Why the fuss about driverless cars? We already have robot politicians
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Version 0 of 1. When will politics and political journalism be farmed out to robots? If you watched last night’s election debate and its aftermath without the protection of a hazmat suit, you might be asking: how soon could it be? Quite soon, it seems. A current New Yorker article points out that the Associated Press will now reply on “automation technology” to cover some college sports – technology that “can analyze the data from a game of anything from badminton to basketball and then use it to write a coherent and familiar-looking recap”. It takes a split second to produce, needless to say, and will soon incorporate post-game quotes from players and quasi-idiosyncratic sportswriter-type prose. Plenty of news output is already computer-generated: the software that will cover sport in this way has been providing most of AP’s corporate-results stories since last year, when the robot was predicted to churn out a billion news stories – and it probably didn’t once stick a massive bar bill on expenses. How long can political coverage resist? Surely only a misplaced sense of ego on the part of its ringmasters is stopping it. Much of our political discourse already feels a lot like the apotheosis of the algorithm – a self-contained formula designed to solve something. A finite number of rule-driven, repetitive steps. On Sky the volume of tweets was the analysis. It might as well have been a graph showing fluctuations in the rice price Of course, the idea that politics is a closed system speaking only to itself is hardly new. Visiting a Labour party conference, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary of “a buzzing bursting humming perfectly self-dependent other world”. That was in 1933, long before anyone talked about “the Westminster bubble”. Progress has brought us to leaders’ debate night in 2015, with its “sentiment-tracking” worms, pre-prepared insta-verdicts, and constant cutaways to graphs measuring volumes of tweets. These are not jobs that robots could do: they are jobs that robots are doing. On Sky, the volume of tweets was the analysis. Look, an extraneous presenter kept saying, there are so many tweets: look at the spike. Yet what does the spike have to do with the price of rice? In fact, it might as well have been a graph showing fluctuations in the price of rice. As for the post-debate spin room, the rise of the machines there cannot come soon enough, not least because one of the most pointless and toxic spaces in modern public life could be sanitised, and turned into a sort of automated precinct, where political protocol droids would move methodically about, the pretence that any of this is in the public interest having been humbly eradicated. An automated spin room would have spared us much of last night’s ghastliness, or at least explained it. Within no more than four minutes, I saw Yvette Cooper and Douglas Alexander speak exactly the same sentence, word for word, to exactly the same presenter. As anyone who watches the news even a bit knows, this happens all the time. It is perfectly clear what has happened: the memo has gone out, and the operatives are enacting it. And that is all they are: the man who would be foreign secretary, and a woman consistently touted as a possible future Labour leader – they are operatives obeying a central command. Yet this was actually a situation where robots would have done better. Just as driverless cars will be able to move in harmony, sensing the actions of their fellow vehicles – so a robot Labour frontbencher in the spin room would presumably have been able to detect that the line had already been uttered, and would therefore have selected another from its databank. We have reached the point where discourse would actually be richer if we had driverless politicians. As it is, politics has become the most formulaic procedural. Think of that excruciating leaked footage of Ed Miliband interview, in which he responded to every question with the same single statement, leaving the interviewer feeling like “a recording device for a scripted soundbite”. Given it’s the season for predictions, mine is that it will be very little time at all before almost all normal people – who are nothing to do with the political process, except insofar as they are its victims –will be able to read these plays and planted plotlines as second nature. That is certainly what happened with showbiz journalism around the turn of the millennium. The puppet masters used to be able to get away with staging paparazzi pictures or confecting news events without criticism. Yet look at the comments beneath any showbiz story these days, and you will find almost everyone remarking (rightly) that the shots are clearly staged, or that something has been said for a veiled purpose. Everyone understands exactly what is going on, and they say so. Contrary to what the men behind the curtain – so-called gurus like Max Clifford – always used to intimate in more innocent times, the process is not complicated. The process can be read by people at home, who unsurprisingly resent it. And so with politics – or rather, politics as it is presented. That version of politics is less and less complicated, for all the worms and widgets and totemic American spin doctors imported at vast expense. The process as it is now designed is simple, much as the journalists and politicians may not care to admit it. But unless you’re too rich to need to care, politics matters more than showbiz. People’s virulent distaste for politicians is being conflated with a sense that they are so entirely predictable. It is this conflation that gives rise to the terrifying notion – terrifying for those of us yet to become Russell Brand disciples, anyway – that politicians are in fact unnecessary. They are already the least real things on TV. The obsession of a generation of politicians with The West Wing has been well documented. Political reality was deemed best and most exciting when it specifically appeared to echo this television show. In one sense, then, these powerful fans have got what they wanted: they have created a fiction. But it is a desperately troubling one. The most troubling aspect of it is that the electorate has seen through it – yet now the politicians cannot get back to reality. They can dimly gesture towards reality TV – Nick Clegg gratefully permitted an Only Way is Essex star to hijack his key mental health press conference this week, while on the same day David Cameron was at pains to point out that he was distantly related to Kim Kardashian. But politicians will find that these do not prove to be routes back through the looking glass. Instead, the political class is condemned to wander through a spin room whose very existence on our shores is TV-inspired – and they must do it live on TV. They must spout the same line of dialogue until someone has got the take – or until the designated plotline has been resolved, and the TV networks have created enough coverage of their own coverage for those involved to judge it a wrap. The old line about politics being showbiz for ugly people feels too subtle to be anything but outdated. Politics is increasingly just ugly. Perhaps the best possible scenario is that we at home will soon have a robot to watch it all for us. |