the algorithms to determine whether or not to launch a world ending nuclear strike might be a good thing. So this is a powerful brain warm that a lot of people in the sort of like what you might call a sort of liberal center, center left, center right have. I don't know why, but they're convinced that like, I love how we're doing a dumber version of the Cold War where there isn't even an enemy, like the enemy is just yourself. We're just building Skynet. Yeah, we're building Skynet, but we're playing Cold War Solitaire.