Ode to Algocracy
Town square beheadings, powdered wigs and democratic elections – although currently regarded as the sacred cow of modern democracies, the popular vote might ultimately end up in the same bucket as any other obsolete, bizarre or cruel tradition we used to believe was the pinnacle of our civilization. Are two (or multiple) heads really better than one? Does this mythical entity that periodically emerges from the voting population – this egregore of mediocrity – really know what’s best?
Argumentum Ad Populum
For a while it was the best we had - it was all we had. In ancient times, it seemed like a perfectly reasonable idea to consult the hive mind on important matters - a commonly applied strategy all throughout history with many examples. Ostrakismos, the ancient Athenian practice of banishing certain individuals from the community – which is where the phrase ’ostracism’ originates from – was an attempt to achieve group consensus in order to determine a citizen’s lack of social fitness. The ostracized were thus determined to be ineligible to continue their participaton in the community and were exiled, not allowed to return for a period of time or might have even been given the death penalty in some extreme cases.
Another similar procedure takes place in the US legal system to this very day - a jury of twelve randomly selected but theoretically unbiased individuals are placed in a room to deliberate about the guilt or innocence of the accused; based on the admissable scientific and legal evidence. This would always strike me as incredibly odd and old-fashioned, a routine that seems almost superstitious and barbaric. Again, notice this heavy reliance on group think, this underlying belief of „safety in numbers”; the core philosophy being, to put it simply: „This many people can certainly not be wrong.”
The problem is, many and even more people have been wrong and will continue to be wrong en masse. Let us not forget how many scientific discoveries have first been disregarded or outright rejected by peers or reigning organizations (e.g. the heliocentric model, germ theory, radio-wave based communication; the list goes on). Let us also remember that Hitler’s rise to power occured with the support of the majority within a democratic system. (By 1932, the Nazi party became the largest and most popular party in Germany, enjoying nationwide support both from the country’s secular and religious institutions and private individuals.) Let us bravely face the reality that the popular vote has legitimized the many psychopathic and/or inept public officials still in power, still wreaking havoc, feasting upon our admiration and resources in a parasitic fashion. Obviously, the system is not working as it should. The assumption that the most accurate way to successfully assess the leadership potential of a candidate is by relying on the opinion of the majority is starting to seem nonsensical. When we strip it of its pretentious ideology, the justification for the currrently existing democratic election process appears to be nothing more than the upscaled version of your garden variety ’Argumentum Ad Populum’ (appeal to popularity); one of the most common informal fallacies.
The Problem With Human Voters
“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.” — Edward O. Wilson
Man’s ability to make emotionally unbiased choices is notoriously bad, and it is highly debatable whether crowd intelligence can truly surpass the limitations of the individual. Truth is, there is no place for emotions, impulses or fears when it comes to the selection process of our political leaders. Our love or dislike of the candidate is irrelevant as long as they are the most suitable based on the data available. Much like skin color, gender, sexual orientation or personal preference for certain ice cream flavors; the presence or absence of charm should not in any way have any impact on our judgement of someone’s competence in this area. Political legitimacy based on charisma, eloquence and likeability is a complete non-sequitur, these qualities only bear relevance to the popularity-based method of selection (a.k.a. the democratic election process) and have nothing to do with the candidate’s actual potential. Pleasant bedside manner is not a reliable future indicator of positive surgical outcomes. Do you want to be operated on by the kind and likeable chump without any knowledge of medical procedures, or would you rather choose the morose and dismissive doctor that has performed thousands of operations before? A great communicator or a stuttering professional? Perfect jawline or a deep and conscientious soul?
Similarly, a compelling personality and good conversational instincts cannot be counted on as trustworthy markers of excellence in politics. Is it possible that neurodivergent individuals – many of whom often exhibit socially awkward behaviours – might be able to offer extraordinary solutions to locally and globally emerging issues? Would it be fair to say that the current system unfairly (and foolishly) favors extraverted neurotypicals and more importantly, gives an overwhelming and unfair advantage to those with antisocial traits? (People with antisocial or psychopathic tendencies are characterized by high levels of confidence, superficial charm and a lack of neuroticism. When combined with remarkable oratory skills, aesthetically pleasing appearance and powerful manipulative ability, we have our „ideal” candidate for a prosperous career in present-day politics.)
Elections force voters to agree to an unrealistic social contract. Although we are blatantly incapable of making accurate judgements about a candidates’ character and competencies (due to time constraints; limited information, brainpower and expertise) we are forced to carry the sole responsibility of making the smartest choice. When things go awry, the blame shifts towards those who voted „wrong” – meanwhile, people at the top reguarly escape accountability. This is gaslighting on a global scale, and we need to learn to reject the blame.
It is apparent that the aggressive political campaigns we’re subjected to - whether done overtly or covertly (such as in the case of Cambridge Analytica) – are among the many things that wear us down to the point where we lack the mental resilience neccessary to make informed decisions. Human consciousness has been under siege and it’s our critical thinking ability that is the first to go under the ruthless manipulation we’re forced to endure. Voters are mentally fatigued individuals who are struggling to make it paycheck to paycheck, typically operating on the physiological baseline of ’fight or flight’. It is no surprise that such people will be likely to engage in mindless tribalism, scapegoating and reductionism and to cast their vote accordingly. It would be unreasonable to expect a healthy, economically and emotionally stable group of people to be able to consistently predict the suitability of political candidates based on this little information – let alone a broken and financially abused herd of uneducated and psychologically fragile individuals who are also exposed to relentless and continuous brainwashing.
One of the big problems is that it is hard to let go of what we’ve been deluded into thinking is a privilige. The obvious trade-off here is narcissistic supply for the masses in exchange for compliance with the politically covnenient status quo. „I am important, I can make my own decisions, my vote matters.” Someone who has potentially failed at every turn in their personal life will be sold the dream that come election day, they can get back in the driver’s seat and regain control. (The 2021 post-election attack of the United States Capitol perfectly illustrates the grandiose sense of self-importance at play.)
Beyond basking in the illusion of choice, all we’re really doing is playing Russian roulette with our own future.The legitimacy of a ruling elite elected by this method is highly dubious, its policies and regulations questionable at best, harmful at worst, and any positive outcomes associated with it are incidental. Ideally, all of us should be relieved of the moral obligation to comply with such a suboptimal, outdated and potentially destructive system.
Algorithms Can Learn To Know You
If people are so glaringly incompetent to choose their own leaders, what could possibly be a better way of deciding?
The short answer: algorithmic profiling.
We would never question the importance of insight that can be gained from the analysis and utilization of large data sets in natural science and medicine and yet, there seems to be a stubborn resistance when it comes to applying this technology to shape the political future of our societies. We would rather rely on archaic methods such as interviewing the confused collective by way of paper voting.
„Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans” is the title of a 2015 research article published by Wou Youyou, Michal Kosinski and David Stillwell that details a study on the accuracy of machine-based personality assessment. The study was done with the participation of about 86.000 volunteers whose social media ’footprint’ was analysed and mapped onto the five personality dimensions (the Big Five, FFM). They were able to use something as simple as the user’s likes on Facebook to make surprisingly accurate predictive statements about the participants. As the article explains, „(…)computer personality judgments have higher external validity when predicting life outcomes such as substance use, political attitudes, and physical health; for some outcomes, they even outperform the self-rated personality scores.” Other types of social media information derived from various sources (the visual analysis of selfies/profile pictures, psycholinguistic analysis of messages/posts, engagement metrics and so on) also provide deep insight into user personality. Big Tech has easy acess to dazzling amounts of interaction data, resources to run social experiments and develop precision tools – a scenario academia can only dream of.
Algorithms can learn to know you.
The technology is available to build and train complex models by feeding them giant bulks of digitally sourced information – models that do not only provide an accurate understanding of the subject’s personality structure but also have considerable predictive power when it comes to behavior. The average internet user’s actions are continuously monitored and analysed for commercial purposes, and it is possible for their behavior to be forecasted. As Shoshana Zuboff explained in her book called ’The Age of Survaillance Capitalism’, it is not merely what we volunteer to contribute that counts. The digital debris, the residual data we unwittingly generate and non-consensually share is just as, if not far more valuable. The main purpose of extracting and analysing user interaction data (which could include browsing history, search queries, clicks, mouse hovers, spelling accuracy, scrolling speed, geolocation, purchase history and other markers) is to increase the precision of targeted advertisement efforts and to stimulate user engagement. Apart from marketing, the data is also utilized by government intelligence (mainly in counter-terrorism) but there also exist applications that leverage behavioral data to create an invaluable screening service for certain sectors. Creditors looking for trustworthy clients, HR departments hoping to find the future employee with the highest chance of retention and property owners in search of the perfect tenant will all equally benefit from the predictive capacity these applications have to offer.
Why then should we as a society not consider vetting our political candidates in a similar fashion?
Apart from the glaringly obvious fact that such a system would intervene in the shady operations of political and business interest groups that are currently managing the public landscape from behind the scenes, we can almost certainly expect a sense of mistrust from the general population as well. Exposure to such a novel idea has the potential to irritate and antagonize, and could even produce some degree of social uproar for the simple reason that it highlights flaws in our working model of reality. It reminds us that we know very little about who we are and what we truly need, let alone who others are and what they are after. It instills fear and aggravates insecurities in those who would rather settle for the illusion of choice and power.
If these two factors of opposition – the pushback from ordinary people and their masters – could somehow be mitigated, a system could emerge with the potential to diminish political contraselection. Needless to say, the chances of this scenario actually occuring are slim to none.
The algocratic election process
If machines are so much more powerful, why don’t we simply automate the flow of our collective decision tree? Why don’t we let it all be decided by algorithms? Are humans even necessary anymore?
It is technically possible to make refined observations about an individual’s psychological, cognitive and moral profile – and to make predictions on how they will behave under certain circumstances with relatively high accuracy. Machine learning algorithms have the upper hand when it comes to making optimal selections for a specified purpose – as long as that purpose is well-specified. in her book ’You Look Like a Thing and I Love You’, Janelle Shane tells us the cautionary tale of the neural net that during its training had mistakenly integrated the tips of human fingers into its visual model of a certain fish species (being a popular game fish, most photos that were fed to the algorithm contained the hands of lucky fishermen holding their „trophy”). Stories of AI glitches are sometimes harrowing, other times simply humorous, but what connects all these cases is human miscalculation.
The future is ours, but we need to be smart about it.
Humans will never become obsolete — that is, as long as we’re here, we’ll continue to matter (to us). It is only by accumulating human feedback that a collective path for mankind and for individual nations can be determined, a requirement which our currently existing, rudimentary systems of democracy have long been failing to fulfill. The main issue with the current paradigm is that our attention is focused on the middleman and not the destiny we would like to steer our ship toward.
We need to start by re-evaluating the role of the politician.
Most of our appointed officials lead lavish lives with all the ingrained priviliges and pitfalls of their celebrity status. Would these types of positions attract the same type of people if no clout and no special treatment were offered, if leadership tasks were reduced to the status of what they in essence are: part of a regular office job? Would different personality profiles with different skillsets show up if they knew they could work in privacy? What a mandated representative is supposed to do is find a way to successfully allocate resources and align governmental processes with the public need, which in essence is nothing more (or less) than project management on a larger scale. Our politicians are over-glorified civil engineers that tend to do a terrible job of it since they are blinded by greed and their own miscalculated sense of self-importance. From a functional standpoint, most high ranking public officials’ names and identities might not even need to be advertised. The task itself does not require any contact with the public once the data is in as to what the people want and need. The key to accountability is transparency, which is hardly achieved by our current practice of publicly showcasing and fetishizing the elected. It is completely unneccessary to feed any narcissists ego on taxpayers’ money when it should have never been an employee perk to be aggrandized by the masses. No matter how hard they are trying to sell them to us as spiritual leaders, visionaries or parental figures, the high ranking politician’s current mission remains to adhere to the needs of economic interest groups and corporate lobbyists (or at the very least to try and compensate for their requests with policies that actually benefit society here and there). The misguided adoration from the general public is leveraged as a token of legitimacy in the quest for more contol over the playing field with little regard to the common good.
The deglamorization of the job is only the first step. Replacing the popularity-based selection method with computer-based profiling would allow for a new set of characters to enter the arena. To accurately assess the candidate’s psychological fitness without interference from our subconscious prejudices and delusions, we must take advantage of the technology and the related tools that should already be available — or at the very least obtainable from tech giants that are already utililizing them for commercial purposes.
Nonetheless, one important preparatory step needs to be performed beforehand. At this point the spirit of democracy can be resucitated and reinjected into our hypothetical algocracy, although with an entirely different purpose. Yes, we should attempt to calibrate collective decisions to what the community’s needs are, and that process is best initiated by an inquiry into what’s relevant to the public. What is it they truly need and want?
Choose directions, not people.
We should not ask the people who they want but instead try to find out what matters to them. We must survey citizens to generate a model of what shared values and directions they would like to pursue, we need to get acquainted with what future trajectory they are attracted to. (In modern democracies, this internal fantasy world is being mapped onto each candidate in an eclectic fashion, and come election day, the most adaptable projector screen will take the cake. Once the selection is made, our collective projections wither away and are replaced by agendas that bear very little resemblance to the original dream.) Only after having accurately determined the collective goal can we move onto the subsequent step of hiring the right person, which is a twofold process of finding the most competent individual available with the most reliable psychological profile. As discussed earlier, the question of determining psychological fitness would no longer be a public burden but the subject of an algorithmic evaluation procedure. Competence assessment strategies would require separate investigation which exceeds the intended scope of this article. Chances are that it could partially be determined by the same algorithmic mechanism, complete with a practical evaluation with a simulator (much like in the case of airline pilots) and/or required completion of courses designed for the specific purposes of the role (not necessarily tied into proof of academic achievement or employment record, widening the spectrum of possible candidates and further democratizing the process.)
What should happen next is open to interpretation and the level of comfort our society has in terms of how deep we are willing to let the algorithms penetrate this system. There is nothing to say that following a pre-selection phase, humans could not be brought back on board to make further decisions, now working with a pool of (robot)hand-picked persons and a much better chance of choosing someone with actual leadership potential. To ascertain the fitness of our future leaders is by no way an easy feat. Creating the new framework would require extensive research, government funding and in-depth interdisciplinary dialogue between the humanities and the STEM field, potentially involving a non-profit oriented collaboration between governments and tech giants as well. This type of thinking would have us question the legitimacy of the very existence of the political party system, any rhethoric based in identity politics, political campaigns and all other ceremonial aspects of democracy that for now seem to be the backbone of how modern democratic structures operate.
Conclusion
Can we impose a legal warrant on the big Silicon Valley tech companies to lend their concoction of algorithms and their enormous computing power for a noble cause? Will political interest groups ever willingly hand their power over to actual competent experts? Will common folk ever be able to let go of their supposedly omnipotent leaders and their own perceived agency in choosing them?
We all know that these scenarios are highly unlikely and yet, it is not entirely meaningless to at least explore the topic of algocratic elections.
Man and machine can cooperate in fascinating ways because a large part of being human is actually being a (neurobiological) machine. There is no question of compatibility – in fact, the once far-fetched transhumanistic vision of technologically enhanced organisms ruling the world is now becoming our reality. Our gadgets are integral extensions to our consciousness, amplifying our intelligence and efficiency (when used correctly). There is a growing market for wearable devices and computer implants, so the tendency is clear. It is a futile effort to try and fight the existence of ubiquitious computing, embracing and harnessing it is our only choice. There is no turning back, but consciously and carefully augmenting our societies with the most precise technology can and will make all the difference.
