Artificial Intelligence or AI, has been the hype of the tech industry. And it's not just an ordinary hype, as an ever-increasing number of companies are using the technology to aid them in certain automations and functions.
While the technology is improving as more and more people are developing and studying the field, many still felt skeptical. Many however, trust the technology so much that they rather have an AI-powered governments rather than humans.
That according to a survey called the European Tech Insights 2021, conducted by researchers at the IE Center for the Governance of Change.
In the survey, it was indicated that a majority of people in Europe would support replacing members of their respective parliaments with AI systems.
To come up with this result, the researchers interviewed 2,769 Europeans representing varying demographics, with questions that ranged from whether they’d prefer to vote via smartphone, to whether they’d replace existing politicians with algorithms if they have the chance.
And here, it seemed that a large number of them prefer to automate politics using computers.
Most of the respondents who agreed come from Spain (66%), Italy (59%) and Estonia (56%), whilst people in Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and Sweden are mostly against it.
The results also vary significantly by generation.
For example, younger respondents were more open to this idea, in which they showed more excitement about this measure. This is explainable, as younger individuals are more adventurous, and are more likely to embrace new technology, no matter how radical it is.
Older respondents on the other hand who are above 55 years told are mostly against it. This is also explainable, as older generations tend to be less tech-savvy than their younger counterparts
The U.S. and China also hold opposite views: 60% of Americans oppose it, while 75% of the Chinese support it.
But in overall, the survey seems to suggest that more people are trusting AIs, despite their reported flaws, more than their politicians.
AI can be smart in a way that it can do certain tasks faster and better than humans.
This is why the technology and its algorithms have been implemented in various of other technologies, including those that power apps and online services, to self-driving cars, robots and more.
But before AI can be implemented to things beyond that, there are many issues that should be addressed.
For example, among the many issues is that AI is known to be biased.
In many cases, the technology prefers White individuals and males, as opposed to females or people of colors. This happens because most AI systems were trained using data sets that were compiled by White males. Should ever AI-powered government and representatives be the future, researchers should at least solve this bias problem.
Another problem is called the "black box" that somehow hides AI's reasoning. While AI is getting better and better, it's this black box that make some AI results cannot be explained, even by those researchers and scientists who created them. And this black box is also making things worse at explaining its decisions than contemporary human politicians.
According to reports, the idea of this particular question at the survey, was to capture the “general zeitgeist” when it comes to public perception of their human representatives.
In other words, the researchers who conduct the survey, were trying to get a general idea of how people feel, which is in fact, not a scientifically accurate information.
