
Can Washington Be Automated? - danso
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/05/washington-automation-congress-politics-lobbying-policy-216216
======
bkohlmann
Private Wealth Management and Real Estate are two industries I once believed
would easily be automated. And there have been a number of moves in each space
to do so [Wealthfront and Betterment, Zillow etc].

But I've come to understand these industries are NOT built on rational,
dispassionate decision making. The reason they only have a foothold in
automation is because at their core, they are deeply relational industries.
Even for incredibly sophisticated, "rational" individuals.

People simply want a person to talk to and walk them through things - even
when they have all the facts generated from sophisticated algorithms giving
them an unequivocal "correct" answer.

It seems like lobbying is the same. There is an important role for automation.
But I believe it will simply augment the existing offering rather than
completely supplant it.

Politics is the most relational of professions. Rational policymaking is an
idealists dream - and I say this as a metric-driven, lover of numbers who once
believed in that dream.

~~~
IIAOPSW
I think there's a generational thing going on here.

I'd love nothing more than to be able to buy stocks, real-estate etc through
an online interface with 0 human interaction. Everyone I know above 40 seems
to be the exact opposite.

Sometimes progress is made one funeral at a time.

~~~
tehlike
Similar. Our generation is more used to getting things done on our phones or
computers, including human interaction.

I for one hate to run errand where i need to talk to someone. It is very
inefficient, and socially awkward.

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forapurpose
Unlike in business, the question in politics and policy is not primarily
efficiency and profit, but justice (including liberty and democracy) and human
welfare. The relationship between automation and efficiency & profit is
relatively clear, but the relationship between automation and justice &
welfare is not. I think the questions are:

1\. Automation can reduce transparency, by moving open discussions and
reasoning into obscure, sometimes proprietary computer code. Effectively, the
person writing the code, or the person who controls the coder, decides the
policy. For example, some courts now use software to determine prison
sentences; what was once decided based on established principles and
transparently detailed by the judge is now decided in some cubicals by
developers and written in C (which is often prioprietary). Why are you going
to jail? The software (i.e., the developer) said so. Also, remember that code
is mysterious and obscure to most people outside HN; they have no
understanding of what it is, of its significance, what it can do, etc. Many
can't define the word "algorithm" or even "web browser"; even open source code
provides no transparency for them (and doesn't for us, unless someone makes
the extraordinary effort to review the code).

2\. To whom will automation shift power? The lobbyists with the best
algorithm? The people developing the technology and solutions (see #1)? Will
automation democratize power or further restrict it? Note that the developers
of one solution in the article went to Harvard. Sounds to me like the same
people running Washington, and the same gateways to power.

3\. Lobbyists who have more data about constituents in general and about major
players in particular will have an advantage. It could increase competition to
erode privacy in its most important context - politics.

4\. Will it result in better policy - more justice and better welfare - or
just more power for the few with the data and algorithms?

If I were devious and wanted to change judicial policy nationwide, for
example, I'd buy the companies making software for courts. I'd be surprised if
I was the first to think of that.

~~~
noobermin
The entire thing is that those who want this sort of thing are not interested
in justice and welfare, they see politics as a way to enrich themselves.

~~~
forapurpose
I think that's always the major issue in politics. IMHO:

It's an issue of individuals: People are neither completely altruistic nor
completely greedy. A very important factor is, where are the elite on that
continuum? My humble hypothesis is that that's the main difference between a
banana republic and first-world civilization and society. IMHO, the elite in
the U.S. have swung far toward greed; the tax bill is a good example: There is
no policy reason for it, not even a figleaf discussion of economics, and even
the principles of conservatives (deficit reduction) are thrown by the wayside:
They just want more money.

It's also an issue of systems: How do we design a system that marries power,
on one hand, to justice and welfare on the other? Then those who seek power
also seek justice & welfare, intentionally or not. Democracy is an
(incomplete) solution to that problem: Power flows from making the people
happy.

Despite the problems, the U.S. and other major democracies work and have
worked for generations, and they work better than any other system of
government. Somehow, I'm not sure how, that happens.

------
yazaddaruvala
Tangentially related:

I'm not sure if automated decisions are a good idea. But it would be really
cool to improve productivity of politicians.

How can we expect our politicians, let alone our lay people, to understand all
of the law's in a country? There is just too much text to grok.

Software developers build abstractions, write tests, refactor and simplify
older code, yet no such trend seems to be occurring for law. Why not?

Politicians already do use references and bucketization, i.e. write a law for
schedule one drugs, then add or remove entities from the schedule one bucket.
Can't we abstract even more?

Recently I've been wondering if it is feasible to create a syntax for lawyers.
Like a law language with a compiler, package manager and similar tooling to
compile laws rather than write them from scratch.

Anyone familiar with such research?

~~~
whatshisface
I think what you're describing is fundamentally against the incentives of
lawmakers. Complex laws make it possible to decouple legislative goals from
public-image goals: when was the last time you saw something that actually had
to be _explained_ come up in a televised debate?

~~~
arthurcolle
unfortunately while cynical i do believe this comment captures the reality of
the situation. whatshisface, what do you think can be done to take back US
society and make it a little closer to what our seemingly more critically-
thinking predecessors had lived through?

~~~
yazaddaruvala
I agree this is a reality.

Just like the cynical reality that C/C++ programers don't want to encourage
package managers. The higher the barriers to entry the more you're talents are
worth.

The reality is, regardless of any one groups desire, the productivity wins of
package managers are too great and the momentum of the larger software
development community is moving towards package managers for every language
and will one day include C/C++.

Similarly, lawmakers are a select few of a larger community of domestic but
more importantly international lawyers. You give the larger community a 10x
productivity win, and just sit back and watch the domino effect work.

~~~
jacques_chester
Lawyers already study the laws of other countries. It is common for precedents
established in one country to be imported into another country by
"persuasion". It is also common to more or less copy and paste legislation or
other legal wording.

Draftsmanship is not the hard part of law. The hard part is everything else.

------
ikeboy
>A couple more clicks after that, and we’re looking at a summarized version of
a bill tackling cybersecurity that the software has considered and rendered a
judgment on, when it comes to the probability that it will become law. We’re
not talking a rough estimate. There’s a decimal: 78.1 percent.

No way in hell is it producing probabilities calibrated to 3 significant
digits. If some kind of testing of calibration produces proof it's even within
1 percent calibrated I will be shocked.

~~~
rayiner
It's spitting out 3 digits for sure. The reporter is just too ignorant to
realize that they're not 3 significant digits.

~~~
ikeboy
Obviously. It's both a concerning detail about the company (why are they
displaying probabilities to a level of accuracy they can't possibly claim) and
an indication the reporter didn't do due diligence. They actually use it to
claim the company must have sophisticated software to get that kind of
accuracy!

------
baxtr
I’m somehow skeptical whenever I see a CEO holding a pen on a glass wall with
random math formulas on it

~~~
cs702
Especially when the first line is a _mangled_ version of Bayes Formula -- the
p(y) and p(x) are in the wrong places!

~~~
syphilis2
It looks fine to me. Mirror the image and see if you agree.

~~~
cs702
Yikes, you're right! _Mea culpa._

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snarfy
I'm not sure it can be but I certainly want it to be. My representative is a
poor representation of me. I'd rather answer a questionnaire and feed the data
into a virtual representative script that voted on laws on my behalf instead
of a human.

~~~
zanny
On the flip-side, I _don 't_ want to live in a country where law is purely
decided based on popular opinion. It is probably impossible to have a nation
of purely rational, informed, soundly-minded voters for that kind of system.
We are certainly very far away from that dream today.

------
eadmund
> Already, clients are signing on to the idea: Toyota and the National
> Institutes of Health, to name a couple.

Toyota I can understand & accept, but is it appropriate for a branch of the
executive to hire lobbyists to lobby the legislature? Just feels a bit
unseemly to me.

> Quorum says its system also powers one well-known late-night comedy show—it
> won’t reveal which one—helping staffers scan YouTube to pull together almost
> instantly a selection of footage about topics they might use on that night’s
> show. Says Wirth, “They’re like, ‘What kinds of Roy Moore clips do we
> have?’” The software has already machine-read heaps of video footage,
> turning them into tagged transcripts, and sends off exactly the correct clip
> to that evening’s show. Millions of Americans, without knowing it, are
> getting their political news curated for them in part by a Quorum bot.

Sounds a bit like Last Week Tonight.

In the cases of lobbying & clip-selection alike, what I worry about is how
we'll groom the higher-level people without running them through their lower-
level paces (since the lower levels will all be automated). What I mean is
that a lower-level job has at least two purposes: one is to perform a job, and
the other is to audition for the next higher job. The former is what AI excels
at. It's really, really easy to automate the job of an 18-year-old who answers
phones and hands them to the next person. It's not so easy to automate the job
of a 24-year-old who answers phones and hands them to the _right_ person. It's
really, _really_ difficult to automate the job of a 36-year-old who answers
phones and decides whether the topic is important enough to hand to his boss.
It's really _supremely_ difficult to automate the job of a 48-year-old who
answers phones and makes decisions.

The problem is that every 18-year-old answering phones isn't just answering
phones; he's also auditioning to be that 24-year-old finding the right person
(experience he gets from the job itself). Likewise, every experienced
24-year=old is auditioning for the job of the very experience 36-year-old. And
all those 36-year-olds are auditioning for the few slots as decision-making
48-year-olds.

We can really easily automate those lower levels away. But what will be our
'farm team'? Where will we grow the talent and depth of experience necessary
for the higher levels?

~~~
dragonwriter
> The problem is that every 18-year-old answering phones isn't just answering
> phones; he's also auditioning to be that 24-year-old finding the right
> person (experience he gets from the job itself). Likewise, every experienced
> 24-year-old is auditioning for the job of the very experience 36-year-old.

Having interned in a political office, the other problem is that the 18- and
24-year-old described often doesn't exist, because there aren't enough to
people to have the heirarchy you describe exist at all; the 18-24 year old
answering phones is doing much more what you describe for the 36-year old
(answering phones, logging constituent positions appropriately if it's a
position call, directing constituent services calls (and any other calls they
don't handle themselves) to the right staff person. And, on top of that, doing
a lot of non-phone tasks like drafting correspondence, assisting legislative
staff with research, etc., etc.

Of course, lots of staff are never college interns and do their first staff
job as a graduate fellow, or as professional staff often after completing a
law, business, or public policy and/or administration degree.

So, I'm both not worried that the lower level will be automated easily or much
concerned that there won't be an entry path if it is.

------
CM30
Can it be? Probably. Should it be? Hell no, lobbying is bad enough with humans
doing it, let alone algorithms.

Hopefully no Silicon Valley startups think this is the next multi billion
dollar industry to 'disrupt'.

~~~
thelittleone
Wouldn't those concerns be resolved by being open source? Could run the new
automated system in parallel for some years first, like a second umpire in
sports.

~~~
landryraccoon
How does open source make policy decisions more transparent to the majority of
people? Are you assuming that everyone in the country can read and understand
the code? I get why programmers and readers of Hacker News could be enchanted
by this idea: government by code shifts the power from one set of elites (the
wealthy/connected) to another (programmers with a specialized skill set that
can read the code). But I'm unclear on how that benefits the nation as a
whole.

~~~
thelittleone
Why would you need everyone in the country to read and understand the code?
You just need a sufficiently large group of academics, programmers, developers
etc to identify issues.

~~~
landryraccoon
> You just need a sufficiently large group of academics, programmers,
> developers etc to identify issues.

I don't attribute any sort of sainthood or trustability to academics over
other segments of society. It's certainly not clear that programmers are
especially qualified to craft public policy. Again, instead of one group of
elites that can understand what's going on you're substituting another.

Look, with Open Source software, programmers are mostly the consumers of that
open source software. The customers of that software can more or less switch
and aren't forced to use it at the barrel of a gun (and in the cases where big
companies DO have monopoly power, the fact that they use Open Source software
doesn't really stop them from exercising it in ways that are clearly for their
benefit but less clearly for the benefit of their users). But if you're saying
that software is now going to determine who can be arrested and who can go
free, how long prison sentences will be or who can go on welfare or receive
public money, there is HUGE incentive to game the system. Right now I might
find Academics trustworthy because they don't get a huge financial benefit
depending on the outcome of their research. But if public policy is controlled
by software the incentives to cheat are huge. Now you can say they'll patrol
each other, but that just means the incentive will be to collude collectively,
as an entire group, for their own benefit against society at large.

------
GuiA
A big problem with the current incarnation of democracy is that there is no
accountability over time of the various goals that officials claim to pursue.

If someone running for office says that they will make sure the local
firehouse gets an X% increase in budget and that unemployment in the district
will go down by Y%, there should be an unambiguous way of tracking, over time,
how they are doing on their promises.

This "goal verification" seems like an important first step if one wishes to
introduce meaningful computational processes in Washington. Ideally, over
time, we would have a system against which we can run such promises: "The
ministry of health says increasing the budget of X will lead to outcome Y, and
our model agrees with this decision with a confidence of 90%".

Eventually, this system might even build excellent models of what happens in
various parts of society when various parameters are modified. It could
predict where new schools need to be opened based on the natality data
provided by hospitals and local employment rates, what the plausible long
ranging effects of lowering or raising corporate tax by x% would be, whether
the opening of a certain factory requires increasing the budget of the
firehouse in the neighboring district because the district is now over a
certain threshold for fire risks, and so on.

~~~
comicjk
Any analysis of the promise "unemployment in the district will go down by Y%"
will be worse than useless, because politicians have little control over the
unemployment rate. You would be judging them based on a coin flip. You have to
include the quality of the initial promises.

As for modeling the effect of policy on the real world, lots of people already
try to do this, and their results do not agree. It's a very hard problem,
perhaps impossible.

------
pessimizer
Isn't this just building a guide to Congressmen based on their stats, and
selling it to lobbyists? I don't mean to say "just" to minimize it, it sounds
like a valuable product, but if you tripled or quadrupled that 160 headcount,
I'd bet you could build this guide to the same quality and usefulness without
using computers.

It doesn't threaten lobbyists, it's a product _for_ lobbyists.

------
dboreham
Bah. I was hoping this article was about automating away the politicians, not
just the analysis of their neural network state :(

------
platz
TLDR: backoffice work in Washington can be automated just like backoffce work
in corporations. FiscalNote wants to advertise the message that anything
involving capturing backoffice data flows is actually "A.I", which means the
career of every politician is in jeopardy, without FiscalNote.

------
erikb
If Washington=Government probably 99.9% can be replaced easily. Maybe even
more easily than most factory jobs. The idea that their jobs would be more
complex is an illusion. The only stressful thing they do is fighting each
other for more power.

However I bet it's one of the last places that actually gets automated. The
value of the government is to give people reason to believe that everything is
fine, that someone will deal with the big problems, etc. This story cannot be
sold equally well if it's done by robots/AI. So even if we are really governed
by AI some day these jobs will probably still exist. The show must go on.

------
cmroanirgo
If you can elect a dog as a mayor[1], I think the answer is yes... even
without reading the article.

[1]
[https://roadtrippers.com/trips/16260761?lat=40.80972&lng=-96...](https://roadtrippers.com/trips/16260761?lat=40.80972&lng=-96.67528&z=5)

------
fogzen
Yes, but automated for the people and not corporate lobbyists:
[https://united.vote](https://united.vote)

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SubiculumCode
Should it be automated is the better question.

~~~
randcraw
And should it be transparent? All measure of sins and inefficiencies cannot
survive unblinking illumination.

------
stretchwithme
Automation is about doing more with less. Washington strives to less with
more.

------
eurticket
I would say it should have been the first thing automated.

