The 2024 voting and AI tsunami

The race is on. Our media nutrition matters more than ever.

My top read of 2023 is Mustafa Suleyman's The Coming Wave. This is not your typical tech exec's effusive gaze into the future, nor is it a disillusioned AI pioneer's bleak outlook, although he is both tech exec and AI pioneer. However, he also has a background in public policy, prior to co-founding Deep Mind, so has some appreciation of the workings of public discourse and the practicalities of policy implementation.

The book is finely balanced, much like AI itself, in presenting both positive and negative futures. The title seems abstract, but as explained in the first chapter, is a very fitting metaphor: technology happens in overlapping waves; sometimes waves cancel out, sometimes they multiply in either very predictable or very unpredictable ways. Science currently has some profound technologies in play, specifically, AI and gene editing, and these will be revolutionary - big waves acting in hard-to-predict ways. The best we can do is to ready ourselves with risk mitigations and, similar to the early nuclear age, treaties. He has some excellent, well-considered and argued ideas, hence why the book is such a valuable read.

Yet, I was left with a lingering suspicion that these mitigations and policies won’t be ready in 2024 and actually may well emerge in the aftermath of large scale disruptions. Why?

2024 will see more than half the planet going to the polls, deciding on how they wish to be governed. Four billion people going to the ballot implies huge potential political power shifts, globally. There is a lot for politicians to play for and they have a new, mostly unregulated tool at their disposal: artificial intelligence. Generative AI has shown a profound capacity for spinning convincing lies, in text, images, audio and even video. What seasoned politician could resist such a tool to promote their own agenda, or, more significantly, pollute their opposition’s agenda?

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts. - Bertrand Russell

Voters will get an unprecedented deluge of media thrown at us in 2024. Media has become increasingly clamorous year-by-year since the dawn of the internet age, but with AI’s ability to rapidly generate multiple versions of convincing-sounding rhetoric, and the political stakes never being higher, the media floodgates could truly open in 2024.

The risk to the political landscape is profound, in that such information disruption favours the challenger: modern politics, in the age of social media, has become a personality contest more than a policy contest. The incumbent with the track record is a known entity, whereas the challenger simply needs to spoil the track record and present a winning personality to secure the vote. Boris Johnson, the UK prime minister, cresting a wave of populism, showed that not only is it easier for the challenger to tell lies than the incumbent, but it is harder for the incumbent to enact any nuanced policy without being undermined by sufficiently determined opposition. He was ultimately unseated by ambiguous Covid policies.

Democracy, under the perpetual onslaught of populist squabbling from both right and left, risks inertia. This, in turn, favours the demagogue: the decision-maker, the person who gets things done. The person who can rally people to a cause, no matter how crooked the cause.

It is on us, the voters, the consumers, that democracy depends. We need to be wary of what we consume: assess our own bias (we all have one; if you don’t think you do then you’re bias-blind) and ensure that we mitigate our bias. Some key pointers:

1. If it sounds outrageous it probably is. A common trick in biased media stories is for the advocate to misrepresent the opposition’s view. Casting them as looney or crazy has the dual effect of ingratiating you to the advocate and reassuring you that your aligned opinion is sensible, unlike the opposition’s. In truth, while there may be factions in the opposition that have extreme views, they probably do not represent the majority. After all, there are some extreme views in your or the advocate’s camp, yet you’re probably comfortable that they do not represent the majority.

2. Watch for gaslighting. This is the inverse of the above, where the advocate convinces you that your reality is distorted. In the non-personal media context this is typically achieved by convincing you that there is a “deeper truth” that most people do not see the reality they, and by extension, you do. Typical phrases are

   1. referring to the media as the “mainstream media” or MSM. The implication here is that regular media is all biased, whereas your special media is the truth.

   2. “Do your own research” implying that professional journalism is all corrupt and the only way to find the truth is to research it yourself. This has been likened, by some humorous journalists, to suggesting you perform surgery (or onanism) on yourself.

   Good journalism still exists in abundance: professionals are paid and assessed (by both peers and employers, as well as readers like us) on the quality of their journalism. Bad journalism sells, and can sell well, but it is not at the exclusion of good journalism. There’s just way more chaff than there used to be.

3. Avoid confirmation bias by seeing the opposite perspective firsthand. As F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.“ The risk we run when reading opposing views is to be overly critical of the view that does not match our own, particularly in light of (1) above where the advocate may have already told us what to think the opposition believe. The simplest remedy is to consume the opposition media. It is vital to consume the opposition facts (or absence of them) first, rather than get distracted (or even incensed) by the opinions and counter-outrage. This has a dual benefit:-

   1. You’re better informed. Seeing both sides directly minimises the likelihood of being fooled by (1) or (2).

   2. You’re more aware of the bias landscape. In the clamour of news media, particularly in election build-ups, it’s important to see how partisan the media coverage is at both ends. Social media algorithms and modern biased reporting constantly seek to recruit us to their brand, their perspective. Monitoring both sides of an issue gives fascinating insight into the extent to which they can and do manipulate perspectives.

The above are, I believe, the most important facets to consider as you consume media in 2024. So, as with food, don’t over consume and use sites like Newsguard and Ground News to check your media nutrition and ensure you’re consuming safely.