Could Artificial Intelligence Threaten Democracy?

On today’s show, we are talking about one of the implications of artificial intelligence that is not being widely discussed in the main stream media.

There are billions of people in the world. Designing and tailoring products for individuals has been largely ignored as even a remote possibility. It takes far too much effort. To develop custom products for each individual on the planet. We have lived much of the past century with products that are designed for the masses. If you think about a standard bell curve, what in statistics is called a normal distribution, product developers, and product marketing have been aiming at the average, and try to remain within one standard deviation from the average.

When marketers send messages to their target demographic, they tend to put them into buckets. This is also true when it comes to trends in voting. What matters to the Christian voter, to the hispanic voter, the indigenous voter, the immigrant voter, the African American voter, and so on. 

Increasingly AI can be used to create messages that are not tailored to a group, but tailored to an individual.

The question is, could AI be used to influence an election result?