AI Steve for PARLIMENT?
Stephen Endacott, a UK parliamentary candidate for the Green Party (UK), is running to become the first-ever AI lawmaker to participate in debates and give live answers as an interactive avatar.
The result marks the world’s first AI representative being elected as a parliament member for the UK, who is represented by an interactive AI Avatar. Alice – a candidate in the race, or rather an AI program built to interact with voters and answer their questions on-the-fly.
Alice is fighting the following by-election in West Yorkshire as an independent candidate. The AI program was created by local tech entrepreneurs who believe more responsiveness and efficiency are possible with a little help from artificial intelligence.
The AI mascot avatar is equipped to communicate with the voters across multiple digital platforms like social media, website and virtual town hall meetings. You, the voter, can ask Alice a question, and get an instantaneous data-driven response from her. The process is intended for younger, tech-savvy voters and also for others who might have lost faith in traditional politics.
Alice is running a campaign that emphasizes the utilization of technology to enhance public services and promote good governance and digital literacy. Thus, the AI candidate puts forward policies about public education, health, and environmental conservation based on data analysis and answers from the people.
Opponents of the AI candidate have made the argument that artificial intelligence would not be able to properly represent its constituents as it does not empathize with humans. They also worry about things like accountability and how the AI could theoretically be manipulated or coded with bias.
Despite these criticisms, Alice is keen on what artificial intelligence could do to politics. They argue that AI can assist human legislators by generating objective, data-driven suggestions, while also allowing politicians to dedicate more working hours on the sophisticated issues which mandate human subjectivity and compassion.
The AI lawmaker idea, meanwhile, has created plenty of buzz and dispute in the UK and around the world. This raises critical questions about the future of democracy and the role technology can play in governing people. And with the by-election drawing near, there is no doubt that West Yorkshire will be under focus to see whether voters are prepared for this forward-thinking variant of politics.
The approach aims to be a test, as Alice is recognized as an ambitious attempt at the intersection of AI and democracy. Whether a better film or not, it makes an important statement about technology and its future influence on all sociopolitical aspects of our society.
