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I have been laid low by a gastrointestinal lurgy for the last few days. The microscopic irritant has created enough discomfort to have qualified as ‘The Vid,’ or some derivative thereof, without having the capacity to extinguish life or provide the biotech industry with another opportunity to flex its intellectual muscles.

This period allowed much time for thought, mainly during frequent visits to the throne. Although Rodin’s sculpture of this author, thinking, may have had less appeal for the visitors of the Musee Rodin than the original.

The feedback loop on which I stuck most often is why humanity hasn’t used the vast potential of artificial intelligence to help us make the most important decisions. This includes developing intelligent laws which punish anyone who doesn’t tell the truth. Because we can’t make the right decisions (about who to vote for or what product to buy – or about anything else for that matter) unless the facts we are being presented with are correct.

The market thinks AI will be great for certain businesses – the MSCI Global Index is 30% up year to date. Why doesn’t good for business translate into great for the rest of us? Some people forget that we are all stuck on this orb together. While I am on this – how come we couldn’t see the solar eclipse in the Southern Hemisphere? Is this another example of one law for the rich countries in the Northern Hemisphere and another for the rest of us in the exploited South?

Half the world’s population reside in countries which are having an election in 2024. The tragedy is that most of the electorate will end up voting for a party or an individual who has no interest in pursuing the agenda of their electors, and even if they are interested in the rights of their constituents, will be forced to vote differently by the interests of the political party they belong to, or more likely, whoever is funding that political party. As a result, many of those eligible to vote in these elections haven’t even bothered to register, subconsciously (or in some cases consciously) realising that the electoral process is pointless for them.

It is impossible to establish what most politicians stand for these days because Trump’s success has proved that a politician’s results will improve if they throw out into the public dialogue as many popular buzzwords as possible, even if they are contradictory. In some cases, the turkey is literally voting for Christmas, although unfortunately, today’s electorate has spent too much time scrolling mindlessly on social media to have the capacity to concentrate long enough to understand this. Social media has provided an ideal platform for much of this nonsense and remains unregulated.

But what if we tasked a benevolent third party to employ AI technology to simplify and translate the mass trash heap of subjective half-truths and white lies in modern politics into a few neat bar graphs and pictorial stories about each candidate or political party? Where our giant computers are used to sift out the verifiable facts based on hard-wired statical probabilities to provide clean data for these simple representations of fact rather than to mine Bitcoin or build bombs. These could reveal useful information to the electorate. For example, has the politician in question been convicted or charged with a crime, how many days have they attended the last session of parliament (whilst awake), and have they recently passed a social audit?

This would allow us to assess the DA’s real performance in the Western Cape and elsewhere based on hard facts rather than 80’s rhetoric. We would know the truth about who is stealing and who is ruling. The ruling should be boring – like politics in Australia or New Zealand – rather than having parliament appear like the inside of a UFC cage.

Boring rulers have time to spend money on houses and securing our strategic water assets rather than avoiding the flying fists. You can be sure that the bad eggs in global politics are using AI for malfeasance – so we must use it to demystify the confusion. There is no doubt that some of our new ‘strategic allies’ are funding the wrong people to achieve the results none of us want.

This could sound condescending, but the electoral choices we are making are enough evidence to suggest we need help. How can polls suggest that the old fools we are being presented with are serious candidates to lead political parties in the elections taking place in 2024? Aren’t leaders supposed to inspire us with selfless virtues in the same way as Mandela or Gandhi did? How can we be choosing our leaders from the overlapping section of a Venn diagram where one circle is ’Men over 70’ and the other is ‘Men who have been charged or convicted of serious crimes involving fraud, or theft?’ There should be a third circle for unfashionable sexual approaches but none of that has been proved yet.

Some may argue that it is the media’s role to provide critique on politicians for the uninformed public. Unfortunately, the media are not objective – they are unashamedly aligned with the political parties that suit them economically. The news on Fox is an entirely different interpretation from that on CNN. And the media is only interested in bad news anyway because that’s what attracts eyeballs. Ghoulish 70-year-old retirees would far rather watch a video of a bridge collapsing into the sea with hundreds of cars on it or a high explosive being shot into a building than a serene morning game drive on the savanna without a guaranteed kill.

Besides, everyone with access to social media is a journalist these days, regardless of their credentials. Even those showing severe symptoms of The Dunnings – Kruger effect, or others without any academic credentials beyond an ability to navigate The Dark Web. At least journalists in the old days faced the prospect of their newspaper getting sued if they published a story that was false and libellous. Today, we can’t be sure if people posting on social media are even human. Russian bots are constantly making a nuisance of themselves by pretending to be voters and posting spurious political content all over social media to influence election outcomes.

Why haven’t we developed a simple way to register for elections which resonates with younger voters? Banks have found it easy enough to develop efficient ways of signing up millions of young customers despite the onerous requirements of regulators. So have cell phone companies. It’s astounding that this technology hasn’t been replicated in the registration process.

Although, to its credit, this government is excellent at not getting things done, and in this case, keeping it difficult to register new voters who are unlikely to vote for you, is an expedient and self-serving policy.

While we are Uberizing the electoral process, we must find an appropriate sanction for lying – both in politics and in general life. Since when did a blatant untruth become someone’s interpretation of the truth or their opinion? What is the point of punishing our kids for lying when it is the universal global currency? Isn’t lying a sin under all known religions or loose arrangements of morals? As soon as we lost our fear of God and the Rule of Law, lying and cheating became an industry. Bizarrely the system ends up pushing those who lie and cheat the most to the top.

Companies have been advertising untruths for centuries. Smoking was good for the respiratory system at one stage, and Coca-Cola (containing cocaine) was sold as a health tonic. Big tech has made trillions of dollars this millennium out of ‘advertising’ involving observing what we are looking at on our devices and then bombarding us with products aligned to those themes. Please excuse me for siding with the amateur but that just isn’t sporting and should be illegal.

And where has the law been while all this took place? Lawyers used to be clever. Now they are pontificating on a Roman couch in the corner with a bunch of grapes in one raised hand, digesting expensive wine and rich food while someone cools them with a palm frond. Legislators blame sovereignty on their inability to prosecute these crimes, but the truth is much uglier.

Others of you, particularly in South Africa, may be grasping onto the straw that BIG BUSINESS is going to show the government the way in pro bono Public Private Partnerships. Unfortunately, the only thing BIG BUSINESS is interested in is profits – particularly for senior management. They may get to show the government how to do things, but only while they are wiping the blood from their jaws before ripping another chunk off the carcass and if it suits them at the time.

The answer to all these questions is that everyone is terrified of how the disenfranchised and unemployed youth will vote. 60% of those entitled to vote in this country are unlikely to do so. But those holding the keys to power are happier with the disorganized and incompetent devil you know than a young firebrand talking about the real meaning of democracy.

However, the danger is not as visceral as it seems because if you provide people access to the truth in a fair process, the right decision for the majority should be made. You won’t end up being ruled by fascist thieves because the truth will be laid bare for all to see rather than being hidden under the table in secret deals.

And at least we won’t have a revolution.