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Artificial Intelligence AI

Regardless of your feelings well-nigh the outcome of the election, information technology'southward pretty clear the present voting system is so blowsy it struggles to provide a meaningful mechanism for translating the will of the people into action. For instance, I was surprised that in this historic period of cloud storage and wireless connectivity, I couldn't vote at the polling identify of my choice and still exist presented with the relevant ballot issues from my home district. Us elections are controlled at the local level, which is ane reason why the widespread voter fraud sometimes alleged to exist is, in practice, almost impossible to accomplish. Only this same local command makes information technology hard to implement the kinds of systems that would help voters improve empathise issues. Even ballot design is typically controlled locally, and is express to any local officials draw upwardly and their own printers can print.

Conspicuously at that place are means modern engineering could improve these processes, and one group is hoping smarter AI could help voters make candidate decisions that better reflect their own goals and priorities.Researchers at Harvard and Carnegie Mellon University have been hard at work devising better methods for collective controlling, using cutting-edge developments in artificial intelligence and auto learning. They devised RoboVote.org , a free public tool that helps people optimize their grouping decision making process. The researchers behind the effort, led by computer scientist Prof. Ariel Procaccia, stumbled upon the idea while working on decision making for software agents. The "aha" moment came when he realized the aforementioned toolset that could be used to help AI brand better decisions could be leveraged to assistance groups of people make better decisions too.

Ariel Procaccia_September 15 2022

Prof. Ariel Procacci, one of the leading lights behind the RoboVote platform. Image Courtesy of Carnegie Mellon Academy.

Their system comes in 2 flavors. Ane helps people assess objectively determinable questions, such as which company to invest in based upon projected revenue. The other is intended for  questions with subjective valuations, such every bit which toppings a group should order on the pizza they are sharing.

While the first blazon of question is fairly straightforward since information technology does not involve people'due south feelings or opinions, the other is trickier. To respond questions involving subjective valuation, the researchers behind R oboVote turned to utility theory. Utility theory presents the concept of the utility maximizing agent, for whom each decision comes with a concomitant cost and benefit. By deriving a group of individual'due south unique utility functions for a given choice, you tin can pool the results and get in at an equation that maximizes the commonage utility of the group. The idea here is to create the greatest skillful for the greatest number of people, no affair how insane or untrustworthy their opinion. (People who call up anchovies belong on pizza must be contained for the proficient of usa all – Ed.)

To run into how this might have played out in the presidential elections, imagine if instead of choosing between ii candidates, each voter was asked to rank all the initial xx or more presidential hopefuls in lodge of preference from top to bottom. The calculator would then create a utility part based upon each person'south ranking, and compare this to the same set of functions generated for everyone else in the electorate. The resulting chemical compound differential equation could be solved to reveal a candidate who would maximize the utility for the entire electorate.

This is conceptually similar to the practice of ranked voting, or preferential voting, which allows a voter to rank candidates rather than just choosing a unmarried candidate. In a hypothetical 3-way election between Jack Johnson, John Jackson, and Richard Nixon, voters choose their first, second, and third choice. In the result that no candidate receives at least 50% of the popular vote, the beginning-identify votes for the least-popular candidate are redistributed to the other ii candidates based on the 2nd-identify pick of those voters.

This AI-based process is a good bargain less intuitive than our current voting system. It would need to be an option that people could consult throughout an ballot entrada rather than but at the polling station, and there are questions almost how and if users would accept its recommendations as valid — especially if the AI adamant that the best candidate for a user to vote for based on their stated goals and priorities was different than the candidate they themselves were inclined to back up. Merely every bit information technology's refined and developed further, it could testify a valuable tool for helping voters evaluate candidates — potentially more valuable than the systems we currently take in place.