Back To The Future | A Terminator of American jobs went unnoticed on Trump’s judgment day: artificial intelligence
MogIA algorithm that correctly called the election against army of human experts portends a bigger threat to human employment than any politician
If anyone needs to be convinced that robots have triumphed over humans, look at the US president-elect Donald Trump. Not that I’m suggesting the winner of the 2016 presidential election is a Terminator sent from the future. But the results of the race give us another sober warning about the advent of artificial intelligence, which will impact our lives in a far more profound way than any individual can.
President Trump: How did the polls get U.S. election so wrong?
The news of the week is not just Trump winning the race. It is the surprise of his victory. For weeks and months, mainstream media and pollsters had been telling us this would be an easy victory for Hillary Clinton. On the eve of the election, Reuters put the chance of a Clinton presidency at 90 per cent. When the results came in, the world was stunned. For those rooting for Clinton, the psychological blow was harder to bear because of rosy expectations.
Buried under an avalanche of polling reports, a lone voice correctly predicted two weeks in advance that Trump would win. And it was no fluke. MogIA, an algorithm created by Indian entrepreneur Sanjiv Rai in 2004, has now correctly predicted four out of four US presidential elections.
Defying pundits and pollsters, Donald Trump is the next US president. Here’s how he did it
Its predictions are based on 20 million data points collected from social media platforms such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. It uses this data to evaluate public engagement with information relating to each candidate. It found Trump’s engagement rate was 25 per cent higher than Barack Obama’s at his peak in 2008, indicating a high chance of him winning.
Unfortunately, our digital sibyl’s voice did not fit the mainstream media narrative, so received little attention.
The practice of using public polls to measure the pulse of the electorate was always a popular but precarious business. Before this week, the most memorable upset in a US presidential election was in 1948, when Harry Truman defeated Republican candidate Thomas Dewey. All the surveys suggested a clear victory for Dewey. So confident of his success, the Chicago Tribune went to press on its early edition with the headline “Dewey defeats Truman”. The photo of a defiant Truman holding a copy of the Tribune and shouting “Ain’t the way I heard it” has become part of American folklore.
Watch: Obama and Trump’s first White House meeting
