A Surprising Number Of People Would Be Fine With AI Controlling The Government, According To Survey
Stock-Asso | Shutterstock AI can do pretty much anything at this point, from helping your kid with their homework to telling you why that cough may be persisting. But how much would you really trust AI to handle? Should it be making decisions that contribute to or detract from world peace?
Ever since AI became commonplace, the debate has been swirling around which jobs it will replace. People tend to think of creative jobs like writing and graphic design, which AI has already taken on a hefty portion of. But, it turns out there’s a good chunk of people who would actually be alright with AI running the government.
A new survey revealed that almost one-third of people would be okay with AI handling some of the tasks delegated to the government.
ELVTR, a platform that offers professional courses, polled 1,000 people who applied to take their courses recently. They noted, “These are mostly white-collar workers in tech, creative, and business roles: the people most likely to be using AI now, and most likely to be affected by it.” Of course, this specific survey took a look at the workforce as a whole and how attitudes towards AI are changing across the board.
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One interesting finding stood out, though. Some people argued that AI should be in control of at least some of the government. In fact, roughly 32% of respondents said that “maybe some departments” in the government would be better off if they were controlled by AI. Another 6.5% said they were okay with the idea of the government being fully run by AI.
Thankfully, not everyone has completely converted to AI and is ready to let it handle absolutely every aspect of life. There were 57% of participants who described working in the government as a “human-only job.” But, when asked which professions should be forced by law to only have human practitioners, only two-thirds said they would say governing roles had to be filled by humans.
Of course, this may have less to do with trust in AI than it does with the actual state of the government.
As ELVTR said, “Given widespread frustration with politics, that might be less about utopian faith in AI and more about disappointment with the status quo.” This certainly isn’t surprising. Pew Research Center has surveyed 12 “high-income” countries since 2017, including the U.S. Of the participants from those 12 countries, a median of 64% said they were dissatisfied with how their democracy functioned. Only 35% were satisfied.
Chances are, people are not suddenly ready for a revolution in which AI takes over the government and controls everything that humans used to. We probably won’t be arguing over which chatbot would make the best senator anytime soon. However, people are just generally so unhappy with how things are being handled in the government that they’re ready for some kind of change.
AI getting involved in the government isn’t impossible.
Ted Lechterman, the UNESCO Chair in AI Ethics and Governance, offered his own thoughts on AI getting involved in government in an essay for The Conversation. He discussed different ways AI could actually be integrated into the government. Somewhat shockingly, one of those methods is having chatbots run for office instead of human politicians, which has already happened in Russia and New Zealand. Another option is an algocracy, or “a regime run by algorithms” — no need for humans at all.
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These ideas seem radical to us now, but will they still seem unbelievable in 10 years, or maybe even less than that? As AI continues to become more pervasive and people likely only become more dissatisfied with the government, it’s possible that there will be a push to replace politicians with technology. While some people may be ready for that, others will see it as a scary day.
Mary-Faith Martinez is a writer with a bachelor’s degree in English and Journalism who covers news, psychology, lifestyle, and human interest topics.
