How Will AI Vote in Upcoming Elections? – Fat Tail Daily

Is this the year Artificial Intelligence (AI) destroys democracy? It sounds a bit ambitious. But democracy isn’t exactly looking so healthy to begin with.

The last few elections were characterised by the pivotal role played by social media. As the narrative goes, social media manipulation gave us Brexit and Trump.

More specifically, referendum campaigners in the UK and Trump’s team in the US figured out how to target voters’ social media. By focusing their budget on ads in the right places they were able to sway the overall vote.

This is of course clearly distinguishable from being right, being honest and being on the right side of history…

Closer to home, ‘Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is the king of political social media,’ wrote News.com.au back in 2013. Apparently tweeting a picture of a shaving cut won him the election he announced he’d be contending on Facebook. Indeed, you could call Kevin07 the prime minister of social media given what followed…

Enough of that, because technology has moved on too. Social media is no longer cool enough to sway elections. Now we get wind that the Crypto Caucus has awoken.

The Crypto Super PAC Fairshake funded a US$10 million ad campaign against an anti-crypto politician in California. And it worked. The Democrat in question failed to win the primary for California Senate nomination.

But get a load of the Crypto Super PAC message in response to the victory:

‘From the White House to the Senate to the House [of Representatives], make no mistake: the crypto voter is here. The crypto voter cares whose side a candidate is on and the crypto voter will play a pivotal role in the 2024 elections. Whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, the choice is clear – to stand with crypto and the 52 million Americans who understand the role it plays in supporting a more fair economic system or stand against it and against change.’

Yikes.

Is this a shadowy crypto industrial complex? Or just a grassroots campaign of crypto investors? Probably both, and I’m not sure how aligned they really are…

Not that crypto funded election interference is new. Failed crypto exchanges are notorious for their political donations.

My colleague in the UK, the Brexiteer Nigel Farage, had some interesting news on the topic of crypto too. Farage has been a speaker at CPAC and personal friend of Trump for years now. He claims Donald Trump has softened his position on crypto in the run up to the election. The sceptic who once threatened crypto can now ‘live with it’.

How might all this crypto pressure matter?

Well, let’s consider one specific example. Fat Tail Daily frequently gets reader mail that banks are making it ever more difficult to buy cryptocurrencies. At our join project, The Fleet Street Letter, Nigel Farage and I frequently receive the same sorts of emails. Not to mention the debanking scandal which Nigel exposed in the UK.

What if crypto investors decide to take on the banks in the political sphere? What if they get organised enough to lobby for changes in bank regulations? Such as the right to use your own money as you see fit, not as your banker sees fit.

What if financial regulation is upended to favour the consumer instead of the bank?

How much wealthier would our crypto investing readers be today, now that cryptocurrencies are trading at new highs, if they were politically active?

You can see how the crypto industrial complex might make itself felt and change things.

Technology has a long history of being on
the side of the silent majority

Printing gave us the Reformation. Pamphlets the American and French Revolution. (Although the French one didn’t work out so well.) Social media gave us Trump and Brexit, not to mention supporting dissidents in all sorts of dystopian places. Cryptocurrencies allow everyday people to escape the ravages of currencies like Argentina’s and Zimbabwe’s.

Thanks to technology like crowd funding, activists can now band together to form groups that donate money to specific causes outside of politics too. When it comes to causes, voters can now compete with corporations to sway results with money.

But these are not the only big tech trends underway in the biggest year for democracy given the number of elections scheduled. And I’ve left the worst till last.

Usually, technology favours the upstarts and the little man. Social media swayed votes against big companies and the political establishment on issues like Trump and Brexit. Crowd funding allowed causes that defied the government to flourish. Cryptocurrencies are inherently anti-State.

Unfortunately, the big corporates are one step ahead of us this year…

AI isn’t good for the little guy

Artificial Intelligence COLLISIONS are a core concept of a big new stock research dump Fat Tail is doing next week.

If you’re interested in small capitalisation stocks that might benefit as AI intersects with almost everything in surprising…and sometimes alarming…ways you should watch out for it.

It’s called Lock. Build. Explode.

But AI’s collision with the democratic process in the coming months could be the most explosive of all.

Could AI really swing an election?

The question is, which side will figure out how to use AI to sway votes first…or best.

The woke currently seem to have a rather solid grip on AI. News stories about AI’s bizarre behaviour are all over conservative, libertarian and right-wing news sites and blogs.

Some examples are just vaguely amusing. One AI service was unable to generate images of white people. When requested to create pictures of famous historical figures, none came up as Caucasian.

But what if this inbuilt bias isn’t just fun and games? What it isn’t just a mistake in the coding? What if it reveals an underlying issue? What if AI has taken sides in the political debate that has become a war?

And what if it is going to be hard to beat?

Remember, employees at the companies that have launched and control AI tools donate rather a lot more money to the Democrats than Republicans, for example.

I can see it now. By the end of the year, all the stories about the election will read that AI cast the deciding vote. And I’m not so sure which side actually wins when loser’s consent is added to that equation.

It might just be my memory, but election denialism has been ratchetting up steadily for years. From Al Gore to ‘not my president’ to Brexit protests to lawfare, the democratic game now resembles the Hunger Games in all sorts of ways.

But it’s a lot easier to deny an election which has AI lurking somewhere inside it…

And if the right manages to hack the tech, as it did in 2016, the left would be just as outraged.

Outraged enough to do what? That is the question investors need to ponder next.

How to turn AI to your advantage
while democracy burns

It might sound a bit morbid. But in times like this, wealth preservation is usually the key. Political risk is just too high to take financial risk as well.

Right?

Wrong.

If the old mantra to buy when there’s blood in the streets, this may be a pivotal year for profits too.

And you could benefit from AI’s booming growth as both sides of politics try to use it to their advantage. And, next week, when we drop our Lock. Build. Explode project, we’ll show you exactly how.

Until next time,

Nick Hubble,
Editor, Strategic Intelligence Australia

Nick Hubble found us at Fat Tail Investment Research in 2010 after a stint inside Wall Street’s most notorious bank, Goldman Sachs, during the 2008 GFC. That’s where he saw the true nature of the investment banking business. Since then, he’s been the editor of the Daily Reckoning Australia and the UK-based Fortune & Freedom and Gold Stock Fortunes.

He’s delighted to work as Investment Director and Editor for Jim Rickards’ Strategic Intelligence Australia. Here he helps turn Jim’s big-picture views into specific actionable advice and ideas for Australian investors.

All advice is general advice and has not taken into account your personal circumstances. Please seek independent financial advice regarding your own situation, or if in doubt about the suitability of an investment.