Is it just me, or are there other people here that are a little bit disappointed with democracy?
Da li je do mene, ili ovde ima i drugih ljudi koji su malo razočarani u demokratiju?
(Applause)
(Aplauz)
So let's look at a few numbers. If we look across the world, the median turnout in presidential elections over the last 30 years has been just 67 percent. Now, if we go to Europe and we look at people that participated in EU parliamentary elections, the median turnout in those elections is just 42 percent. Now let's go to New York, and let's see how many people voted in the last election for mayor. We will find that only 24 percent of people showed up to vote. What that means is that, if "Friends" was still running, Joey and maybe Phoebe would have shown up to vote.
Pogledajmo neke brojke. Ako pogledamo širom sveta, prosečna izlaznost na predsedničkim izborima u proteklih 30 godina je bila svega 67 procenata. Ako pođemo do Evrope i pogledamo ljude koji su učestvovali na parlamentarnim izborima EU, prosečna izlaznost na tim izborima je svega 42 procenta. Pođimo sad u Njujork, i pogledajmo koliko je ljudi glasalo na poslednjim izborima za gradonačelnika. Otkrićemo da se svega 24 procenta ljudi pojavilo na glasanju. To znači da kad bi se i dalje prikazivali „Prijatelji”, Džoi i možda Fibi bi se pojavili na glasanju.
(Laughter)
(Smeh)
And you cannot blame them because people are tired of politicians. And people are tired of other people using the data that they have generated to communicate with their friends and family, to target political propaganda at them. But the thing about this is that this is not new. Nowadays, people use likes to target propaganda at you before they use your zip code or your gender or your age, because the idea of targeting people with propaganda for political purposes is as old as politics. And the reason why that idea is there is because democracy has a basic vulnerability. This is the idea of a representative.
I ne možete da ih krivite, jer je ljudima dosta političara. I ljudima je dosta drugih ljudi koji koriste podatke koje su oni stvorili da bi razgovarali sa prijateljima i porodicom, kako bi usmeravali političku propagandu na njih. Međutim, radi se o tome da ovo nije novina. Danas ljudi koriste lajkove radi ciljane propagande ka vama, a nekad su koristili poštanski broj, vaš pol ili vaš uzrast, jer je ideja ciljanja ljudi u svrhe političke propagande stara koliko i politika. A razlog zašto je ta ideja prisutna je zato što demokratija ima osnovnu ranjivost. A radi se o ideji zastupnika.
In principle, democracy is the ability of people to exert power. But in practice, we have to delegate that power to a representative that can exert that power for us. That representative is a bottleneck, or a weak spot. It is the place that you want to target if you want to attack democracy because you can capture democracy by either capturing that representative or capturing the way that people choose it. So the big question is: Is this the end of history? Is this the best that we can do or, actually, are there alternatives?
U principu, demokratija je mogućnost da ljudi vrše vlast. U praksi, međutim, moramo da delegiramo tu moć zastupniku koji može da vrši vlast za nas. Taj zastupnik je usko grlo, ili slaba tačka. To je mesto koje biste ciljali, ako želite da napadnete demokratiju, jer možete da kontrolišete demokratiju bilo kontrolisanjem tog zastupnika ili kontrolisanjem načina na koji ga ljudi biraju. Veliko pitanje glasi: da li je ovo kraj istorije? Da li je ovo najbolje što možemo ili zapravo postoje alternative?
Some people have been thinking about alternatives, and one of the ideas that is out there is the idea of direct democracy. This is the idea of bypassing politicians completely and having people vote directly on issues, having people vote directly on bills. But this idea is naive because there's too many things that we would need to choose. If you look at the 114th US Congress, you will have seen that the House of Representatives considered more than 6,000 bills, the Senate considered more than 3,000 bills and they approved more than 300 laws. Those would be many decisions that each person would have to make a week on topics that they know little about. So there's a big cognitive bandwidth problem if we're going to try to think about direct democracy as a viable alternative.
Neki ljudi su razmišljali o alternativama, a jedna od zamisli u opticaju je zamisao o direktnoj demokratiji. Radi se o zamisli zaobilaženja političara u potpunosti, gde ljudi direktno glasaju o pitanjima, direktno glasaju za predloge zakona. Međutim, ova ideja je naivna, jer ima previše stvari koje bismo morali da biramo. Ako pogledate 114. kongres SAD-a, videćete da je Predstavnički dom razmatrao preko 6 000 predloga zakona, Senat je razmatrao preko 3 000 predloga zakona, a odobrili su preko 300 zakona. To bi bile brojne odluke koje bi svaka osoba morala nedeljno da donese, o temama o kojima malo znaju. Dakle, imamo veliki problem sa kognitivnim opsegom ako ćemo da razmišljamo o direktnoj demokratiji kao mogućoj alternativi.
So some people think about the idea of liquid democracy, or fluid democracy, which is the idea that you endorse your political power to someone, who can endorse it to someone else, and, eventually, you create a large follower network in which, at the end, there's a few people that are making decisions on behalf of all of their followers and their followers. But this idea also doesn't solve the problem of the cognitive bandwidth and, to be honest, it's also quite similar to the idea of having a representative. So what I'm going to do today is I'm going to be a little bit provocative, and I'm going to ask you, well: What if, instead of trying to bypass politicians, we tried to automate them?
Pa neki ljudi razmatraju ideju tečne demokratije ili fluidne demokratije, a to je ideja da date punomoć za vašu političku moć nekome, ko može tu punomoć dati nekom drugom, da biste na kraju stvorili veliku mrežu pratilaca u kojoj se na kraju nalazi nekolicina ljudi koja donosi odluke, u ime svih njihovih pratilaca i pratilaca tih pratilaca. Međutim, ni ova ideja ne rešava problem kognitivnog opsega, i iskreno, prilično je slična ideji da imate zastupnika. Zato ću ja danas da budem malo provokativan, pa ću vas pitati: šta ako bismo umesto pokušavanja da zaobiđemo političare, pokušali da ih automatizujemo?
The idea of automation is not new. It was started more than 300 years ago, when French weavers decided to automate the loom. The winner of that industrial war was Joseph-Marie Jacquard. He was a French weaver and merchant that married the loom with the steam engine to create autonomous looms. And in those autonomous looms, he gained control. He could now make fabrics that were more complex and more sophisticated than the ones they were able to do by hand. But also, by winning that industrial war, he laid out what has become the blueprint of automation.
Ideja automatizacije nije nova. Pokrenuta je pre više od 300 godina, kada su francuski tkači odlučili da automatizuju razboj. Pobednik tog industrijskog rata je bio Žozef-Mari Žakard. On je bio francuski tkalac i trgovac koji je spojio razboj sa parnim motorom kako bi napravio automatski razboj. Sa tim automatskim razbojima on je pridobio kontrolu. Sada je mogao da pravi materijale koji su složeniji i prefinjeniji od onih koji su pravljeni ručno. Međutim, pobedom u tom industrijskom ratu postavio je i temelje nečemu što će postati obrazac automatizacije.
The way that we automate things for the last 300 years has always been the same: we first identify a need, then we create a tool to satisfy that need, like the loom, in this case, and then we study how people use that tool to automate that user. That's how we came from the mechanical loom to the autonomous loom, and that took us a thousand years. Now, it's taken us only a hundred years to use the same script to automate the car. But the thing is that, this time around, automation is kind of for real.
Način na koji automatizujemo stvari u proteklih 300 godina je oduvek bio isti: prvo identifikujemo potrebu, potom napravimo oruđe da zadovoljimo potrebu, poput razboja u ovom slučaju, a potom izučavamo kako ljudi koriste to oruđe da bismo automatizovali korisnika. Tako smo prešli sa mehaničkog razboja na automatski razboj, a za to nam je bilo potrebno hiljadu godina. Bilo nam je potrebno svega sto godina da korstimo isti scenario da automatizujemo automobil. Međutim, radi se o tome da je ovaj put automatizacije nekako stvarna.
This is a video that a colleague of mine from Toshiba shared with me that shows the factory that manufactures solid state drives. The entire factory is a robot. There are no humans in that factory. And the robots are soon to leave the factories and become part of our world, become part of our workforce. So what I do in my day job is actually create tools that integrate data for entire countries so that we can ultimately have the foundations that we need for a future in which we need to also manage those machines.
Ovo je snimak koji je moj kolega iz Tošibe podelio sa mnom. On pokazuje fabriku koja proizvodi poluprovodničke diskove. Čitava fabrika je robot. Nema ljudi u fabrici. A roboti će uskoro da napuste fabrike i da postanu deo našeg sveta, deo naše radne snage. Dakle, moj dnevni posao je zapravo stvaranje oruđa koja integrišu podatke celokupnih država kako bismo na kraju imali potrebne osnove za budućnost u kojoj moramo i da upravljamo tim mašinama.
But today, I'm not here to talk to you about these tools that integrate data for countries. But I'm here to talk to you about another idea that might help us think about how to use artificial intelligence in democracy. Because the tools that I build are designed for executive decisions. These are decisions that can be cast in some sort of term of objectivity -- public investment decisions. But there are decisions that are legislative, and these decisions that are legislative require communication among people that have different points of view, require participation, require debate, require deliberation. And for a long time, we have thought that, well, what we need to improve democracy is actually more communication. So all of the technologies that we have advanced in the context of democracy, whether they are newspapers or whether it is social media, have tried to provide us with more communication. But we've been down that rabbit hole, and we know that's not what's going to solve the problem. Because it's not a communication problem, it's a cognitive bandwidth problem. So if the problem is one of cognitive bandwidth, well, adding more communication to people is not going to be what's going to solve it. What we are going to need instead is to have other technologies that help us deal with some of the communication that we are overloaded with. Think of, like, a little avatar, a software agent, a digital Jiminy Cricket --
Međutim, danas nisam ovde da vam pričam o tim oruđima koja integrišu državne podatke, nego sam ovde da govorim o jednoj drugoj ideji koja bi nam mogla pomoći u razmišljanju kako da koristimo veštačku inteligenciju u demokratiji. Jer su oruđa koja sam napravio dizajnirana za izvršne odluke. To su odluke koje mogu da se donesu u nekom obliku objektivnosti - odluke o javnim investicijama. Međutim, postoje zakonodavne odluke, a te zakonodavne odluke zahtevaju komunikaciju među ljudima koji imaju različite tačke gledišta, zahtevaju učešće, debatu, zahtevaju razmatranje. Dugo vremena smo smatrali da, kako bismo unapredili demokratiju, zapravo nam je potrebno više komunikacije. Pa su sve tehnologije koje smo unapredili u tom kontekstu demokratije, bilo da se radi o novinama ili društvenim mrežama, pokušale da nam obezbede više komunikacije. Ali već smo prošli tu zamku i znamo da to neće da reši problem. Jer se ne radi o problemu u komunikaciji, radi se o problemu kognitivnog opsega. Ako se radi o problemu kognitivnog opsega, dodavanje više komunikacije među ljudima neće rešiti problem. Umesto toga će nam biti potrebne nove tehnologije, koje će nam pomoći da se rešimo dela ove komunikacije kojom smo zatrpani. Zamislite na primer, malog avatara, softverskog agenta, digitalnog cvrčka iz Pinokija, Džiminija -
(Laughter)
(Smeh)
that basically is able to answer things on your behalf. And if we had that technology, we would be able to offload some of the communication and help, maybe, make better decisions or decisions at a larger scale. And the thing is that the idea of software agents is also not new. We already use them all the time. We use software agents to choose the way that we're going to drive to a certain location, the music that we're going to listen to or to get suggestions for the next books that we should read.
koji je u stanju da odgovara u vaše ime. Ako bismo imali tu tehnologiju, bili bismo u stanju da se oslobodimo dela te komunikacije, i možda pomognemo donošenju boljih odluka ili odluka većeg obima. Stvar je u tome da ideja o softverskim agentima nije nova. Već ih stalno koristimo. Koristimo softverske agente da odlučimo put kojim ćemo da vozimo do određene lokacije, koju ćemo muziku slušati, ili da nam preporuče sledeću knjigu koju bi trebalo da pročitamo.
So there is an obvious idea in the 21st century that was as obvious as the idea of putting together a steam engine with a loom at the time of Jacquard. And that idea is combining direct democracy with software agents. Imagine, for a second, a world in which, instead of having a representative that represents you and millions of other people, you can have a representative that represents only you, with your nuanced political views -- that weird combination of libertarian and liberal and maybe a little bit conservative on some issues and maybe very progressive on others. Politicians nowadays are packages, and they're full of compromises. But you might have someone that can represent only you, if you are willing to give up the idea that that representative is a human. If that representative is a software agent, we could have a senate that has as many senators as we have citizens. And those senators are going to be able to read every bill and they're going to be able to vote on each one of them.
Dakle, postoji očigledna ideja u 21. veku koja je jednako očigledna kao i ideja da se sastave parni motor i razboj u Žakardovo vreme. A ta ideja je kombinovanje direktne demokratije i softverskih agenata. Zamislite za trenutak svet u kome, umesto što imate zastupnika koji zastupa vas i milione drugih ljudi, možete da imate zastupnika koji zastupa samo vas, sa vašim nijansiranim političkim stavovima - tu čudnu kombinaciju libertarijanca i liberala, i možda po nekim pitanjima malo konzervativca, a po nekim drugim, vrlo progresivnog. Današnji političari su paketi i puni su kompromisa. Međutim, možete da imate nekoga ko može da predstavlja samo vas, ako ste spremni da odustanete od ideje da je zastupnik ljudsko biće. Da je taj zastupnik softverski agent, mogli bismo da imamo senat koji bi imao onoliko senatora koliko imamo stanovnika. A ti senatori bi bili u stanju da čitaju svaki predlog zakona, i da glasaju o svakom od njih.
So there's an obvious idea that maybe we want to consider. But I understand that in this day and age, this idea might be quite scary. In fact, thinking of a robot coming from the future to help us run our governments sounds terrifying. But we've been there before.
Dakle, imamo očiglednu ideju koju bismo možda želeli da razmotrimo. Međutim, razumem da u današnje vreme ova ideja može biti prilično zastrašujuća. U stvari, razmišljati o robotu koji dolazi iz budućnosti da nam pomogne da vodimo države zvuči zastrašujuće. Međutim, već smo to doživeli.
(Laughter)
(Smeh)
And actually he was quite a nice guy.
I zapravo je bio prilično fin momak.
So what would the Jacquard loom version of this idea look like? It would be a very simple system. Imagine a system that you log in and you create your avatar, and then you're going to start training your avatar. So you can provide your avatar with your reading habits, or connect it to your social media, or you can connect it to other data, for example by taking psychological tests. And the nice thing about this is that there's no deception. You are not providing data to communicate with your friends and family that then gets used in a political system. You are providing data to a system that is designed to be used to make political decisions on your behalf. Then you take that data and you choose a training algorithm, because it's an open marketplace in which different people can submit different algorithms to predict how you're going to vote, based on the data you have provided. And the system is open, so nobody controls the algorithms; there are algorithms that become more popular and others that become less popular. Eventually, you can audit the system. You can see how your avatar is working. If you like it, you can leave it on autopilot. If you want to be a little more controlling, you can actually choose that they ask you every time they're going to make a decision, or you can be anywhere in between. One of the reasons why we use democracy so little may be because democracy has a very bad user interface. And if we improve the user interface of democracy, we might be able to use it more.
Kako bi Žakardova ideja razboja u ovoj verziji izgledala? To bi bio veoma jednostavan sistem. Zamislite sistem u koji se ulogujete i napravite svoj avatar, a potom počinjete da obučavate svog avatara. Možete da prenesete na vaš avatar soptvene čitalačke skolonosti, ili da ga povežete sa vašim društvenim mrežama, ili da ga povežete s drugim podacima, na primer, rešavajući psihološke testove. Dobra stvar kod ovoga je ta što nema obmane. Ne dajete podatke kako biste komunicirali sa prijateljima i porodicom, a da se to kasnije koristi u političkom sistemu. Pružate podatke sistemu koji je osmišljen da se koristi kako bi donosio političke odluke u vaše ime. Potom uzmete te podatke i odaberete algoritam za obuku, jer se radi o otvorenom tržištu, u kome različiti ljudi mogu da prilože različite algoritme kako bi predvideli kako ćete da glasate na osnovu podataka koje ste ponudili. A sistem je otvoren, dakle, niko ne kontroliše algoritme; tu su algoritmi koji će biti popularniji i drugi koji će da budu manje popularni. Naposletku, možete da revidirate sistem. Možete da vidite kako vaš avatar funkcioniše. Ako vam se dopada, stavite ga na sistem autopilota. Ako želite da imate malo veću kontrolu, možete zapravo da odaberete da vas pitaju kad god treba da donesu neku odluku, ili možete da budete negde u sredini. Jedan od razloga zašto tako malo koristimo demokratiju je možda taj što demokratija ima veoma loš korisnički pristup. Ako bismo unapredili korisnički pristup demokratije, možda bismo mogli da je više koristimo.
Of course, there's a lot of questions that you might have. Well, how do you train these avatars? How do you keep the data secure? How do you keep the systems distributed and auditable? How about my grandmother, who's 80 years old and doesn't know how to use the internet? Trust me, I've heard them all. So when you think about an idea like this, you have to beware of pessimists because they are known to have a problem for every solution.
Naravno, verovatno imate gomilu pitanja. Kako da obučavate ove avatare? Kako da vaši podaci budu bezbedni? Kako da vaš sistem bude raspodeljen i podložan reviziji? Šta je sa mojom bakom koja ima 80 godina i ne zna kako da koristi internet? Verujte mi, sva ta pitanja sam čuo. Kada razmišljate o ovakvoj ideji, morate da se pazite pesimista, jer su poznati po tome što imaju problem za svako rešenje.
(Laughter)
(Smeh)
So I want to invite you to think about the bigger ideas. The questions I just showed you are little ideas because they are questions about how this would not work. The big ideas are ideas of: What else can you do with this if this would happen to work? And one of those ideas is, well, who writes the laws? In the beginning, we could have the avatars that we already have, voting on laws that are written by the senators or politicians that we already have. But if this were to work, you could write an algorithm that could try to write a law that would get a certain percentage of approval, and you could reverse the process. Now, you might think that this idea is ludicrous and we should not do it, but you cannot deny that it's an idea that is only possible in a world in which direct democracy and software agents are a viable form of participation.
Želim da vas pozovem da razmišljate o većim idejama. Pitanja koja sam vam upravo pokazao su male ideje, jer se radi o pitanjima zašto ovo ne bi funkcionisalo. Velike ideje su: šta još možemo da uradimo s ovim, ukoliko bi ovo funkcionisalo? A jedna od tih ideja je: ko piše zakone? U početku bismo mogli da imamo avatare koje već imamo, koji glasaju za zakone koje su pisali senatori ili političari koje već imamo. Međutim, ako bi ovo proradilo, mogli biste da napišete algoritam koji bi pokušao da napiše zakon koji bi dobio određen procenat podrške, i mogli biste da obrnete proces. Možda smatrate da je ova ideja smešna i da ne bi trebalo to da radimo, ali ne možete da negirate da je ova ideja jedino moguća u svetu u kome su direktna demokratija i softverski agenti održivi oblici učešća.
So how do we start the revolution? We don't start this revolution with picket fences or protests or by demanding our current politicians to be changed into robots. That's not going to work. This is much more simple, much slower and much more humble. We start this revolution by creating simple systems like this in grad schools, in libraries, in nonprofits. And we try to figure out all of those little questions and those little problems that we're going to have to figure out to make this idea something viable, to make this idea something that we can trust. And as we create those systems that have a hundred people, a thousand people, a hundred thousand people voting in ways that are not politically binding, we're going to develop trust in this idea, the world is going to change, and those that are as little as my daughter is right now are going to grow up. And by the time my daughter is my age, maybe this idea, that I know today is very crazy, might not be crazy to her and to her friends. And at that point, we will be at the end of our history, but they will be at the beginning of theirs.
Kako da otpočnemo revoluciju? Ne započinjemo ovu revoluciju tarabama ili protestima, ili zahtevajući od trenutnih političara da se pretvore u robote. To neće funkcionisati. Ovo je mnogo jednostavnije, mnogo sporije i mnogo skromnije. Počinjemo revoluciju stvarajući proste sisteme poput ovog na fakultetima, ili u bibliotekama, neprofitnim organizacijama. I pokušavamo da shvatimo sva ta mala pitanja, te male probleme, koje ćemo morati da rešimo da bi ova ideja postala održiva, kako bi ova ideja postala nešto čemu možemo verovati. Kako stvaramo ove sisteme sa stotinama, hiljadama, stotinama hiljada ljudi koji glasaju na načine koji nisu politički obavezujući, izgradićemo poverenje u ovu ideju, svet će se promeniti, a oni koji su mladi, kao moja ćerka danas, će odrasti. A kad moja ćerka bude mojih godina, možda će ova ideja, za koju znam da danas zvuči sumanuto, njoj i njenim prijateljima neće biti sumanuta. A u tom trenutku, mi ćemo biti na kraju naše istorije, ali oni će biti na početku njihove.
Thank you.
Hvala vam.
(Applause)
(Aplauz)