No silly season this time, thanks to AI

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WHAT'S UP!

In August 1955, the great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov published a short story named ‘Franchise’, in which he imagined what elections would be like in a futuristic society with advanced technology.

Asimov saw a society where general elections no longer took place, instead a supercomputer named Multivac chose one person who would make the decision on behalf of the whole electorate. Politicians still went through the process of campaigning and making all kinds of promises, for it was not known who among the populace Multivac will choose to cast the single vote.

How did that happen? How did they get there? As the story goes, elections had become something of a mess. A lot of money was spent on campaigns, which always led to inflation and a struggling economy for the next couple of years. Partisan sentiments had been rising to such an extent that violence always broke out and people died (sound familiar?).

To try and lessen the wait for the results, during which period some people succumbed to stress-induced malaises, a computer was used to try and predict how the results would turn out.

“The computer would look at the first few votes and compare them with the votes from the same places in previous years. That way, the machine could compute how the total vote would be and who would be elected,” Asimov wrote.

In the story, the computer got so good at predicting how the results would be that it eventually just needed one person (it was a man between 20 and 60 years of age, then) to cast the vote for everybody.

You really have to give it up to Asimov. The first modern electronic computer had only been invented about 10 years earlier, and here he was thinking about Artificial Intelligence as it would be in the 21^st century. Because what he envisioned as Multivac is easily the equivalent of modern AI.

How AI works is that it collects as much data as it possibly can, and then, based on that, makes predictions. An easy example is that Premier League pundit (but Man Utd hater) Chris Sutton, who makes predictions every week on how the games will go. He usually faces off against somebody else, and from last season, he has also been competing against AI.

So far, Sutton has bested AI, but with more and more data about the games, it is only a matter of time before AI can predict with an increasing level of confidence who will win the games.

As the AI being used, Copilot, said when asked if Sutton was better than it was: ‘over time, AI tends to improve as it absorbs more data and refines its models. Short term, Sutton's instincts and experience can give him an edge, especially in unpredictable fixtures. But long-term, AI may outperform with consistency and breadth, especially across hundreds of matches.

With time and enough data from enough matches, AI could get so incredibly correct that we would know with almost 100% certainty the results of the matches before they are played. That is what Asimov imagined 70 years ago.

So, if AI could do it for soccer, why not elections? Take Uganda, for example. If AI had access to all the election data over the last 40 years (coincidentally, Asimov writes that it took 40 years for Multivac to become good enough to determine who would win the elections), wouldn’t it be able to predict with an acceptable degree of confidence who would win our elections?

It is not as far-fetched as one would think; it is happening already. What the media call ‘exit polls’ are actually predictions based on partial results, and AI is being used to make them even more accurate. So, give AI enough data on the election process over the years, including how individual people voted, and I bet it would be able to tell who will win. Of course, the elections have to be ‘free and fair’.

So, imagine, no more campaign rallies, no more hooligans and boda riders high on substances riding crazy on the roads. No more closing roads because rallies are being held, and no more thugs getting an excuse to rob people. And definitely no more trucks laden with concert sound equipment, singing praises of candidates.

In Asimov’s story, it is not revealed till election day who the voter will be, or what part of the country they would be from. In Uganda’s case, it might be in Yumbe, or Kalangala, or Kamuli. It might be a farmer, a tea girl, a hawker or even a boda rider.

In that distant fall of 1955, Asimov thought all that could come to happen in 2008. Unfortunately, 17 years past Asimov’s dream, and we are still stuck with the silly season.

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