Trying to put on my optimist hat. I believe the most beneficial near-term impact of AI on U.S. politics isn’t persuasion; it’s comprehension.
I believe our real civic bottleneck is volume, not apathy. Omnibus bills and “manager’s amendments” routinely hit thousands of pages (the FY2023 omnibus was ~4,155 pages). Most voters and many lawmakers can’t digest that on deadline.
We could solve this with LLMs right now.
The bottleneck is epistemology via semantics. It's inherent to words which many things to different people. LLMs have no chance against semantic diffusion and chaos. They're subject to them unless some status-bearer decides the semantic.
Politics is over until we solve the initial condition, by placing syntax above grammar. Action over meaning etc.
Tech accelerated, horizontalized and automated units that could barely keep their meaning loads stable at printed paper, radio and TV.
Everyone should have seen this coming.
Oh for the love of God. Lawmakers that don't understand the things they're making laws about, using tools that have not-insignificant error rates, and whose mistakes will not all be reviewed by a human before being passed as law because there already isn't enough bandwidth without them?
This country is doomed to collapse. This is about the time when Rome decided it was too much overhead to manage the whole empire, so they split into two empires. We're on such a mountain of cards that we're considering running our representative government with AI.
Your optimism just reinforced my blackpill...
Processing everything that's already been passed as laws and regulations, identifying loopholes, bottlenecks, chokepoints, blatant corruption, and systematically graphing the network of companies, donors, bureaucrats, and politicians responsible - the strategy of burying things in paperwork isn't feasible anymore, and accountability will be technically achievable because of AI.
We've already seen several pork inclusions be called out by the press, only discovered because of AI, but it will be a while before it really starts having an impact. Hopefully it just breaks the back of the corruption, permanently - the people currently in political positions tend not to be the most clever or capable, and in order to game the system again, they'll need to be more clever than the best AI used to audit and hold them to account.