Ask Siri: A Glimpse of Tomorrow's Technological Government

Rachel Stone

Okay, I’m Rachel Stone. I am a sophomore at BYU. I study political science, and I’m just barely picking up a minor in computer science, so I can be sort of like you guys. or so it seems. I so I study the crossroads between technology and government, and I think it’s a lot of fun. I’ve been kind of alone in that endeavor, or so I thought, for the past like year. And then in the past three months or so, everything started to pick up, and it’s been a whirlwind, and I’ve been having so much fun.

Rachel Stone

So um we’re gonna start off with a necessary dose of uh pessimism about government. I don’t know where the Okay. Yeah, so I don’t know how visible that is, but I will read it. It says, we are 21st century citizens doing our best To interact in 19th century designed institutions that are based on the information technology of the 15th century.

Rachel Stone

Okay, this is Pia Peninj Mancini. Sorry, Mancini. She is a great democracy activist in Argentina. She started this thing called Democracy OS. And it’s basically a crowdsourcing platform, and we’ll talk about it later. But she’s identifying the fact that in today’s government, the few make the decisions of the many, which sounds familiar. And also that there’s a steep cost of participation. If you want to be deeply involved in politics and the governmental process, it costs a lot.

Rachel Stone

So here’s a little bit more optimism from Beth Novick. And I have, in every formal discussion of technological government, have started with a Beth Novick quote because I love her. She used to be the deputy chief technology officer at the White House. And she says, in a Cambrian era of big data, of social networks we have this opportunity to redesign these institutions. We invest plenty in innovation in broadband and science, education and research grants, but we invest far too little in reinventing and redesigning the institutions that we have. And so what she’s suggesting is a top-down reevaluation of the way that we govern ourselves today in the 21st century and a top-down redesign of those processes.

Rachel Stone

Okay, so we see a couple themes in this discussion of 21st century government. We see e-governance and crowdsourcing and e-participation. and lots of transparency and direct democracy and big data, which is great because every other place has been talking about it for five years. Okay.

Rachel Stone

So, who’s been on this website? Okay, we have a couple hands. So this is the hallmark healthcare. gov. And this is probably like the worst introduction to an American’s technological idea of government. that there was. It crashed multiple times. Here’s a little news thing about it. It says after two years and two point one billion dollars, healthcare. gov is unfinished. and people are still pretty unsatisfied with that system. But it’s part of this transformation which we’re watching, where governments are starting to put a lot more of their information online, make their services available. So let’s learn a little bit more about that.

Rachel Stone

The United Nations has been tracking e-government for about Seven years now. The most recent survey that came out was in 2014, and it put the United States of America at number seven in the world. Congrats to us. Republic of Korea is the first. That’s a little awesome and scary. Ace is cool. We are the first in the Americas, however, to top that. So we have a little bit of a of a leg over somebody.

Rachel Stone

I like to show this particular website. This is the Republic of Estonia. And I am a big fan of Estonia because in 2005, they were the first to try to implement e-voting. And about 2% of their population joined in and voted on their laptops rather than getting in a line in a building like we do here in America. And it’s been growing steadily more successful ever since. And so I love Estonia, and they do a lot of great e-government. And they’re a really small country, so it makes a great lab rat.

Rachel Stone

Okay, so now we get to the title of my talk. A government crafted series. So I want you to step into my imagination with me real quick. and pretend that we’re five, ten years in the future. And the government has created your very own personal automated assistant named Siri. For the sake of familiarity. Okay.

Rachel Stone

So this is a streamlined mechanism for engaging one-on-one with government. like the way that you have a streamlined mechanism for engaging with your phone, your smartphone. It’s created equally for public servant and average citizen, meaning that your government researcher can use it, your poli-sci professor can use it, you can use it as The average citizen. It has access to all publicly available online government data. It draws from all levels of federalism, from state to local to federal. And it’s seated in the environment of five to ten years in the future. So let’s think about with this series what kind of questions or commands we would ask. I don’t know why there’s music notes, but they’re cool.

Rachel Stone

All right, question one. What are the new Salt Lake City regulations on self-driving cars? Send the clip of my congressional hearing on net neutrality to my e-mail. What percentage of the State budget is transportation oriented or energy oriented? What is my projected tax return for this fiscal year? Renew my vehicle registration one week before its expiration. Wow. What is the average donation to the Liberty Super PAC? That’s for your researcher to know. And here’s a good favorite. What is the President doing today, or right now, at this very second?

Rachel Stone

So I want to, for the rest of the talk, go a little bit more in depth to a couple of questions that I have identified as key indicators of what the future would look like if we had this Siri. Okay, and so we’ll just dive into it.

Rachel Stone

The first question goes, Siri, based on my personal data, what proportion of the city’s annual budget applies to my particular circumstances? That’s interesting. How much of the city’s budget actually applies to me? Okay, so the point of this question is to bring To attention this idea of personalization and transparency in government that we’re seeing in this evolution.

Rachel Stone

This is a screenshot of Cedar Hills City Budget on their website. Cedar Hills is right. That way, it’s south, right by Alpine. And they have put their budget on a dashboard that anybody can access from their website. So this is a lot of transparency that we’re seeing from them. And then you can look and see, okay, well, the Golf Fund relates to me, so that’s good, and I like that. And the Water and Sewer Fund relates to me, and I support that. But not maybe the Capital Project Fund, not so sure about that. And so you have a deeper stake in what’s going on. What else do we have?

Rachel Stone

Here’s a new app that came out recently. It’s a mobile app from California that helps you find jobs in the city. And it’s geolocated. So lots of little ways that governments are personalizing themselves towards you. Okay, next question.

Rachel Stone

Siri, notify local road management that there’s a fallen tree on 124th and center. Kind of cool. Really simple. You can do this already by calling your city’s 311 number. This is the screenshot for Provo, where I live. where I am loving, living. But nobody ever dials 311. And I’ve tried it multiple times, and it’s okay, but it could be better. And so we have these other apps that have taken place.

Rachel Stone

Texasin is pretty popular. Texasin serves a lot of purposes, but primarily it’s been used by the city of Boston and the city of Philadelphia. And the idea is that if you see a fallen tree or any problem of any kind in your neighborhood, you text a number and it filters through the government system, goes to the right person of contact, and then there’s a feedback loop. So, you had to do almost nothing. You texted like you normally do your friends, your family on your phone. There’s a similar app called Citizens Connect that does about the same thing. They’re coming out in a lot of different cities, and there’s one that we’re working on here at BYU. So Utah can have it too. I think smartphones are one of the greatest things that have ever happened to government, and we’re just barely starting to realize that and capitalize on it. And this is one of those ways.

Rachel Stone

Here’s something in Uganda that has been pretty successful. It’s called the U Report. And essentially, the Ugandan government will send out little polls to people’s phones via text. And so, like, they’ll ask a question, respond number four if you think this, number one if you think this, et cetera. And they get these real live data like streaming in through their phones all the time. So it’s constant crowdsourcing. And we see that applied constantly and visualized. This is the crime rates of Chicago, which has been pretty great.

Rachel Stone

Siri, send a message to my senator’s office that I just posed an amendment to the drone regulation bill. Okay. You pose an amendment to the bill? That’s not our job. That’s never been our job. But it is now because there’s been this huge focus on direct digital democracy. Here’s a couple websites that have come out with ways to do this.

Rachel Stone

This is an article from Motherboard from about a year ago when this Startup in California decided to run two candidates for office for Congress. And they ran these candidates that were software. So the idea was that this The software would take the place of the candidate and be elected into office, and then you would be able to tell the software, yeah, okay, this is my input, and it would crowdsource from everybody in the district. and then the people would really be in control. Now I think this is smart, but this is actually not so great because who roams the hallways of Congress then? Does anybody do that? Does anybody network? So it’s not quite there, but I like where it’s going. And they called that place of vote. Exciting stuff.

Rachel Stone

This is another website called Pop Fox. They just hosted a hackathon in San Francisco that I was pretty sad to miss. But essentially, what they do is they streamline all the different bills that are coming through, and then you can rate them. You can like favorite them with the heart or the cancel button. No problem. And there’s a lot of these coming out. There’s the one that Pia Mancini worked on, Democracy OS. And this one here. The ultimate goal is that everybody has an input and that your voice really counts. All right, here’s where we get really radical.

Rachel Stone

Theory, cast my vote for the incumbent me of love in the house race. All right. So the disclaimer is that I would never actually ask you to tell Siri to cast your vote. And the reason is, is because it’s not private. If you were actually going to say out loud, this is who I’m voting for, anybody could manipulate that. You could have a 3D printed gun to your head saying, okay, you’re going to vote for the other person. Or else your boss could definitely get in the way, all sorts of voter fraud problems like that.

Rachel Stone

But what we see is that Estonius tried it. They’ve tried to vote online. The way that they’ve been doing it is they have these little these little cards with chips in them, and you insert it into a portal that you’ve been mailed. something and you put it into your computer and you’re able to securely, supposedly securely, place your vote. And you can do that within a twenty four hour window as many times as you want to. You only get one vote, but you can change it within that time frame as many times as you want. It’s been really interesting to watch. They haven’t been incredibly successful, but they have they’ve been raising it over the numbers. It’s only a country of 1. 3 million people. So It’s a lab ratination for us. But the idea is that we’re on the verge of voting in a whole new way where you don’t have to stand in line at your local school anymore.

Rachel Stone

And this is what I wanted to add on: was Siri cast my vote for me to love because, because of her voting record in favor of altering the national clean air standards. This is revolutionary in a way. Nobody votes like this, but I think we ought to. I think we ought to vote with rationale because What does your vote actually say when you say yes or no? It’s a majority rule, but you’ve said yes or no, but why? And so how are we supposed to direct policy without actually knowing why you voted the way you voted? Why isn’t there a because? Why isn’t there a comment box? Why isn’t there a way for you to express a little bit more than a for or against? Okay, so this is what I would like to see in tomorrow’s government. We’ll see how it works out. And then the final thing that I wanted to get to was

Rachel Stone

The perhaps even more radical idea of introducing artificial intelligence into the way that we govern ourselves. I have here Siri, rank all poverty reducing U. S. policy mechanisms from the last decade by percent reduction after one decade or from the last century. The idea is that our policymaking processes are antiquated and slow, and they’re run by lobbyists. I’m from Washington, DC, so I have a little bit of a hint on how This goes. And it takes a lot of time. And we’re constantly depending on outside resources, private resources, to furnish us with information. You who have heard of IBM Watson know that Watson has all this information in his great repository and can access it. And so we can access that for for publicly serviceable reasons.

Rachel Stone

And so finally, Siri weighed the arguments for and against reproductive genetic engineering in support of the Supreme Court case. Assuming this probably will happen. Weigh the arguments. Help us figure this out.

Rachel Stone

There’s this idea introduced by Herbert Simon of bounded rationality. And that idea is that human cognitive limitations that humans are limited in the way that they can process information within a certain given amount of time. And we know that in Congress, we are always on a time constraint. And so, the idea behind this is that we’re able to surpass bounded rationality and use the tools of our collective brains together, our collective technologies together to create a better way to govern ourselves in the future.

Rachel Stone

I would be amiss without referencing this app called Justify, which is one of my team, my collaborators. Great Life Works. It’s an online tool that you can use to make rational decisions from which sock to choose to wear in the morning to whether you should take the job to whether you should vote for and against a certain policy. And that’s us at the hackathon a couple months ago. So that’s all I have for you. Thank you very much for listening.