The Bad Presidential Polling Results and their Ominous Implications in the Age of Algorithms

For the second Presidential election in a row, the polls were materially off. This suggests that the science of polling is regressing, not improving, because pollsters are failing to create polling models that realistically reflect the voters, and thus the extrapolations of polls based on faulty models are resulting in faulty polls. Not only is this bad news for polling in years to come, but it is a sadly superlative example of what society faces with algorithms in the future.

Just like polls, algorithms are dependent on three fundamental elements: 1) an accurate database, 2) a design that uses, or allows the algorithm to learn, accurate correlations between the database and conclusions to be drawn by the algorithm, and 3) a design that properly uses the those correlations to make accurate conclusions. If any one of these elements fails, the entire algorithm will result in inaccurate, misleading or simply incoherent results.

The bad polling results have ominous implications for what society faces in the Age of Algorithms. Just like bad polling models suggested that Biden might actually win my home state of Ohio, a bad algorithm might decide, for example, that some convicted criminals are more likely to be a harm to society, and thus those algorithms might instruct judges to increase the sentences for those guilty persons. However, when a poll is bad, eventually the election results will show the poll was erroneous, and the poll will not have resulted in fundamental harm to the election, except perhaps the pride of commentators who were paid to spout the poll results like an electoral oracle. In contrast, after a criminal is given a longer sentence by a faulty algorithm, there is no subsequent test by which that sentencing will be proven wrong, and the harm caused to the prisoner will mean an irreparable loss of additional and unnecessary years in prison, while criminals who perhaps should be in prison longer will be freed too soon to commit more crimes.

So the bad polling of the last two elections should serve as an omen for what society faces in the Age of Algorithms.