Concrete Achievements

Tag: ai

  • No AI UBI without AI taxation

    Stephen Bush has a good piece in today’s FT, pointing out that the state pension is a form of live test of a UBI, a universal basic income. Pensioners don’t just sit around and do nothing, for the most part. Some continue to work, some do local volunteering, some travel.

    It’s an important issue, he points out, because a UBI is one of the solutions for a world where AI and advanced robotics have destroyed an enormous number of jobs, without replacing many of them.

    It’s worth a read, and it makes a convincing case, but the issue that isn’t mentioned, which jumped out at me, is – where does the money come from for paying the “AI state pension”?

    If the companies making the money are – as they probably will be – mostly digital and mostly non-European, how are we going to tax the profits that they are making in ways that will give the State revenue? It’s hard enough as it is, when there are buildings full of office workers in Luxembourg and Cork, all beavering away in an undertaxed paradise.

    I don’t have an answer, but taxing AI-driven profits is one of the social and economic questions that we need to address as AI has an increasing impact on jobs and society. If we don’t, we will end up pressuring smaller businesses that have no choice but to stay local, or imposing regressive taxes on consumption.

    If anyone has seen any interesting research on this, I’d be glad to see it.

  • Synthetic publics can’t see the future

    Listening to a presentation on synthethic publics*, something we’re increasingly seeing discussed in the participation and democracy space.

    Reassuringly, the research suggests that while synthetic publics are good at matching public opinion survey results on existing situations, they are not good at addressing new situations.

    On one level, this is what you’d expect – the training data exists for the past, not the future. The AI is guessing what a group of people in the past might think, it’s difficult for it to take new situations into account.

    I say it’s reassuring, though, because for me democracy is about defining the future, not commentary on the past. I don’t think an aggregate of past public opinion could ever be a reliable source for synthetic democratic participation, because the nature of being citizen is having a vision of the future, and working out in society how to deliver it.

    That doesn’t mean we should ignore AI in our field, of course, there are plenty of organisations thinking hard about how to use it, and Democratic Society is one of them (I’m about to speak on a panel on this very topic). But this is further evidence that it should be used to enhance participation and deliberation, not to replace it.

    * (where existing public opinion research is aggregated and the data is queried using AI to get a synthetic public opinion on an issue, or AI personas are created who can be interacted with as if in an interview).