Endless Thread - Good Bot, Bad Bot | Part II: Political Bots

Episode Date: November 11, 2022

Next in our series Good Bot, Bad Bot: the possibilities of bots being used in governments around the world. How can bots increase transparency and shine a light on corruption, such as insider trading, among our elected officials? Will bots be put on the ballot in the near future? We go into all of this and more in this installment of Good Bot, Bad Bot. ****** Credits: This episode was written and produced by Grace Tatter. Mixing and sound design by Paul Vaitkus. Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson are the co-hosts.

Support for endless thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. There are more than a half million elected officials in the United States, and they get into all sorts of trouble. Six New York politicians were arrested Tuesday. He's accused of illegally gathering absentee paid for a woman's abortion despite opposing abortion You got your bribes, your corruption, going back on campaign promises, failing to show up for critical votes. There are lots and lots of opportunities for human fallibility.

And while it might feel like politicians are especially slimy these days. Regular salamanders. Those slippery. Those dang slippery political salamander politicians. Everyone keeps talking about how they're like They're lizard people But I think they might be salamander That's right, we've just been thinking of them slightly incorrectly

Okay, well we think they're especially slimy these days There's been some element of moral depravity in politics Since forever Something about that confluence of power and money Seems to bring out the worst in us It's true This is not just an American problem, though. People all over the world think politicians suck.

That is why, back in 2017, two guys in New Zealand thought of a new kind of politician, one who they believed could rise above a lot of our worst instincts. A candidate who would really be accessible to their constituents. A candidate who would never lie or put their own financial interests first. A candidate, unlike any, we've seen, for office before. The candidate's name was Sam. And Sam was a bot.

We didn't set it up as a stunt sort of thing. That's Andrew Smith, one of the New Zealanders who created Sam in partnership with Nick Gerritsen. Andrew and Nick are both entrepreneurs who are interested in AI. As Nick and Andrew see it, people are increasingly disconnected from the systems and officials who are supposed to represent them. And in order to act on the issues that affect us all, like climate change, governments need to be listening to everyday people. Here's Nick.

As the world moves into increasingly complex issues, whether they be macro issues like climate change or inequality or even more, I guess, geographically triggered, such as the war in Ukraine, engagement with the political system by every individual on Earth is actually really, really important. They set up a website where people could talk to Sam about the issues that were important to them. No need to wait for a town hall or for Parliament to be in session. Voters could log on and register their opinions whenever they wanted to. In New Zealand, I think Parliament only ever sits somewhere around 108 days a year out of 365 days. So this whole thing about actually turning political engagement into a real-time thing, was really, really, really exciting. Sam could remember everything that anyone said to her.

When a CNN business journalist named Meg Wagner chatted with Sam, Sam told her, quote, my memory is infinite, so I will never forget or ignore what you tell me. Sam also told CNN that, quote, unlike a human politician, I consider everyone's position without bias when making decisions. Sam expressed strong opinions about climate change. got to cut a mission, stat, but told the CNN journalists that it would, quote, change over time to reflect the issues that the people of New Zealand care about most.

While human politicians can dodge the truth or renege on their campaign promises, Sam would never. I mean, the current scenario in most countries, most democracies, is that people sort of lie through their teeth to get elected. And, of course, being digital, you can keep a record of everything that you say and do. So it creates a level of accountability that the current politicians just don't have. Nick told journalists back in 2017 that he wanted Sam on the ballot in the 2020 elections. But it didn't happen.

Nick and Andrew also couldn't tell us how many people Sam talked to. But increasingly, voters seem ready for a candidate like Sam. According to a 2019 survey conducted by researchers in Spain, one in four Europeans said they'd actually prefer. prefer AI to make governance decisions. That is bananas. That is bananas. 25%. But there are also some pretty significant downsides to a virtual politician. You don't say. I do. Starting with the pretty important reason Sam did not make it onto the ballot in 2020. So legally, you know, obviously you have to be a human to engage in the human system. So. Oh, come on.

This is speciesism. Speciesism. Speciesism. Specism. Whether or not they're on the ballot, bots are increasingly part of our political system. Remember those Russian social media bots, the Twitter ones, the Facebook ones, meddling in the 2016 election? The Trump administration officially moved to punish Russia for cyber attacks and election meddling in the United States in Europe. But bots can also play a more subtle, less nefarious role in politics. They can be tools for how we vote, why we vote, and maybe someday even who or what we vote for.

I'm Amory Sebertson. I'm Ben Brock Johnson. And you're listening to Endless Thread from WBUR, Boston's NPR Station. Today, the second installment of our series about the rise of the machines and how virtual machines are changing the way we interact with the Internet, and each other. Good bot, bad bot. We'll get back to Sam and the idea of a bot candidate.

But what about the ways that bots can already be a tool in democracy? One of the biggest frustrations with modern politics, if you're a voter, is something that ought to be simple. Accountability. Basically, knowing that your politician is going to represent the views of their constituents instead of, oh, I don't know, Exxon, which in a world where corporations are people, too, who, thanks Citizens United, feels harder and harder.

Or knowing that your representatives in Congress are using the information they learn on the job to make informed decisions for the country, not for their bank accounts. Enter Chris Kardatsky. So I'm based out here in Madison, Wisconsin right now. We have a team of bot. Creator of a bot that tracks the stock trading of members of Congress

and how much money they make from those trades. Chris and his brother came up with the idea for this back in 2020. There was a lot of news at that time about the congressmen kind of downplaying the severity of COVID and press conferences while they themselves were selling off their shares. And they were attending like confidential briefings. So obviously there was all sorts of nationwide interest in Congress stock trading around that time. And I think that's when we really started to build out some like serious tools and dashboards

around the data. Remember this? Senators are being accused. of using inside information. To sell off hundreds would be, during closed-door Senate briefings, was sell a huge amount of stock. What did Richard Burr, the former lawnmower salesman, know that the financial experts did not know? Some of the senators who dumped their stocks in February 2020, notably Richard Burr, a Republican from North Carolina who headed the Intelligence Committee, were privy to crucial information about COVID-19 that we, the general public, were not.

Basically, it looked an awful lot like insider trading, the thing that Martha Stewart went to prison for back in 2004. You know, making money based on confidential information. Cheating the system. The Department of Justice ended up dropping its investigation into Burr's dealings earlier this year. But in 2020, this was huge news for like two days. And it got at this thing, which is a trigger for a lot of voters. the idea that politicians would govern not to create a more perfect union, but a more perfect stock portfolio for themselves. This is a continuing issue in politics.

Lots of members of Congress trade stocks, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her husband. She gets asked about stocks quite a bit. Over the course of your career, has your husband ever made a stock purchase of sale based on information you received from you? No. Absolutely not. And somewhat weirdly, Nancy Pelosi's trades especially are a big trend on TikTok. Copying Pelosi's stock moves literally does not miss because she just did it again. The pilot app, which allows you to copy the trades of people like Nancy Pelosi.

Even as the market continues to fall, our Congress buy strategy is up 12.5% this year. But do we want to just follow politicians' investments so that we too can make a buck? Or do we want to get back to that accountability thing? You know, making sure they're doing their job, which, isn't to make money, it's to govern on behalf of the communities they represent. That's where Chris comes in with his lawmaker trade bot. Chris and his brother are the co-founders of Quiver Quantitative, an alternative data investment firm. They actually made one of those TikToks that you heard, and alternative investment data is

are, well, an alternative to more traditional types of data investors use, like quarterly financial statements or SEC filings. Data and data. Yes. It's boring. It's very boring. Alternative data is a little less boring, a little more outside of the box. Looking at satellite data to evaluate how crops are growing in different companies or looking at GPS data to see how many people are going into different stores.

Creepy. But the Kardatsky brothers aren't looking at who's going into stores. Our work primarily focuses on kind of public web data, so collecting data from around the web that we think would be useful to in making different investment decisions and then providing it in a format that's kind of easily accessible to normal people. Including those congressional stock trades. The reason that this data is even available, are even available, is because of a 2012 law called the Stop Trading on Congressional Mollage Act of 2012, aka the Yes, Stock Act. It prohibits members of Congress from using confidential information they learn on the job for insider trading. Interestingly, Richard Burr, yeah, the same guy who was investigated for dumping a bunch of stocks in February of 2020, was one of the only senators to vote against the Stock Act back in 2012.

Also, really, it took us until 2012 to figure this out. Anyway, in addition to banning insider trading, the Stock Act stipulated new rules for when and how members of Congress disclose their dealings. And that data is, in theory, public. In theory, because it's really hard to access. It's not really built in a manner that makes it super easily accessible, I guess, the general public. Like, you can view it. You can see all the disclosures here. But if you wanted to see, like, for instance, all trades of Tesla by Congressman, you need to go through and, like, download thousands of disclosures and kind of parse them all

manually by hand. So we've been encode to basically automatically download new disclosures and parse out like stock trades and then provide that information on our dashboard. Why do you think it's important for the general public to know about their Congresspeople's stock trading habits and portfolios? I think by providing transparency, you can hopefully hold politicians a bit more accountable for their financial dealings. Like obviously, I don't think any of us as U.S. citizens want politicians to be making financial moves, which are kind of a negative towards us as the U.S. citizens.

But there's also a lot of interesting insights as an investor where you can see what moves like congressmen on different committees are making. So that's one of the big things we really focus on is not just looking at kind of what's being traded, but also who's trading it and what inside information they might have. So like if somebody on the Senate Agriculture Committee trades, soybean futures or something that's a lot more interesting than if somebody who has no connections to the field does a similar trade. So every day the bot scrapes the list of disclosures off of the website of the House.

It's different for the Senate because the website doesn't work the same way, so it's harder for the bot and Chris has to do it himself. But that's the beginning of the process. And then by focusing on those disclosures, I can point the bot, look at the text, and see what it says. and then like take out the parts that we're interested in. Like is this like a stock transaction, kind of what's the information associated with us? Like how much money was spent in the transaction was like a purchase or sale. And then sending that to like a database on our end. We were able to republish it on our site.

Basically, Quiver's Lawmaker TradeBot automates something that would be a huge pain to do yourself. Even just finding the websites with the disclosures isn't very intuitive. They don't come up in a simple Google search. The bot visualizes all of this data on a dashboard. You can click on the member of Congress you want to see, and then you'll see a line graph showing how much money they're making or spending on stocks. Below that, there's a running list of recent trades. Sometimes Chris has noticed just some funny things,

not necessarily malfeasance, just something strange. There's sometimes weird, just weird stuff like Nancy Pelosi bought like Real Block stock. or options or something a while back. It just kind of like seems like a really weird thing for like a 70-year-old position to be buying stock in. Today we're playing Roblox, Munching Masters, a crazy game when you start small and eat to grow huge. That is Roblox, the online gaming platform. And who knows? Maybe Nancy Pelosi is spending her free time doing a lot of gaming.

Who knows? Ultimately, what's really compelling to me about this bot is that it helps us, the voters, See what our Congress people are doing. Now I'm just trying to think of what Nancy Pelosi's like gamer handle would be, Emery. I feel like it would be like dump Trump, Blaze Callie Buds forever or something, but with the four, the number four. Anyway, we're going to hear from one of those members of Congress, whatever the gaming handle is after the break. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science. neuroscience, neuroscience, chemistry.

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Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. We've been talking about how bots might be able to help guide democracy. hold politicians accountable and help us make better decisions about who to vote for. In particular, we've been talking about a bot that tracks the stock trades that people in Congress are making and how much money they make from those trades.

Congresspeople like... Representative Dean Phillips from Minnesota's third congressional district. Representative Phillips is a Democrat, and he has a hefty stock portfolio. In September, the New York Times published an article that Anne, analyzed data from a similar dashboard to the one compiled by Quiverspot. The New York Times found that between 2019 and 2021, 183 current members of Congress reported that either they or an immediate family member traded a stock or a financial asset. And half of those Congresspeople sat on congressional committees that potentially gave them special insight into the industries they were investing in.

He's on the House Ethics Committee, which is supposed to. to enforce that 2012 Stock Act. And he's on the House Financial Services Committee. Since assuming office, he's made 150 trades involving tech companies, banks, or other financial institutions. So I asked him about this New York Times article. So can you just explain that for us? Sure. And I celebrate that article.

That's exactly what so many of us have been hoping would be shared with the public, that most members of Congress, and this was 100, me included, came to this job with investments. And I conduct myself, I believe, in the most principled ethical fashion of anybody. I have not spoken with my investment advisors since I've been a member of Congress. I never personally initiate a stock trade either directly or through a proxy. And I'm just one of a handful now that has put my assets in a qualified blind trust, which I believe all members of Congress should do. Amory, I also conduct myself, I believe in the most principal ethical fashion of anybody. Just so you know.

Noted. But in all seriousness, Representative Phillips is talking about some pretty admirable practices here. Also, a blind trust means that you don't know what assets are being managed on your behalf. An advisor is doing everything for you, so you're blind to it. So if a member of Congress gains insight into a specific company, they can't act on it. There's a lot of momentum right now around the idea that, something's got to change when it comes to members of Congress and stocks. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is talking about this.

This isn't just about actual impropriety, but this is about the perception of impropriety. And so is the ultra-right conservative senator from Missouri, Josh Hawley. We need to have a ban on members of Congress trading stock, and it has to include members' spouses. Even Nancy Pelosi, she of the TikTok stock memes, who used to dismiss the idea of barring members of Congress from the stock trade has gotten on board with introducing legislation barring politicians from owning stocks in individual companies. Some proposals ban Congresspeople from engaging with the market at all while they're in office. Other proposals would require blind trusts like the one that Phillips uses.

Phillips has signed on as a sponsor to the proposal for the latter. When we talked to Chris at Quiver Quantitative, he mentioned how the current Stock Act just doesn't do a lot to disincentivize unethical behavior. There aren't very many harsh penalties on, I guess, violations of that guideline. So if a politician is like approaching an election, for instance, and they have some financial dealings, which might hurt their odds at the election, they could just, like, wait until, like, the next month or something, like, pass the deadline in order to disclose it. And they'd probably be some, like, like, House Ethics Committee investigation.

and they might get some fine or something, but we really haven't seen very severe penalties in place for violating this legislation. Representative Phillips, who, again, serves on the House Ethics Committee, said something similar. There needs to be way more accountability for him and his peers. Those who file late, those who don't file at all, are flagged. But the fines, I think, are in, like, the low hundreds of dollars.

It has no teeth. It does little to actually encourage law. abiding, and it also, if anything, simply causes more problems than I believe it is worth. Consequences can come in the form of fines, but they can also be served up via public opinion. We asked Phillips what he thought about the role of bots, like the lawmaker trade bot from Quiver. I'll put it this way. There's nothing more important than transparency in a Democratic Republic, like the United States of America. Those who offer themselves to the public in service have a requirement in my estimation to be forthright about their investments

and about their principles and the public has every right and reason to have some eyes on that. There's no question. Do you think some of your colleagues in Congress are relying on the public simply not paying attention to something like their stock trading practices and how that aligns with the committees that they sit on and their other interests? I do believe there are a few. I think there are a handful. I think there are bad apples amongst every institution and organization, and that certainly includes the United States Congress. Phillips clarified that he personally does not believe insider trading is a widespread issue in Congress. But he also underscored that accessible information is just one part of the accountability equation. In order for that information to be effective, people need to actually pay attention to it.

For example, data about who contributes to politicians' campaigns. Phillips thinks this needs way more attention. We have mechanisms by which transparency is provided to the American public. But that's worthless unless people actually go look into it. Look into who's giving the money. Look into who is handing over the keys to one and a half billion dollar companies to super PACs that they can then sell tax-free to then influence all of us. That kind of reminds me of what Nick.

Nick Garrison and Andrew Smith, the Kiwis who created Sam the virtual politician, what they seem to believe. That bots don't actually have to be candidates to help clean up politics. They can be useful tools to help human politicians know what's up with their constituents and vice versa. But the future of political bots might be weirder than that. A bot made a bid for office in Russia in 2017. The bot called Alice or Elisa is the virtual assistant for, the Russian tech company Yandex. Kind of like if Apple tried to get Syria on the ballot.

According to Russian news sources, more than 36,000 people nominated Alice for the country's highest office. Putin didn't seem concerned by the competition, and, of course, remains in power. There are a lot of reasons to wonder about the legitimacy of that election, but even in more democratic countries, it's hard to imagine a serious bot politician, even if there's a lot of reasons to be frustrated with our own

human representatives. Yeah. If a bot could actually run and be elected, what would it look like? Bots ultimately don't have agency. So what humans would be held accountable for the bot? How would the bot engage in debate? Would it just represent the views of the people who voted for it or who belonged to a particular party? What if it got hacked?

Yeah. Or what if it turned out to be a real jerk? Like Tay, that Microsoft chat bot. It was supposed to learn how to interact with people by mimicking messages. it received on Twitter, cue the trolls. Within hours, Tay was spewing racist and violent messages. An episode, Andrew remembers all too well. We're very conscious of that. We're very aware of the example of Tay that was corrupted within minutes

and turned into a narcissist. We would have to really concentrate on the AI platform so that it wasn't corrupted. by people who wanted to influence the outcome. You'll hear more about Tay later in our bot series. There's definitely a lot to work out. But people are imagining this stuff. And once it's imagined, it often starts getting built.

The astronaut Buzz Aldrin had a different way of talking about science fiction literature. He called it Future Prediction Literature. I read a book a few years back called Blackfish City, where novelist Sam J. Miller imagined an entire government run by algorithms. Even if we built an entire bureaucracy of bots, they would have our own biases and issues hard-coded into their underlying software. In the near future, it sounds like Sam will help survey voters about issues rather than run for office. Nick and Andrew are talking to some local government officials across Europe

about using Sam to increase engagement on the municipal level. But they think we will see bots on the ballot within our lifetimes and that that's a good thing. You know, the question really is, is there true accountability within current democracies? And I think the increasing number of people that are choosing to disengage with the political process actually would suggest that the system is failing. So how do we renovate the system? because it's obviously really, really important. I even suggested to Representative Phillips that the House Ethics Committee use its own bots

to help the public understand some of the things they're working on, like transparency around how political campaigns are funded. Humans can act immorally, for sure, but we're less likely to if we know someone's watching us. And maybe politicians and local governments can use chatbots like Sam to find out what issues people care about. If it's easy to engage with the government, maybe elected officials will understand that lots of people care about issues like climate change. And the interests of the public will come to outweigh the interests of corporations that can afford to spend millions on lobbyists.

Bots and AI can be a way to not replace humans in politics with all of our messiness and imperfections, but to help us navigate politics. But what if you actually wanted your bot to have all the idiosyncrasies in full? foibles of a human, a friend, a parent, a former partner. Next week in our bot series, Bringing Back the Dead, kind of. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. Want early tickets to events, swag, bonus content, my political platform, Ben's stock portfolio, join our email list. You'll find it at WBUR.org slash endless thread. This episode was written and produced by Grace Tatter, but we

found Chris and Quiver, thanks to my illustrious co-host, Amorya Sebertson, mix and sound designed by Paul Bikis. Yeah, you're illustrious. Thank you. I'm the decidedly less illustrious, Ben Brock Johnson. Our web producer is Megan Kattel. Also, the theme music for our series, which you heard at the top of the show, was composed by a bot, thanks to sound designer Emily Jankowski, who found a way to do this via a website

called Boomy. You can check it out. The rest of our team is Norrisaxe, Quincy Walters, Dean Russell, Matt Reed, and Emily Jenkowski. Endless Threat is a show about the blurred lines between digital communities and a slimy, slimy salamander. Sure. Gotcha. Okay, yeah, real curveball there. If you've got an untold history and unsolved mystery or a wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up.

Email Endless Thread. at WBUR.org.org.