Of course that was silly that an AI would decide the best election outcome. It implied that humans would actually desire an election outcome based on effectiveness. The reality is people vote on feelings and have no desire for fair or equitable outcomes.
Its funny that HN is supposed to be filled with logical people yet all the time yet jump over logic to get to their creation. I see creators lament,I built this perfect thing and no one wanted it. Exactly. People don't want effective things, they want better things for themselves which usually comes at the cost of others.
> The reality is people vote on feelings and have no desire for fair or equitable outcomes.
And this really frustrates me. I try to vote based on who I think could best do the job, but there is no real data source for me to make my decision. Plus my vote is so terribly diluted by the feelings voters.
...
In the fictional society, people voluntarily (presumable because of an existing social contract) feed data about themselves into Multivac. Multivac then considers all this data and uses it to pick the elections winners (it picks all election races, not just presidential).
There is only one actual human who votes (Norman), and he doesn't really cast a ballot. Rather, he is interviewed by Multivac to help it make the final decision. Every election year, Multivac uses its vast data on all humans to pick the voter of the year, and this year it's Norman. Norman is just a store clerk, not some important dignitary.
SciFi about AIs deciding elections? Here's a real paper on using GPT-3 to simulate a human poll.
> Specifically, they do three social science experiments on GPT-3 and discover that GPT-3 has biases that are “fine-grained and demographically correlated, meaning that proper conditioning will cause it to accurately emulate response distributions from a wide variety of human subgroups.”
You could run an election "in silico" based on knowing the demographic profiles of your population.
Its funny that HN is supposed to be filled with logical people yet all the time yet jump over logic to get to their creation. I see creators lament,I built this perfect thing and no one wanted it. Exactly. People don't want effective things, they want better things for themselves which usually comes at the cost of others.