Hey, kids.
Are you fed up with today’s politics?
Are you tired of all the riff-raff and chit-chat and knick knacks and tic tacs of current politics?
Don’t get me wrong, our governments today are way better than the governments of times
when one guy was in charge because God said so, or something, but our governments still
aren’t exactly the best they can be.
From constant scandals to disagreements turning into shouting matches, it can be hard to get
much of anything passed in government.
A large part of that is probably because even the most perfect governments are still led
by a bunch of smelly, biased apes, so what if we did something else?
What if we replaced our human politicians with robot politicians?
Now, this wouldn’t be the robotic apocalypse we’ve all been fearing, just a rearrangement
of our governments so they can be run more efficiently.
After all, humans may have completely maxed out their intelligence stat, but their play
type still revolves very strongly around team bias, with many frequently being criticized
for not knowing the true inner workings of the game, or their respective civ.
This often results in things like populism, and prioritizing personality over actual policies
when voting for new leaders, allowing some certain players to simply game the system,
almost as if they were playing some sort of video game.
Bot-run governments could also run a lot more efficiently than human admins.
Bots have a lot of advantages to other players, as they can remain on the server pretty much
indefinitely, and could also respond to an issue much quicker, and possibly much more
logically than human admins, in addition to being able to process requests from millions
of players at a time.
They could also hold huge amounts of in-game data, replacing the need for looking through
guild archives and being able to draw on historical outcomes of similar issues to see how their
intended actions might turn out, instead of just using educated guesses and lobbying.
Although, if they were to play in the most logical way possible, it’s doubtful they
would have the best bedside manner to most.
AI is of course short for artificial intelligence, as in decisions made by a brain we created
with tools, and silicon, and stuff.
Artificial intelligence is defined as “the theory and development of computer systems
able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception,
speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages”.
Now, government is also defined as “the governing body of a nation, state, or community”.
The word “government” stems from the word “govern”, which came from the French “governer”,
which itself came from the Latin “gubernare” meaning ‘to rule’ or ‘to steer’, which
came from the Greek “kubernao (κυβερνάω)”, meaning ‘to steer’.
So what history’s essentially saying is that government is basically the people in
charge of driving the country.
What a strange coincidence!
But running the government doesn’t just mean making new laws and signing new treaties
with other countries, it also involves filing paperwork.
A lot of paperwork.
After all, the government is also what’s in charge of issuing your passport, your birth
certificate, managing your health care access, and giving out licenses and permits.
We might not yet be able to use machine learning algorithms to turn our politicians and lawmakers
into computers, but would it make sense to automate government bureaucracy instead?
Well, computers can be used to do everything from prescribing medications to processing
legal information in trials.
Like running the government, tasks like these also require a huge amount of paperwork that
would be a lot for a human to achieve on their own.
A lot of it just involves sifting through records and paperwork, which a human can do
just fine, but it would take a while.
I mean, If you wanted to find a specific word among a huge wall of text.
It would be so much easier to do by just pressing command+F and letting the computer do the
work for you.
In fact, sometime in the middle of this century, a computer could have the processing power
to model every human brain on Earth, which means machines definitely could take over
government positions, but we don’t have to go from 100% human politicians to 100%
computer politicians overnight.
So maybe we don’t have to give our power and authority over to computers, at least
not yet.
There are still some problems with that, though.
For one, the US federal government alone hires 2 million people, which isn’t even including
those who work for organizations like USPS and the military.
This could lead to some outrage from federal employees worried about losing said jobs,
I mean we all saw what happened when the government recently shut down.
However, whenever the workers try to protest against technology being implemented to replace
them for less, the onward march of technology usually wins.
For example, in the 19th century, many English textile workers (known as “luddites”)
banded together to smash the machines that were coming to replace them in the factories.
Were they successful?
Maybe, if their goal was to get arrested and shipped off to Australia, that is.
The point is, people don’t like it when machines (or anyone, for that matter) come
to take their jobs.
So, the real question with implementing automated politicians is not if the computers can do
the work of politicians, but if our current politicians will let them, and if history
can tell us something else here, the answer is no, but will they always have that choice?
One thing that’s important to remember is that robot politicians and lawmakers will
need a lot of data on past events and how they affected their societies, and even if
their effect was a good or a bad thing.
Take Brexit as an example, 52% of voters voted for the UK to leave the EU and 48% voted to
stay, so it’s clear that there is no immediate consensus on what should have been done.
Would an automated government have chosen to stay or to leave, and would they have done
so out of what they considered Britain’s best interests, or what the people said they
all wanted at the time?
What even are Britain’s best interests?
Matter of fact, the whole Brexit referendum was just a campaign promise David Cameron
made to try to stay in power, so would it even have happened in the first place?
This whole argument is kind of circular in nature, but hopefully whenever someone asks
you if robots will one day take over the government, and if that would even be a good or a bad
thing, hopefully now you know better.
Okay, back to who I normally am.
So, you might have noticed that this isn’t really a normal video of mine, and that’s
because, well… it is the April Fool’s Day special, after all.
Nevertheless, this is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time now, so I am
very excited to finally be able to make it.
Now, I am a big fan of the six channels I just parodied, and a few of them are also
very close friends of mine, so definitely be sure to subscribe to their channels if
you like their format, and better accents.
Links are provided down below.
If you enjoyed this video and want to see more from this particular channel, do be sure
to like, share and subscribe for more 3-6 minute long, semi-animated videos about different
aspects about the world, posted every Sunday.
Just, in a slightly different style.