An AI candidate is running for parliament in the UK

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Okay, now here’s a politician who represents the people: AI Steve from Brighton and Hove, England.

Yes, this is the first time I’ve heard of such a thing. An AI candidate is running for Parliament in the UK.

Seriously!

Green Party MP Caroline Lucas is stepping down from her position, and AI Steve, running as an independent, is one of eight potential replacements.

Sussex businessman Steve Endacott is the man behind AI Steve, and while he’s the actual candidate headed to Parliament, he says he will be controlled by AI Steve, who will be available 24/7 to answer questions from constituents.

Like this one.

AI Steve does not care about Steve Endacott’s political views, he simply works as a representative for his Brighton and Hove constituents, and will, unlike most politicians, listen to them and vote the way they’d prefer. You know, like a representative democracy is supposed to work. It would technically be Endacott voting in parliament, but he’d do it at the direction of AI Steve.

Here are some of the issues AI Steve’s constituents are most concerned with.

Voters’ top issues so far, according to those calls, were (in order of importance): Concerns about the safety of Palestinians, trash bins, bicycle lanes, immigration and abortion. Endacott noted that having an AI representative enables him to respond, in a sense, to thousands of potential constituents a day.

‘I don’t have to go knock on their door, get them out of bed when they don’t want to talk to me,’ Endacott said. He said that was ‘the old form of politics,’ whereas people can now choose to contact AI Steve on their own volition and at their convenience.

I asked AI Steve about immigration.

And the Palestinians.

And abortion

AI Steve did mention that abortion is legal up to 24 weeks in the UK, and that abortion is a sensitive issue. He just wouldn’t answer about the third trimester.

Speaking with AI Steve was the highlight of my morning, so I’ll leave the link right here if you want to have a little chat with him yourself.

As for Steve Endacott’s business interests.

Endacott is the chairman of Neural Voice, a company that creates personalized voice assistants for businesses in the form of an AI avatar. Neural Voice’s technology is behind AI Steve, one of the seven characters the company created to showcase its technology …

He said he is not using the AI avatar to propel his own business interests, as he says he holds less than a 10% share in Neural River, the platform behind AI Steve. His primary motivation, he said, is to push the government to enact changes to cut carbon emissions — whether that means running for office or, ‘worst case,’ becoming a political influencer.

Well, we’ll see how AI Steve does in the July 4 election. I’m honestly looking forward to those results.

As for the idea of AI candidates running for office, well, maybe the Democrats wanna try this technique with Joe Biden.