Will Robots Want to Vote?

Originally posted to Medium on May 20, 2016, this piece was adapted from my remarks delivered at the 23rd Annual Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship Awards Dinner held at the National Press Club on Wednesday, May 11, 2016. My project investigated the potential impact of artificial intelligence on democracy and its ability to influence elections. I will be posting over the next few days a summary of my work, as well as the work itself in its enterity as a series. Given the state of affairs, I wanted to publish this to the blockchain.

If you liked this post, please consider sharing, commenting, and upvoting. Thank you in advance for reading,

- Josh

---

Est. Reading Time: 2 min

---

Image Credit: Steve Baker (CC BY-ND 2.0) | Source: Flickr

---

Hello, everyone. For those of you who haven’t met me yet, I’m Josh, and this year I will be writing about how the robots may or may not be coming to kill us all.

And so before I briefly get into that, I just want to say a quick thank you to The Fund for American Studies for this opportunity. I’ve been working toward this fellowship since I first began my journalism career in DC over five years ago, and I am quite excited for the privilege to join the company of some of the best journalists on the planet, many of whom are here in this room tonight.

Bar room jokes about robot uprisings aside, humanity’s storytellers have pondered the question of machines imbued with the human spirit ever since the time of the Ancient Greeks. But what was once relegated to the realm of the fantastical is now becoming science fact.

Currently, human civilization is on the bleeding edge of what many to be a seismic shift not seen since the agricultural revolution allowed us to abandon the necessity of our hunter gather origins.

Major tech companies such Google and Facebook, which have already, some would say, fundamentally transformed our society, are investing in artificial intelligence technologies, and policy makers are seriously considering the potential impact thinking machines will have on the future of work.

---

^{23rd Annual Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship Awards Dinner held at the National Press Club on Wednesday, May 11, 2016. My remarks begin at 21:40.}

---

As stewards of the great American experiment of self-governance under the rule of law, it would be a mistake to not also consider their power to influence the outcome of elections as well.

I believe we need to consider how these emerging technologies will impact the future of democracy. Do I believe that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s robot assassin doppelgänger is going to be kick down our door? No, not necessarily.

But I do wonder how the minimum wage worker who loses their fast-food job to a self-service kiosk will vote. And I wonder about the decisions of the machines who serve up my search results and newsfeed items, and I wonder about the humans who program them.

And so these are the things that I will be looking into over the next year. Because in reality, as we look to create these machines in our image, it is important to consider what kind of image we want staring back at us.

Thank you.

---

More Posts by Josh Peterson

---

• Putting together resources for new Steemit users and non-users
• Why is it taking so long to approve new accounts?
• Helping introduce non-Steemians to Steemit
• Lessons from 50 days on Steemit
• Why am I angry all of the time and where did my friends go?
• My first Steemit post: Introducing myself, and some initial thoughts

---

View History

---

View Steemit blockchain activity/edit history | View draft edit history on Github

---

Josh Peterson is a 2016 Robert Novak Journalism Program Fellow and a writer living in Denver, CO.* *Follow Josh on Steemit and Twitter. Keybase for secure chat. PGP Fingerprint: 4507 3000 1A40 2691 DAB8 ED65 A3EA 3629 73FD B7FF.

---

Cryptocurrency Wallets

• BTC: 14LE7Jv4NZXgtWq876RUdSUVKfZs7rcnzf
• ETH: 0x4Dc807c3409Ba225d7Fc07fFd97d219613E11d31
• DASH: XhMDF7PjkYsT1wiYREDDewxnDPNSjNWpc8

Need a Bitcoin wallet? Use my referral link to download a mobile Airbitz wallet.

---

For more information on STEEM and Steemit

If you're new to Steem and Steemit and would like to know more, check out the platform's FAQ, and Steem.Center, a Steemit-focused wiki built and maintained by the platform's users. Also check out @minnowsupport.

• Interact with the Steem blockchain through several different platforms: Steemit, Steemd, SteemDB, Busy.org, ChainBB.

• Other Steem apps include dTube , dSound, Steepshot, and dMania. Mobile apps include eSteem, Steepshot, and SteemApp.

• Enhance your Steemit desktop browser experience by downloading the Steemit More Info browser extension for Chrome and Firefox.

• New to blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies? Check out @heiditravels' videos on Steemit and YouTube to learn more.

If you're not on Steemit, but would like another way to show your appreciation for this piece besides sharing it on Facebook or Twitter, or you'd like to comment on it, please consider signing up for a Steemit account and voting for this piece. It doesn't get cost anything to sign up, and votes are really important because that's how I get paid on here. Thank you in advance. - Josh

^{Signature created by @joshpeterson. If you'd like a copy of the code to make your own extension, click here.}

---

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.