Considering things like Palantir, and the doge effort running through Musk, it seems inconceivable that this is not already the case.

I think I'm more curious about the possibility of using a special government LLM to implement direct democracy in a way that was previously impossible: collecting the preferences of 100M citizens, and synthesizing them into policy suggestions in a coherent way. I'm not necessarily optimistic about the idea, but it's a nice dream.

> special government LLM to implement direct democracy

I like your optimism, but I think realistically a special government LLM to implement authoritarianism is much more likely.

In the end, someone has to enforce the things an LLM spits out. Who does that? The people in charge. If you read any history, the most likely scenario will be the people in charge guiding the LLM to secure more power & wealth.

Now maybe it'll work for a while, depending on how good the safeguards are. Every empire only works for a while. It's a fun experiment

Thanks for the comment. Interesting to think about but I am also skeptical of who will be doing the "collecting" and "synthesizing". Both tasks are potentially loaded with political bias. Perhaps it's better than our current system though.

Sounds like Helios https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swbGrpfaaaM

Centralising it is definitely the wrong way to go about it.

It'd be much better to train an agent per citizen, that's in their control, and have it participate in a direct democracy setup.

Indirectly, this is kind of what I was trying to get at in this weekend project https://github.com/stewhsource/GovernmentGPT using the British commons debate history as a starting point to capture divergent views from political affiliation, region and role. Changes over time would be super interesting - but I never had time to dig into that. Tldr; it worked surprisingly well and I know a few students have picked it up to continue on this theme in their research projects

Real world LLM's cannot even write a proper legal brief without making stuff up, providing fake references and just spouting all sorts of ludicrous nonsense. Expecting them to set policy or even to provide effective suggestions to that effect is a fool's errand.