In your TED talk , you mention that augmented democracy would work through the user providing data to an avatar and that avatar would predict decision and vote . Do you think these algorithms can become accurate enough to predict decisions affected by the countless experiences in someone ’ s life ?
Yes , at the moment we are working on creating an avatar using data we collected last year . I don ’ t know if you know this but there were riots and protests in Chile , Lebanon , Georgia and Colombia . In those four countries , we created platforms for people to express their political views online and now we are using that data to try to understand how political preferences are distributed and so forth . And the truth is that even though people have countless experiences , political opinions tend to be quite correlated . They can be explained by a few dimensions . If I tell you someone is a fan of Greta Thunberg and is also a vegan and is someone that is in favour of universal marriage and universal income , I ask you to predict , does that person vote for leave or remain ?
Remain . Yeah , I see .
Yeah . So , preferences are quite correlated . It ’ s because there are certain views of the world that we eventually acquire that help inform our preferences . If we believe people are inherently good , or that people are inherently bad and need to be policed , you know . Whether we believe that freedom is extremely important or that people should get the service of society and that freedom is a right that only you can earn through good behaviour .
Also , there are people who are working on similar technologies that are not in the context of politics but rather in a commercial context . A lot of communications companies are working on developing digital agents and avatars , for example you have an avatar with certain parameters to negotiate some vacation for you . You say , I want to be on vacation August next year , I have this budget , and I want to go to a place with tropical beaches . Then the avatar would negotiate with different travel agents to try find the best deal . That ’ s not something with a political implication like an avatar that votes on your behalf , but companies are working on digital twins . We are moving into a world where people will become overwhelmed by the amount of information they receive and the decisions they have to make and there will be a market for technologies in which you outsource those decisions .