Ask HN: Isnt Politics the most easiest field to be replaced with AI? - mkovji
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mattmanser
I think Obama said it best:

 _The final thing I’ll say is that government will never run the way Silicon
Valley runs because, by definition, democracy is messy. This is a big, diverse
country with a lot of interests and a lot of disparate points of view. And
part of government’s job, by the way, is dealing with problems that nobody
else wants to deal with.

So sometimes I talk to CEOs, they come in and they start telling me about
leadership, and here’s how we do things. And I say, well, if all I was doing
was making a widget or producing an app, and I didn’t have to worry about
whether poor people could afford the widget, or I didn’t have to worry about
whether the app had some unintended consequences -- setting aside my Syria and
Yemen portfolio -- then I think those suggestions are terrific. (Laughter and
applause.) That's not, by the way, to say that there aren't huge efficiencies
and improvements that have to be made.

But the reason I say this is sometimes we get, I think, in the scientific
community, the tech community, the entrepreneurial community, the sense of we
just have to blow up the system, or create this parallel society and culture
because government is inherently wrecked. No, it's not inherently wrecked;
it's just government has to care for, for example, veterans who come home.
That's not on your balance sheet, that's on our collective balance sheet,
because we have a sacred duty to take care of those veterans. And that's hard
and it's messy, and we're building up legacy systems that we can't just blow
up._

~~~
tntn
It's not inherently wrecked, but it's often wrecked anyway.

For example, the BART extension to south Fremont cost around $150 million per
mile and took 3 years longer than planned. CA can't seem to maintain roads,
and when it does it costs bazillions of dollars.

~~~
veddox
Differentiate between a wreck and a bug. Bugs may be big, common, and
expensive, but they don't invalidate the system as a whole. Bugs need fixing,
a wreck requires a reimplementation. But seductive as reimplementations may
be, they are usually a lot more expensive and difficult than one thought, and
at the end they're still going to have bugs.

Wrecks require reimplementation. In politics, as in software development, one
should think very carefully indeed before declaring something a wreck.

------
veddox
No, absolutely and emphatically not! Underlying this question is an assumption
very common in tech circles, but nonetheless fundamentally flawed: that social
problems can be solved by technological advances.

Sure, technology can help implement solutions to social problems, but it will
not arrive at these solutions of its own accord. That is because technology
only ever magnifies our inherent human capabilities, it doesn't give us new
ones. A case in point: Internet and the social media have made communication
and the exchange of information as easy as never before. We can use this power
to keep in touch with distant friends or take free classes from a university
on another continent. We can also use it to spread fake news and organize
terrorist plots. But it is not "the Internet" doing all this, it is the humans
sitting at either end of the data cable. Technology is not of itself good, nor
is it evil. It is merely an enabler and an amplifier.

Technology is about optimizing metrics. (Say, time spent doing a certain task,
or money invested to achieve a given aim.) Politics is about finding out what
the problem is, agreeing that it is a problem worth solving and then
discussing what a suitable metric is to tackle this problem. (For example:
high housing prices may be considered a problem. But do you tackle this by
raising the spending power of your citizens or by lowering the average rent?)

Politics is about humans, and that is something technology in itself can never
be.

------
fardo
Not at all, politics is often a question of values as much as one of
logistics, even assuming AI can handle logistics.

For example, consider homelessness. No one has any clue what, if anything, is
the best solution, because there are tradeoffs of values.

One possible solution (these are examples, if your personal pet solution is
not included or is misrepresented, I apologize) is you ignore the homeless and
just let them be, and allow individual communities and cities to address
charity and enforcement. Another is for states to house all non-mentally ill
homeless for free, for, say, a year, and, in mental health instutitions, house
the repeat homeless, the mentally ill homeless, and those that after some
period of time cannot or will not find work.

AI can help you diagnose the problem, and make predictions about it, but those
two solutions above have VERY different outcomes, have very different
pricetags, and accomplish very different goals. An AI can’t think about the
high level moral tradeoffs of questions like “is 100% getting homeless off the
streets worth a fraction of the population being held at significant cost to
taxpayers and against its own will?”

Somebody, at the end of the day, must decide which, if either, of those plans
people will use, and that somebody is a politician you elect. AI is not going
to replace that.

------
itamarst
No, politics is in part about what is right, in part about what is possible,
in part about what you convince people to do. AI is useless for all of that.

------
arthev
Seems like with ten thousand years of time to learn about the stuff, we humans
haven't understood politics at all yet.

So I'll go with "No, politics is complex and _hard_ ".

------
eb0la
This remindminds me the old Paranoia RPG
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_(role-
playing_game)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_\(role-playing_game\))

An AI will try to achieve its goals by any means. I believe it coud be useful
as a helper, assistant, etc.

Anyway no politician would allow to loose powers because a machine took
his/her job...

------
mabynogy
Yes maybe. We have that because we lack of strong theories about how group of
people work. Ants don't do politics, they know what they have to do. No
politics in Star Trek excepting with aggressive species like Klingons.

------
mkovji
Should i have better phrased it by replacing politics with government.

Isn't government all about asking one yes or no question and collecting a
response from every citizen and going forward with the majority answer.

Isn't scenarios where we go ahead with minority decisions where the issues
arise?

~~~
veddox
> Isn't government all about asking one yes or no question and collecting a
> response from every citizen and going forward with the majority answer.

No, it's not. In our modern representative democracies, government is about
asking as many people as possible for their input and then going forward with
what seems wisest to you. Modern societies face problems that are much too
complicated for the simple majority to be a good indicator of the best course
of action.

We vote for our politicians because we agree with their set of values, and by
electing them give them the responsibility of taking decisions for us, based
on those values. In effect, we ask them to do the hard work of thinking
through problems thoroughly enough to arrive at a good solution.

(Of course, that doesn't mean that what we think becomes unimportant, or that
the "average citizen" is unable to form valid opinions on social matters. And
one of the defining factors of a good politician is and always will be that he
listens to the people. But his responsibility is to take the decisions that he
believes are best for the people, not necessarily the ones the people want.)

Brexit is a prime example for what happens when politicians shirk their
responsibilities and hand the decision-making back to an uninformed majority.
(This is an almost literal quote from a friend of mine who voted Leave!)

~~~
mkovji
>> No, it's not. In our modern representative democracies, government is about
asking as many people as possible for their input and then going forward with
what seems wisest to you. Modern societies face problems that are much too
complicated for the simple majority to be a good indicator of the best course
of action.

It is just this mindset that is ruining the whole world. One persons so called
wise choice which goes around creating discomfort for majority is what creates
imbalance and intolerance across community and ruins every ones peaceful life.

>> We vote for our politicians because we agree with their set of values, and
by electing them give them the responsibility of taking decisions for us,
based on those values. In effect, we ask them to do the hard work of thinking
through problems thoroughly enough to arrive at a good solution.

No politician will ever be skilled enough to make a decision. A politician is
just a servant. I don't let my servant decide what to cook or what to do with
their time.

I decide what menu i want and they just prepare the logistics and production.

Today i tell them to pick what majority wants and tomo i tell them to make
what rest of them wants so that everyone is taken care. Each individual cannot
or need not think and execute on how to clear the trash in their apartment.
That's where a politician comes in i tell him daily we will keep trash outside
home n u get some people to come and collect and dispose it using this
technique and he just serves that task.

It should be the common people the actual customers who are making the
decision not the service providers like politicians.

Or we can have multiple governments running simultaneously and i can just
switch to the government of my choice and live by that rule. Something like
changing from Verizon to Tmobile.

