Post
Here's something AI would actually be good for. Feed it the nation's population information, with home addresses, but nothing about party affiliation, race, age, religion, wealth, or anything else. Tell it:
DRAW COMPACT ELECTORAL DISTRICTS
Everyone knows this would be fair. How did we stray so far from anything like it?
What does AI have to do with this? Pick four applied math grad students at random and they could do this in python, and we could check their work...
@eestileib I just mean machine intelligence rather than human intelligence. I don't mean chatbots and LLMS.
@gleick an LLM doesn’t have moral values to asses fairness with. Moreover, an LLM is biased by its training data, which is racist and sexist to just name a few things.
@koos That’s not the point. I'm not saying it's a job for a chatbot. And (as others have noted) no great AI capabilities are needed. The computer needs to be deprived of data about race and sex and given the plain (though complex) task of organizing districts according to geographical compactness. Moral values don't enter into it.
@gleick sorry, when people use the phrase AI nowadays, they mean LLM, or specifically ChatGPT. So confusing. I try to avoid using it altogether.
@gleick@mas.to @njf@social.lol @koos@mastodon.green You don't think people's addresses contain racial information? Oh, you sweet summer child...
@gleick I read an article a few months ago (wish I'd saved the URL) suggesting we should ditch geography and draw districts by age brackets (scattered throughout each state, not geographically contiguous).
I know, it sounds crazy at first, but reading the article, I became convinced. Age groups have at least as much in common as geographic groups, and it's impossible to gerrymander them.
Unfortunately it wouldn't help minorities - but it's probably better than our current gerrymandered system.
The major error in your plan is thinking they want fair electoral distribution
@gleick An AI will have be trained on _something_, maybe your existing drunkards walk boundaries? I feel it might be very unfair indeed, and nobody could criticise it, because nobody would know how it works.
A branch of the public service can do this job very well. (Like the branch you currently have that handles pensions). It is a straightforward clerical job, done, as you say, according to simple rules..
In Australia, we call it the Australian Electoral Commission https://www.aec.gov.au/redistributions - they do boundaries for all electoral purposes all across the federation. It works just fine.
I feel the USA's Reaganite(?) 'less government is better' trope has led you to this place. It is an ideology, not a fact.
@gleick I take your point, but would it be fair? I'd argue that the "fairness" would ultimately depend on how the models were trained and who controls them. Could anyone trust Grok (or any other proprietary black box) to generate fair maps?
@gleick we don’t need any AI for that, simple math would do
@gleick One of my "pet peeves" is that "AI" is not required for this.
It's just simple geography layered on population maps. You divide it by "number of reps" so that there are equal numbers of voters and the districts are as close to a circle as possible given state boundaries, etc.
No, it's not AI. AI can't help with this. It would actually hurt, because there would be no transparency to the solution.
Install bonfire.cafe
Get the full app experience
