April 22, 2023 - 8:00am
If you thought the social media elections era was bad, AI is about to cram a new layer of derangement into an already busting system. “AI will be a significant influence in elections,” Elon Musk told Tucker Carlson, on a recent Fox News interview. “People will use the AI as a tool and then if the AI is smart enough — are they using the tool or are they using them? Things are getting weird and they’re getting weird fast.”
No one does ‘weird’, ‘elections’ and ‘emergent tech’ quite like Dominic Cummings. In the Brexit referendum, he famously enlisted particle physicists to find missing voters. His hired hands used statistical techniques beyond the ken of conventional pollsters to truffle up the forgotten, the left-behind and the unreachable from the rolls.
A longtime AI believer, lately he has been experimenting with a new kind of psephological battle weapon: modelling voters in AI. That is: using ChatGPT-style large language models (LLMs) to come up with personas, then talking to them. ‘A MAGA voter’ or ‘a swing voter’, who can then be probed, via the prompt box, with as many hundreds of questions as you might wish. This he announced on Substack, in a long essay, which delved into his predictions for the 2024 US elections.
The problem is that LLMs are only good at solving yesterday’s problems, bounded as they are by the data set they’re given. Garbage in, garbage out. And as we arrive at 2024, while it might be a good straw poll to get inside the mind of a disenfranchised voter, it hardly beats the real thing.
Of course, fake focus groups are only one application. In the next couple of years, there will be many others. As Cummings points out, victory will belong to whichever side can think of useful, novel applications, and organise their strategy around them. The power of AI is not magic, but organisational horsepower — a compounding advantage that might allow one team to race ahead.
If you can find ways to structure your campaign through AI — maybe through online rapid-rebuttal or through more rapid and elegant voter data capture — the other team will be forced to make sloppier decisions just to keep up with the accelerated pace.
In the rush to own the future, the AI deepfake has been touted as the election killer application — be it the Pope in a puffa, or fake photos of Trump being arrested. But for the kind of news that moves polls, the old system, of big reporters on big important news shows, has proved remarkably resilient.
Conventional reporting will keep the most obvious fakes out of play. But will it save us from people inside the media making up elaborate conspiracy theories about sinister AI systems and how they swung it?
As Cummings points out, the Carole Cadwalladr contingent managed to meme the ‘Russia conspiracy’ into the pages of the New York Times and the Observer. That story didn’t rely on fake photos of Trump bodging a voting machine. It merely relied on a set of ill-informed, credulous media gatekeepers believing that ‘Cambridge Analytica’ and its segmented marketing techniques were a forms of magic, capable of hypnotising thousands of ordinary voters.
It then spread memetically from publication to publication. The fake news virus was inside the system, not howling at the gates. Maybe that’s what we should be worried about instead.
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SubscribeAt last it comes together; a sound basis for a safe, reliable minimum-carbon energy mix for the UK’s future. After years of dither the government is committed to problem-solving investment in new nuclear power generation. Firstly, it has taken Merkel’s standing down, to expose the folly of Germany’s abandonment of nuclear power which resulted in more coal burning and reliance upon Russian gas. Secondly, a strategic and ethical shift in policy has ended the danger of any involvement by communist China in our energy supply. A short term shortage in petrol and diesel has raised the public perception of energy supply vulnerability. And, I am sure, the M25 blockaders have highlighted the utter irrationality of the climate change zealots, many of whom still hate and fear nuclear energy. Aris Rousinos has summarised some key arguments well, but a critical point should be made, that the UK has a domestic capability in the form of our Rolls Royce reactor technology. Better late than never we should develop a standard mini-reactor, for modular power production. There is a possible world-wide market for a low cost, flexible means of nuclear energy supply at variable scale and location. We do need sufficient political energy in the first instance however.
GRAHAM PYCOCK
“standard mini-reactor,” – great news if possible. The modest casket sized devices stored in the ground, replaced every 20 years promise to bring energy to neighborhoods. The devices can nearly stand alone or be interconnected giving us the future. If combined with flow batteries and solar, the devices can be even smaller. A power franchise for every council or community.
Nuclear is the only solution for the next 30 years. Particularly smaller plants with overlapping capacity leaving us strategically less vulnerable to shortages from down times and terrorist attack
I was thinking of terrorism when I read your comment … if we developed many smaller nuclear plants, how would we secure them all from terrorist attacks? I suppose big plants are the same – what would happen if a terrorist flew a ‘plane into a nuclear power plant?
And there’s the waste – which would also have to be secured from terrorists dispersing it in places we wouldn’t want it to be dispersed.
TheGreen movement in America is totally against nuclear..Disposal issues such a long transport times leaving open the issue of accidents. No national depository site that is politically acceptable. Terrorism, and NIMBY…are other impediments. The process and cost and approvals process in America is anything but quick. In fact it is glacial as the Green movement sues every and all initiatives they do not like. The weight of environments litigation generally grinds things to a halt. Perhaps needed items. Luddites in the Green movement would be perfectly fine to out law cars and make bicycles the only mode of transport. We might be allow candles. Nothing short of deindustrialization will satisfy some. Sigh, America is a very hard place to find common sense and compromise these days.
Perhaps the moral of the story is that it’s time for the USA to destroy the Tyranny of the Lawyers, so that its elected politicians can rule instead.
Modular small reactors promise a way around those impossible to construct huge plants.
I thought I kept up pretty well with current affairs, but it was a surprise to hear from this article that the government have announced a push to open lots of nuclear power plants by 2050. It would be wonderful if there was such a push, and even more so if it was accompanied by a PR campaign to start to overcome the opposition and its delaying tactics. Nuclear is indeed our only hope of reducing CO2 emissions significantly without economic and social collapse.
“Lots of nuclear power plants” sounds great if that is what is really on offer (meaning, I hope, the smaller Rolls-Royce reactors). Huge power plants like Sizewell C, however, may seem like the answer until you know what building one of these entails. For all the NIMBY’s objecting to the destruction of their and the local, natural environment for the next 15 years, it seems more like Armageddon, with a legacy of untreatable nuclear waste on an unstable coast for many generations to come. I do wish the advocates of nuclear power had more specific knowledge on the subject.
I have always been a fan of nuclear power and I can’t see any logical arguments against it. There are many emotive arguments which start, ‘What happens if….. ‘ but arguments like that exist for everything.
Perhaps the biggest argument against it is the NIMBY thing. People might support nuclear power as long as it was situated in Lancashire and Yorkshire, well away from the Home Counties.
We will never go to nuclear power because in our democracy each of the 64 million people has to say something and be heard carefully. By the time all the answers have been collated and considered everyone will have forgotten the question. I would suggest 42 as a good answer.
There was a nuclear reactor in London for many years and may still be there but inactivated. In the early 70s the Navy was trying to get me into the nuke (bombers) program. The engineer of the diesel boat I was then serving in told me that when he did his nuclear course at Greenwich Naval College they had a small reactor in the basement on which all of his his course had to watchkeep. I don’t think Ken Livingstone was ever informed of its presence.
These may have been more common across the world than you think. I know there was a small reactor like this in Madrid during the Franco years when they were making tenative efforts towards a nuclear program that never got that far before his death.
The biggest argument against it is the storage of nuclear energy. But there are practical solutions to the problem and the high-end figures pushed by anti-nuclear activists about thousands of years of radioactivity seem to ignore the fact that radioactivity is an exponentially decaying phenomenon, so that it is only actual dangerous for a far, far smaller proption of its existence.
I used to live in a small French town which had a nuclear power plant in its commune. It was extremely popular, because it paid huge local taxes, which not only reduced the rates on private houses to a laughable level compared to the commune next door, but the surplus paid for a state of the art swimming pool, mediatek, gymnasium ( and of course , mairie). The church was virtually rebuilt , the roads were replaced, the flower beds in the public square were wondrous.
and of course the presence of a large number of well paid employees bunked up the house prices, too.
not many nimbys there.
Mon Dieu! France, it seems, is truly a master of nuclear power, and the air in France is exceedingly clean. So why did they try to foist old school diesel submarines on those Down Under?
Nuclear power works. Problems, such as storage/disposal of nuclear waste can be solved, and more coal/fossil fuel is not the answer for many of the reasons posted here. But the left (at the time) concluded that nuclear was bad, end of story. Many navies–perhaps the US leads the way in this–really know how to do nuclear power. There is an untapped reservoir of expertise willing and able to safely run nuclear power plants. Let’s do it!
“So why did they try to foist old school diesel submarines on those Down Under?” The Aussies didn’t want to offend their neighbors NZ who refuse docking to nuclear ships.
Good article, I agree that nuclear is the only way but Oh My God! I had missed the AngloModernist article you linked to. I love it! I bought all the ladybird books for my daughter and read them to her from an early age to try to inoculate her against the post-modern rubbish that she would soon be exposed to and to give her an optimistic vision of Britain – its past and its future.
Boris should be digging out the collection – as you say, it is the blueprint for Britain.
Mass production of nuclear submarines. Park them under the offshore windfarms and connect them up. Environmentalists will believe wind power works, and neo-cons will believe national defence is being properly funded.
Nuclear is clearly necessary, although if we keep increasing its presence across the world using current technologies we will be up against the relatively limited supply of uranium. What we need are thorium based breeder reactors.
Interesting in the 70s there was a lot of research in the UK into molten salt reactors which could have developed many of the technologies realistic thorium breeder reactors will need. But then the anti-nulcear crowd came in and banned it all.
Excellent pithy article, but I would like to add that as someone who lives on the Suffolk coast, near to Sizewell, the UK has to go for a faster, more flexible approach than those currently on offer, such as the mini reactors proposed by Rolls Royce.
The French nuclear technology being proposed for Sizewell C has suffered huge problems at sites in Normandy and Finland and the costs are ballooning. Add to this a coast line that is continually eroding each year and you have to wonder whether this is not a massive white elephant in the making.
Yes to nuclear, but only if it is a sound, safe approach that is used.
I agree. Small is Beautiful.
“Our own government’s push to open 16 new nuclear power stations by 2050 should be welcomed by green campaigners.”
The year 2050 will be a great time to be alive, assuming that the next 6 parliaments can be trusted to stick to policy formulated today, but what do we do for the next 30 years? I often forget (and I doubt that I am alone in this) how utterly dependent we are on a reliably constant supply of affordable electric power – Every aspect of our lives, and not just our indulgencies, requires electric current somewhere in the chain, from your Amazon deliveries, to the money that you imagine is in your bank account, to the clean water that flows from your tap . Climate change may indeed be as important as some claim, but right now it is the least of our worries,
You make good points but in my view climate change isn’t the least of our worries, it’s just one of our many worries all of which need attention.
Perhaps we Aussies could placate France by purchasing a reactor or trois funded by coal sales to the PRC. It’s already dark and soon to be very cold there.
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