Like almost everybody I know, the shock of the election hasn’t yet worn off. Our family circle all got good and drunk the Wednesday after, singing R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World (as we know it)”, while doing shots of whatever was handy. We felt fine for the duration, but Thursday morning brought reality (and a hangover) crashing back down. I taught my classes that week to nearly dead silence. There were some questions about an upcoming exam, but otherwise I might have well been lecturing to an empty room.
Still, something has been bothering me about the election (besides the obvious). It should have been a slam-dunk. A serial rapist and convicted felon running against a qualified, intelligent and experienced candidate? With abortion rights a major issue, the economy humming along and gas prices (the most visible economic indicator to the average person) down, it was difficult to imagine how Harris could be beaten. However, I became increasingly uneasy about the possibility that she would lose after the failure of both the LA Times and Washington Post to endorse her. Did the tech moguls who owned those papers know that the fix was in?
The weird connection between Elon Musk and Trump was another red flag. Musk’s purchase of Twitter has been widely derided as a poor deal. But perhaps the value of Twitter to Musk was not monetary, but as a mine of information on people’s reaction to events, as well as the timing of those reactions. How long after something happens do emotions peak? What posts provoke the most emotional responses? By removing the necessity for fact checking, X became a real-time gauge of emotions, ripe for analysis by a suitably programmed AI.
AIs can be very specialized. Consider AlphaFold, an AI that has solved the protein folding problem and won its creators the Nobel Prize in chemistry this year. How does a protein arrive at the unique three-dimensional structure that gives it function, based solely on the linear sequence of amino acids that make it up? This has perplexed scientists since the first protein, insulin, was sequenced almost 70 years ago. Proteins chains range in length from a hundred to more than a thousand residues. With 20 different amino acids to choose from, there are essentially infinite possibilities for how they might fold. Yet fed on a diet of known protein structures and sequence information, AlphaFold can provide an accurate structure prediction for virtually any new protein sequence it is given. If this is possible, why not an AI programmed to predict the extent and timing of emotional responses to external stimuli? With the wealth of data provided by Twitter, this seems not only possible, but likely. In light of this, the timing and content of Trump’s closing rally at Madison Square Garden, at the center of the media world, appears particularly sinister. What better way to ensure that every voter would hear about and respond to it than to hold it in the spotlight?
Almost two years ago, not long after the debut of ChatGTP, I wrote a blog about the coming technological singularity, the point at which artificial intelligence outpaces than of humans. Now AI is everywhere. IPhone has Siri, with an eerie ability to listen in on us even when not directly invoked. Google’s AI “helper” appears with every search. These programs are ubiquitous: If you use any electronic device, AIs are listening, analyzing and digesting data about your fears, desires and motivations.
It may be that the re-election of Donald Trump was the first successful exercise in AI-directed social engineering. If that is true, “free and fair elections” are no longer possible. We can only hope that our AI overlords are benign.
Note added in postscript: I wrote this piece originally on the Friday after the election, but did not post it on P&P, mostly out of paranoia. But here are some links that make me think I am not alone in my suspicions. Thanks to my friend for these:
AI’s Fingerprints Were All Over the Election
Cybersecurity Experts Warn the Election was Hacked
And here is one from me:
Welcome to the Machine by Pink Floyd.