The Opportunities Party (TOP) has revealed it is working on an artificial intelligence candidate.
Speaking to Newshub Nation on Saturday morning, TOP leader Raf Manji told Simon Shepherd: "We've been playing around a little bit with the idea of could you create an AI candidate?
"As it happens, you can."
TOP has some radical policies that will fundamentally change the nature of New Zealand society if they are enacted, such as a universal basic income and a land tax, and this stems from their belief that technology and automation will also fundamentally change society.
"So we have a candidate, which is online at the moment, but I am talking to somebody about whether we can actually develop that up into, you know, a proper avatar, somebody that might be able to speak, answer questions, do interviews," Manji said.
While the idea of an AI candidate is interesting, its ability to be used exactly like a human candidate remains fanciful.
"Obviously, it's a bit of fun because it wouldn't fit under the Electoral Act, but it could be a good demonstrator for actually what is the future of politics."
"If we think that 120 people sitting in this, you know, 100-year-old room are going to be the best people to make decisions, we might be surprised to find in the future that AI's going to be way smarter than us."
Manji admits "we'll still need people to actually decide the outcomes that we want" but he believes that soon enough, AI will be a much more efficient way of running aspects of government than "tens of thousands of public servants shuffling paper around writing strategy documents and all the rest of it".
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