Margin of Error
A Canadian named Polly is a fortune teller 2016 is a good year for their predictions. She accurately predicted the outcome of the Brexit referendum and the 2016 US presidential election. She was also right in the 2019 Canadian federal election and the most recent 2020 US presidential election.
But Polly doesn’t claim to be anything but a modern political Nostradamus. She’s more of a pollster or someone who conducts and analyzes polls. In the history of election researchers, however, Polley may prove to be the most successful of them all.
Polly – short for Politics – is not human. It is an artificial intelligence system made in Canada. That’s the brainchild of an intrepid research team at Ottawa-based startup Advanced Symbolics Inc. (ASI). They currently use Polly to predict consumer behavior. However, ASI also sees the value in exposing Polly to the world of politics, and so far, she has proven relatable and deadly accurate.
How does Polly work? It uses a combination of algorithms and statistical methods to predict the outcome of future events. It also mines data from social media, among other data sources. Their algorithms can also take into account other factors, such as demographics, making their predictions more accurate than traditional surveys or other predictive models.
Traditional surveys were once considered straightforward, simple and accurate, using methods that are more than 100 years old. These include surveys, telephone calls, home visits, informal polls, town hall meetings, and opinion polls. Often a small portion of the population is randomly selected to represent the opinion of the entire population. These selected respondents were cheerful, courteous, and even keen to engage with the process and provide specific answers to add to the conversation.
However, over the past 30 to 40 years, many changes have occurred worldwide, especially in terms of demographics and major technological advances. Technology is very fluid right now, and people are less trusting and annoyed when it comes to reaching out to pollsters, let alone answering their questions.
People spend an inordinate amount of time on social media these days, and it’s where we get information, share opinions, and have conversations about national and political issues. It’s a trove of data about people’s feelings, habits, and of course preferences. In this context, an AI system like Polly is valuable because it can extract meaningful information from random noise.
The benefits we reap from forms of AI like Polly also come with risks. Critics point out that social media platforms fail to provide a representative sample of the big picture because they already target young, urban users and the politically engaged. There are also concerns that those in power may use Polly to mislead the public.
While not yet a perfect system, Polly and AI in general show promise for how we can accurately predict human behavior.
Directed by: Peter Gombos
