🦾 This is how we can get better politicians and smarter political decisions

I want better politicians and smarter political decisions. Together with two Members of Parliament, I have created an AI for each of them to demonstrate the potential.

Wanting smarter politicians isn't just a casual dig at "stupid politicians" or the voters who elected them. For twelve years, I was elected first in the city of Norrköping and then to Parliament, so I know the system works better than most people realize. This also means I understand its shortcomings. Addressing all of them isn't the purpose of this text - instead, I want to focus on one particular problem that now has a solution.

Information overload

Political decision-making involves gathering information and making decisions based on it. Most democracies handle this similarly: Politicians listen to voters, interest groups, businesses, and other societal actors through visits, meetings, and media. This is combined with documentation compiled by civil servants. Partly in the form of various investigations, where specific proposals are examined and argued for. For example, how the grading scale should be changed or a new tax introduced. Partly in the form of documentation for specific cases, such as why a school should be closed or a road built.

Regardless of political level, from government and parliament to municipality and region or state or city, politicians must process information and make decisions based on it.

For each individual case, it involves tens to hundreds of pages of information. A municipal board or a parliamentary committee makes hundreds of decisions each year. In parliament or congress, thousands of decisions are made during a year.

That becomes very much information.

When I was a new member of the Constitutional Committee, someone calculated how long it would take to read all the committee's documents. 24 hours a day would not be enough. No time to sleep, eat, or do anything other than read documents. The Constitutional Committee is the committee with the most documentation, but it still says something about the constant avalanche of information that every politician is exposed to.

Besides reading documents, you also need to find time to think, listen to feedback, sit in lots of meetings, talk to the media and everything else that is required. If you're a part-time politician, you also have a job to manage. That's why politics is largely a team sport. Cooperation is required for it to work.

What if we had a technology that could help us...

Now we do! AI will become an invaluable tool for all politicians. Not just for handling the current volume of information. Also to absorb more and better information, without it taking more time. Let's take one thing at a time.

Handle the current volume of information: AI can instantly read through thousands of pages and summarize or find important information. For example, summarize a 500-page report in a bullet list. Based on that, politicians can ask AI to delve deeper into certain parts, or go into the document themselves to read.

More and better information, without more work: Let's say you sit on a municipality's education board. The civil servants' proposal is to close three schools, and they attach documents that provide the basis for that decision. Perhaps the closure proposals are based on the municipality's forecasts of childbirth rates, which are included in the documentation. But how accurate are these forecasts? It doesn't say anywhere. A municipality or city has decades of documents that can be made available to an AI. With a simple instruction, the part-time politician on the board can ask their AI to analyze how previous childbirth forecasts turned out and five seconds later have a result. Maybe the forecasts have been significantly wrong. What says they're right now? It doesn't need to stop at municipal documents but can be linked to research, state or federal documents, and much more.

Add to that the type of capability released by Open AI over the weekend, called Deep Research. You can give it a task, for example: "Analyze Canadian housing policy and its effects and compare it with the other OECD countries." It then start independently searching the internet, research studies, their training data, and combine this into a detailed report of 10-20 pages with clear references. (Then you need another AI to summarize it, haha.) Now we're not talking seconds, but minutes are required for the AI, that's how advanced the process is. It not only manages to produce lots of text but maintains the same high quality as a skilled civil servant.

In this way, politicians (and civil servants) can more easily create better documentation. Especially if the AI they use is adapted to themselves. So that the AI knows which board or committee, party, opinions, motivations, and other factors. Then the most relevant information can be extracted.

We have built such an AI

Together with members of parliament Patrik Karlson and Robert Hannah, both from the Liberals, I have built a first simple prototype of such an AI.

It is adapted specifically to them. We sat down over a cup of coffee and went through what was important to them in their political work. What values and goals they had, how they wanted to improve society. We also fed it with op-eds, other documentation, and speeches. Based on that, the AI got a good understanding of their style.

Maybe a bit too good sometimes.

"I'm known for being combative, and it seems to have understood that, a bit too well. Sometimes I have to tell it to chill a bit," Robert Hannah told Svenska Dagbladet when we showed our creation.

This isn't difficult to either make or use. All politicians can both build and use a GPT, a special version of ChatGPT. I can't program or anything like that. The only thing I have is language and you have that too. Here is my guide on how to build GPTs.

The second part, making documents available to an AI, is more advanced. It obviously requires that the documents are digital and that you connect it to an AI. A few years ago, this would have been extremely expensive and practically impossible. Now it's neither expensive nor difficult, but not something an individual politician can put together on their own.

Not just politics

This of course doesn't just apply to politics. Most of us handle large amounts of information both in our daily lives and work. AI can help us too to become smarter and make better decisions. For example, about which party and which politicians we should vote for in the next election.

Mathias Sundin
Angry Optimist