The Future of Democracies and Voting on the Eve of the U.S. Election

November 7, 2016 – On Tuesday, November 8th, Americans go to the polls. As much as the focus has been on the Donald Trump show and Hillary Clinton, Americans are voting for Congress, the Senate, governors, mayors, judges, school boards, water boards, coroners, mosquito control boards, city councils, county executives, country licensing clerks, and even dog catchers. I don’t believe there is another country in the world that makes as many decisions based on popularity contests as does the United States. Based on one calculation I saw the number of elected officials totals more than 519,000.

In the 21st century the apparatus and methods used in elections has become a mishmash of low and high-technology solutions. Voting methods led to the dimpled chads controversy in Florida in 2000 and a contested election. Donald Trump talks about massive voter fraud even though studies have shown the incidence of such acts to be negligible. Politicians in the United States in control of electoral processes have redrawn district boundaries to perpetuate the power bases of the party in power. This gerrymandering practice has become endemic to the American political process.

So it would seem that change is needed. But what kind of change?

Peter Diamandis has shared with those who he sends his email blasts to, a vision of what the U.S. election of 2020 may be like. Of course he applies technology to the political process and comes up with ideas you probably never considered. To our American friends and readers, I hope you survive the vote tomorrow and make wise decisions about the people you choose to represent you in your democracy. The world is watching.

Here are Peter’s words.

If you think this election is insane, wait until 2020. Imagine how, in four years’ time, technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, sensors and networks will accelerate. Political campaigns are about to get hyper-personalized thanks to advances in a few exponential technologies. Imagine candidates who now know everything about you, who can reach you wherever you happen to be looking, and who can use information from social media (and intuited by machine learning algorithms) to speak directly to you and your interests. So here’s what future election campaign marketing might feel like.

Key Trends Four Years Hence

1. Social media will have continued to explode.

In 2016, 78% of Americans have social media profiles. This year, 162 million Americans (over 50%) will log onto Facebook at least once a month. In four years, these numbers will continue to grow. And, therefore, so will a campaign’s knowledge about you, who you are and what you care about.

AI agents built by political campaigns will track your every move, scraping your social graph, reading your tweets and posts, analyzing your Instagram photos, mining your publicly available data to know more about you than ever before. The single most important factor influencing your voting decision will be your social network. So you can bet that political campaigns will mine this data to find out who are your top social influencers, what stories you read and subjects that resonate with you.

2. Machine Learning/AI will be enhanced by a factor of 10.

This year, we saw chatbots emerge in a big way. Since Facebook opened Messenger it now has 11,000+ chatbots, where algorithms communicate with end users over it as if each were a person. By 2020, expect chatbots to get much more sophisticated. Also expect voice interfaces like Siri, Cortana, Google and Alexa to get much, much better. You’ll be able to carry on in-depth conversations with these AIs, and thanks to machine learning and the exponentially increasing amount of data about you that is self-generated each year, the AIs will learn to optimize communication with you in a personalized fashion. You’ll swear the technology will seem like your closest friend. The communications will incorporate your ideologies, preferences, choice linguistic styles and slang, favorite topics and content, and even add inside jokes to the conversation. It’s going to get very personal.

3. 50 billion devices and One trillion sensors will come online.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is growing exponentially. We will see billions of devices connected to the Web interacting with you daily. Your cars, your augmented-reality glasses and contact lenses, your computing devices, your biometric sensors, your home, office, appliances, restaurants, grocery stores, airports, airplanes and everything in between will be interconnected communicating with you and each other.

In this new interconnected world the machines will know the answer to questions like: Are voters who exercise frequently better Republican donors?

An AI will pick up on your movements, track your phone, and perhaps even monitor your heart rate. Ubiquitous cameras throughout the environment will image everything, everywhere. Imagine passing by a sidewalk display where the cameras and machine learning protocols pick up your face, know who you are and feed you personalized advertising. Spooky? Perhaps, but this kind of hyper-focused, targeted advertising is already starting to show up.

4. Digital avatars will become photo-realistic and fully programmable.

In four years, we’ll be able to fully manipulate photo-realistic avatars of candidates to say anything. This year, researchers out of Stanford University were able to take videos of humans and, in real-time, manipulate their faces to match expressions of another person in the lab. Scary. By the next election, this is going to get even better. We’ll be able to render any face to do and say anything, and you won’t be able to tell it’s a fake. Add this to advances in algorithmic audio dubbing, and we’ll be able to type text into a program which will then spit it out in the exact voice of the presidential candidate.

5. Micropayments, Smart Objects, and Blockchain applications will go mainstream.

In four years, it’s going to get easier and easier to pay for things. Mobile payments in 2016 will amount to over $600 billion. In 2020, this will likely be over $1 trillion. More than that, we’ll see a proliferation of apps that use “micro-payments,” small payments, from a fraction of a cent to just a few dollars, built on digital protocols like the Blockchain. You’ll be able to “flick” digital objects that contain value, like a Digital Political Sticker (which you by for $0.05) with your face on it, endorsing candidates from your phone to their smart billboards. I doubt the regulatory environment will move quickly enough for the next election to stop this from happening. And eventually using Blockchain we will vote in elections from our own devices.

Hyper-personalized Political Advertising: What it will feel like

The bottom line is that by 2020 elections are going to get very personal. Imagine candidate advertisements so personalized that they are scary in their accuracy and timeliness. For example, imagine you are walking down the street to your local coffee shop, and a photo-realistic avatar of the presidential candidate on a bus stop advertisement starts talking to you as you pass by and says: “Hi Peter, I’m running for president. I know you have two 5-year old boys going to kindergarten at XYZ School. Do you know that my policy means that we’ll be cutting tuition in half for you? That means you’ll immediately save $10,000 if you vote for me…” If you pause and listen, the candidate’s avatar may continue, “I also noticed that you care a lot about science, technology, and space exploration. I do too, and I’m planning on increasing NASA’s budget by 20% next year. Let’s go to Mars! I’d really appreciate your vote. Every vote and every dollar counts. Do you mind flicking me a $1 sticker to show your support?”

Fun times ahead.