How Blockchain Can Improve American Politics

                                                 Credit: Arkansas Money & Politics

It’s no secret that American politics is broken. Our government is increasingly dysfunctional and ineffective, with citizen trust in government hovering near historic lows. Recent sessions of Congress have been amongst the most unproductive (in terms of bills becoming law), of all time. Partisan division is the worst it has been in several decades, with geographic segregation by political views, becoming a defining feature of American life. A prominent majority of the country expressing dissatisfaction and concern, with the direction that our nation is headed in.

A range of solutions have been offered. Some have called on Americans to speak with one another individually (so that we might better understand and empathize with our fellow citizens, despite our differences. Others have argued for reducing the influence of money in politics. Prominent analysts also believe that the process by which Congressional districts are drawn, and the closed nature of most primary elections are major culprits, for our current situation.

Each of these reforms merits consideration. Yet, there’s another approach, grounded in a relatively new technology, which could have a dramatic, transformative impact upon American politics: Blockchain.

First off, what exactly is blockchain? It’s a complex technology, but let’s review the basics.

As The Economist explains, blockchain is best known as the technology which underpins Bitcoin, by facilitating financial transactions, between individuals who don’t know each other, and without the involvement of a third party (i.e. a bank), since blockchain basically acts as a “trusted third party.” This system has helped make Bitcoin, while still not mainstream, increasingly popular. It does this through a mix of sophisticated mathematics, advanced computational tools, and cryptography.

Blockchain tracks, and provides proof of, the payment history and ownership of each and every bitcoin in existence, through a decentralized “distributed ledger” (that is, in various locations or“bitcoin nodes”, which is shared with every party within a required network). Thanks to this approach, transactions will only clear if they meet the requirements of the network/system, and there is a permanent record of all transactions (nothing can be erased). The graphic below, produced by the World Economic Forum, provides an excellent illustration of how this system works.

Credit: World Economic Forum (weforum.org)

Colin Turnbull offers an interesting analogy, to better understand how blockchain works. Imagine that a piano fell from the sky, onto the middle of a crowded city street. Dozens of bystanders witnessed the event, and each is strapped to a lie detector, independently, and shares what he or she saw. In the blockchain, each of these people would be the distributed “nodes” of the system, each registering an account of what they saw. The lie detector, is the cryptographic process, by which the truth of outcomes are verified, and in order for something false to be recorded, over half the people (of half the “nodes” in a system), would have to tell the exact same lie, without being able to coordinate. Obviously, this is rather difficult.

Blockchain carries disruptive potential, for applications far beyond bitcoin-based transactions. Because of how it facilitates and distributes trust and transparency in transactions between parties, blockchain is being used to validate property/land title transactions in the Republic of Georgia and elsewhere (helping ensuring authenticity of any property purchases, transfers, or claims, in places where falsification of documents and other fraudulent conduct runs rampant). Blockchain makes self-executing smart contracts possible, more easily facilitating a range of transactions, and reducing the need for middlemen like lawyers and brokers. It can help ensure better identity management and verification, both online and offline. In the world of finance, the promise of blockchain is nothing short of transformative, as it allows both for a significant reduction in transaction costs (both money and time), and an ability to decentralize, which will allow for new, innovative approaches to take root in areas like venture capital, payments, lending, and more.

What about politics? At first glance, this might seem like an unusual arena for blockchain applications. Unlike the examples cited earlier, politics isn’t a series of discrete, unemotional, clearly defined transactions. Rather, it tends to be highly contentious, ideological, and deeply grounded in social, cultural and economic identity (look no further than the Brexit vote, or the 2016 US presidential election). Yet, upon deeper examination, there are several compelling ways in which blockchain might be applied, to make American politics better.

One of the most obvious applications of blockchain, is in voting itself. The 2000 presidential election, which was a complete circus, replete with recounts of votes and “hanging chads.” In subsequent years, we’ve learned that voting machines are highly vulnerable to hacking (as seen most recently at the 2017 Def Con Convention in Las Vegas), which ultimately throws the integrity of elections into question, undermining our democracy.

How might blockchain help? As Ben Dickson explained in VentureBeat explained last year, because of the “distributed ledger” structure of blockchain, votes could be stored in many “independent nodes” (i.e. different locations), which would make modifying or tampering with votes “theoretically impossible.” In blockchain voting, each voter could be assigned a “wallet” (a sort of user identifier or credential), and a “coin” (that is, a chance to cast a vote), the results of which would be stored in various places. Platforms like Follow My Vote (a blockchain venture which allows for secure, anonymous voting, monitored in real time), and Blockchain Technologies Corporation (which combines blockchain voting with paper ballots) are leading the way in the United States.

To be clear, there are still challenges around blockchain-based voting (not least of which is that blockchain is traditionally anonymous, and meant to avoid the involvement of third parties, while voting is managed by governments, and requires verification of identities). Also, while blockchain votes might themselves might be secure, online voter identification (i.e. passcodes to gain access to the blockchain), can be vulnerable to hacking. Still, as these issues are gradually resolves, blockchain can improve voting mechanisms, which can in turn ensure trust in the electoral process.

Over the past 12 months, few catchphrases have become more prominent than “fake news.” Politifact named fake news as it’s 2016 “Lie Of The Year), thanks to Twitter accounts (many of which were bots) and websites which churned out a steady stream of misinformation. Numerous false stories went viral on Facebook, while BuzzFeed documented how teens in Macedonia created thousands of fake news websites, targeting American voters.

While it is difficult to be certain of the extent to which fake news swayed the election (towards any candidate), there’s little doubt that promotion of outright falsehoods, regardless of political viewpoint, isn’t helpful to the functioning of our democracy. It is difficult to have any real debate or discussion, around the best way forward, when individual citizens are working from completely different sets of facts, some of them patently untrue.

Blockchain offers solutions here as well. Warsaw-based startup Userfeeds is working to stem the spread of fake news, by using blockchain to implement a ranking framework, which uses a blockchain ledger, and “reputation tokens”, in order to offer a voting system. Users and publishers of content (as well as software developers), can offer their own rankings of content, which would be factored into search results, that is, deciding which content is actually shown to users of a platform, and in which order. Those who are ranking content, can also back the recommendations offered by others.

Userfeeds’ participants will be rewarded for productive behavior by digital tokens, which acts as a measure of authority and reputation. As Userfeeds noted in a recent Medium post, the incentives of platforms like Facebook, or online publishers (who typically optimize for clicks and advertising revenue), aren’t aligned with the motives of people who actually use the platform (i.e. they have no “skin in the game” as far as the actual veracity and quality of content) The company hopes to change that, and, as a result, limit the spread of fake news.

Augur offers another approach to tackling fake news. Augur is a bitcoin-based prediction market, where people are allowed to bet on outcomes of various events, while Augur pays another group of individuals, to verify or report what happened. For those who verify, a digital currency (known as the Rep), monitors an individual’s propensity for truth (whether someone is in fact reporting events accurately), by polling whether other people agree with the factual assessment offered by an individual — and if so, that individual will have their tokens returned, and be paid out in cash (a reward for being truthful).

As Augur grows in scale, the facts agreed upon by it’s “reporters” can be stored in blockchain ledgers, and tapped by applications like Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia, to measure the truth of any claim that is circulated (essentially, creating a crowdsourced “digital market for facts”, which stems the rapid spread of fake news). Remember, as with Turnbull’s “falling pianos” analogy, since the parties engaged in verification can’t coordinate with each other, a consensus of misinformation, becomes far less likely.

Blockchain can also do something far more radical than anything we’ve explored earlier: Remove politicians from politics, through blockchain-based direct democracy. As Sue Brideshead explains in Vice, political representatives “evolved out of necessity”, since in the early days of this country, it wouldn’t have been possible for citizens to travel to Washington DC for each vote. In today’s era, however, Brideshead argues that we might form voting districts through use of public records (based on geography and population numbers, rather than gerrymandering), and use a secured smartphone app, to vote directly on issues.

Brideshead proposes that in the United States, app-based democracy (powered by blockchain) ought to start at the local level, where political staffers (who would be hired more on merit, and less on partisanship and ties to special interests, as is the case today), will draft a basic version of a piece of legislation. This legislation will originate not from these staffers, but rather, from ideas proposed by voters. who would use the petition format, offered by Change.org, and the upvote model utilized by Reddit, to indicate interest. Text message alerts would guide this process, to ensure that a wide enough group of voters indicate interest in the issue.

Once a certain threshold is passed, government administrators will collaborate with the voter who originally proposed the petition, to draft a final version of the legislation, for consideration by the broader electorate. A majority of the electorate will then decide whether this legislation ought to become law. Broadside also argues that at higher levels of government, politicians and political parties could run on the implementation of a direct democracy voting system pledging that “I will set up a system for you to rule yourselves.” Over time, this voter-centric, blockchain system, could work it’s way up the political chain.

As Brideshead acknowledges, this system, like any new technology, faces some challenges, including voter apathy and lack of knowledge, to the potential for deliberate outside misinformation and manipulation. These issues will have to be resolved over time. Yet, as Brideshead argues, the system is broken, and change is needed. Blockchain-based democracy offers a solution, whereby voters are empowered.

Blockchain, whether applied to voting machines, news curation, or the political system itself, is not a panacea for the many challenges we face, in various areas of our political apparatus. A variety of strategies will be required, in order to bring about lasting change. Yet, blockchain offers a powerful mechanism to incentivize truth, and make coordination easier. We must give it a chance.

The Chatbots That Will Manipulate Us

                                                                  Credit: Parade.com

Humans are emotional beings. In fact, at some level, almost every human action is driven by our desire to experience pleasure and avoid pain, gain social acceptance and avoid rejection, and ultimately, to survive.

Also, contrary to what we’d like to believe, we are far from perfectly rational. Dan Ariely and Daniel Kahneman (and many others), have done an excellent job of exploring the mental flaws, biases, and reactions, that we manifest on a regular basis. An inherent degree of irrationality isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it can make us more effective thinkers, and bring a greater sense of meaning and control to our lives. Our less “logical” behavior, is quite likely evolutionary in nature, rooted in our hunter-gatherer past.

However, our biases, and varied emotional states, are also what makes us vulnerable to a new breed of chatbots, which are skilled at understanding and manipulating human behavior, and combining that knowledge with large data sets and more effective technology, to impact our lives in undesirable ways. As chatbots gain greater popularity, and enjoy more widespread adoption, we will need to develop effective strategies to guard against these dangers.

Ever since Alan Turing developed the eponymous Turing Test back in 1950, people have had an obsession with the idea of human-like intelligence in computers; more specifically, a computer that is indistinguishable from a person, in terms of the sort of responses it offers to various questions. Over the decades, computer scientists have developed software tools have are increasingly adept at communicating with people.

In 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum (a member of the then-emergent MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab) developed ELIZA, the first known chatbot, which used pattern matching to hold (simple, somewhat awkward) conversations with people. Interestingly, despite their awareness that they were communicating with a computer program, Eliza’s human counterparts still became “emotionally attached” to Eliza. Eliza was followed by Parry in 1972 (an AI version of a paranoid schizophrenic), Alice in 1995 (the chatbot most adept at communicating with humans, up to that point), Clippy in 1996 (assisted users of Microsoft Office), and SmarterChild in 2001 (if you were a teen or young adult in the early 2000’s, you might recall this chatbot, which was a part of AOL Instant Messenger, whom you could ask about the weather, news and more).

Each of these chatbots was, for it’s time, a noteworthy achievement. Today, however, we are on the cusp of a transformative era in both chatbot usage, as well as technological capabilities.

The rise of smartphones led to the release of Siri in 2011, as an intelligent assistant for the iPhone and other Apple devices, followed by Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Google Assistant. These chatbots might not yet pass the Turing test, and they still have a ways to go, in terms of offering contextually relevant answers, on a consistent basis. Yet, as Siri (and the others) leverage advanced strategies in machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing, these chatbots will learn from their shortcomings, and become better and better at communicating with us.

The major technology companies are locked in an arms race to make use of the latest advances in artificial intelligence, which, amongst other areas, will be incorporated into their chatbots. However, they won’t be the only players in this space. 80% of businesses (across a range of sectors) have indicated that they hope to deploy chatbots by 2020, given the utility in everything from customer service, to personalized user engagement, to sales itself. Analysts predict that every Fortune 1000 company will incorporate a chatbot into their technology platforms by 2017, while small businesses will adopt these technologies as well. In the United States, government agencies have already begun making use of chatbots for various roles, including communication with the public and training of employees. a trend that is likely to continue.  People have demonstrated a willigness to interact with chatbots, and share sensitive information as well.

Here’s where the story becomes even more interesting. Chatbots aren’t just a vehicle for impassive, functional communication, between people and software platforms. Rather, human behavior can be influenced by chatbot interaction. Researchers at Yale University recently found that inserting a bot into collaborative group tasks with humans, and arranging for it to behave in a somewhat uncooperative manner, altered the behavior of humans within this group. In Psychology Today, Liraz Margalit observes that the humans have a bias towards simplification, and avoiding complexity. Since chatbot interactions are far less emotionally demanding than person-to-person relationships, people might gravitate towards chatbots, at the expense of real human connection (this would offer chatbots even more power over us, as we become increasingly dependent upon them, for social fulfillment).

A team of computer scientists in China recently developed a basic version of an emotionally intelligent chatbot, which can better connect with humans, by responding to their current mental/emotional state. Meanwhile, New Zealand startup Soul Machines recently announced the release of Nadia, a video-based chatbot that can read user’s facial expressions and feelings, and adjusts accordingly. Clearly, chatbots are finding their way into our heads.

Let’s think about the possibilities here. Chatbots can be used for some really worthwhile purposes. Woebot, a chatbot based in Facebook messenger, developed by psychologists and AI researchers at Stanford, works to help people improve their mental health. Karim, a chatbot designed by Silicon Valley firm X2A1, fulfills some similar function for Syrian refugees, since victims of this conflict have suffered from high levels of depression. Chatbots are being used to simplify immigration processes, and provide legal aid for the homeless. And, as I explained in an earlier piece, chatbots can play a variety of useful roles for businesses, most prominently in customer service.

Of course, any technology that can be used for good, will also have some rather nefarious applications, and in the case of chatbots, that is something which we need to give some careful thought to. If a chatbot can become a digital companion to a human, and influence human behavior, through it’s understanding of our mental states, couldn’t it do so for negative purposes? ISIS and other terror groups often  recruit online, through one-on-one contact on Skype, Whatsapp, and various other Web platforms. Imagine if these organizations made these efforts more widespread and scalable with chatbots, which understood our biases, and emotional pain points. How many more prospective fighters might they bring into their organization, as a quicker pace?

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. As American diplomat and technologist Matt Chessen explains, “machine driven communication” will end up filling the comment sections, and other areas, of Twitter, Facebook, and other social web platforms, communicating in a way that is indecipherable from human communication (in fact, Chessen believes this will “overwhelm” human speech online). Chessen believes that AI systems will use existing knowledge of our individual preferences, to create a range of content online, which is designed to “achieve a particular outcome.”

Such a system could examine your personality and demographics data, and and the content you already consume, to create content “...everything from comments to full articles - specifically designed to plug into your particular psychological frame and achieve a particular outcome. This content could be a collection of real facts, fake news, or a mix of just enough truth and falsehood to achieve the desired effect.”

These tools would be able to communicate not only through text, but possibly also voice and video, and could use A/B testing, to figure out which messages are most powerful. Known as MADCOM, or machine driven communication tools, they might be used for rather nefarious motives, such as allowing governments and nations to “create the appearance of massive grassroots support (astroturfing)”, or by terror groups to “spread their messages of intolerance” or for “democracy suppression and intimidation.”

These chatbots will take various forms. Propaganda bots will “attempt to persuade and influence” through spreading a mix of truths and lies, while follower bots could create fake support for a cause or individual, and suppression bots can create various distractions and diversions, or, even worse, engage in outright intimidation. These bots can leverage a variety of “theories of influence and persuasion” (think of the methods detailed by Robert Cialdini), such as displaying authority, or using repetition of a message to create an impression that it is true, and thus become even more effective (again, let’s remember that we aren’t rational). Those bots which are designed for purposes of intimidation are perhaps the scariest of all, because they can draw upon personal information, such as financial and arrest records, to craft “precision guided messaging.” As always, let’s remember that artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning, allow these sorts of technologies to both improve and scale quickly, at a cost that will continue to decrease.

If all of this sounds a bit farfetched, let’s keep in mind that we are already in the early stages of this process. Massive bot networks already operate on Twitter, delivering automated messages, in a coordinated manner. Estimates suggest that between 9 to 15% of Twitter accounts are actually bots. Progress in machine learning has made it possible to generate increasingly realistic copycat audio and video of people, in order to effectively impersonate others. Chatbots might also create unique personas that we are likely to connect with (the movie Her might not be so farfetched after all). Thanks to an almost exponential rise in the amount of data available, there’s more information out there, on you and I, than ever before. And, as discussed earlier, robots are continuing to develop emotional intelligence, which will enable them to become only more persuasive (or, in this context, harmful and destructive).

So what’s the solution? It isn’t easy to say. Becoming more aware of our mental biases, and flaws in thinking patterns, might allow us to better guard against efforts to manipulate us. Blockchain could play a role in improving online authentication, and provide at least a partial antidote to the most destructive chatbots, as well as the spread of false information. Better regulation of artificial intelligence, at an international level, might also help (although attempts to stem the spread of technology, can often prove to be a futile endeavor). Or, we might end up taking steps that appear simply unthinkable today, and end up pulling back from a range of online platforms, including social media, where chatbots have simply become too dominant, and are aimed at causing us mental harm.

In the near future, chatbots are going to bring many changes to our lives. Let’s keep in mind that not all aspects of this transformation, will in fact be positive. For this reason, it is important that we take steps to guard against that which can cause real harm. Let’s proceed wisely.