full transcript

From the Ted Talk by César Hidalgo: A bold idea to replace politicians

Unscramble the Blue Letters

So there is an obvious idea in the 21st century that was as obvious as the idea of putting together a steam engine with a loom at the time of Jacquard. And that idea is combining direct dercaocmy with software agents. Imagine, for a second, a world in which, instead of having a representative that reenprtses you and miliolns of other pepole, you can have a reeverittnsape that represents only you, with your nuanced political veiws — that weird combination of libertarian and liberal and maybe a little bit caevsvnorite on some issues and maybe very progressive on others. Politicians nywadoas are packages, and they're full of compromises. But you might have someone that can represent only you, if you are willing to give up the idea that that representative is a human. If that representative is a software agent, we could have a senate that has as many senators as we have citizens. And those senators are going to be able to read every bill and they're going to be able to vote on each one of them.

Open Cloze

So there is an obvious idea in the 21st century that was as obvious as the idea of putting together a steam engine with a loom at the time of Jacquard. And that idea is combining direct _________ with software agents. Imagine, for a second, a world in which, instead of having a representative that __________ you and ________ of other ______, you can have a ______________ that represents only you, with your nuanced political _____ — that weird combination of libertarian and liberal and maybe a little bit ____________ on some issues and maybe very progressive on others. Politicians ________ are packages, and they're full of compromises. But you might have someone that can represent only you, if you are willing to give up the idea that that representative is a human. If that representative is a software agent, we could have a senate that has as many senators as we have citizens. And those senators are going to be able to read every bill and they're going to be able to vote on each one of them.

Solution

  1. views
  2. nowadays
  3. conservative
  4. democracy
  5. millions
  6. represents
  7. people
  8. representative

Original Text

So there is an obvious idea in the 21st century that was as obvious as the idea of putting together a steam engine with a loom at the time of Jacquard. And that idea is combining direct democracy with software agents. Imagine, for a second, a world in which, instead of having a representative that represents you and millions of other people, you can have a representative that represents only you, with your nuanced political views — that weird combination of libertarian and liberal and maybe a little bit conservative on some issues and maybe very progressive on others. Politicians nowadays are packages, and they're full of compromises. But you might have someone that can represent only you, if you are willing to give up the idea that that representative is a human. If that representative is a software agent, we could have a senate that has as many senators as we have citizens. And those senators are going to be able to read every bill and they're going to be able to vote on each one of them.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
direct democracy 4
software agents 4
cognitive bandwidth 3
median turnout 2
people vote 2
bandwidth problem 2
steam engine 2
integrate data 2
obvious idea 2
providing data 2
user interface 2

ngrams of length 3

collocation frequency
cognitive bandwidth problem 2

Important Words

  1. agent
  2. agents
  3. bill
  4. bit
  5. century
  6. citizens
  7. combination
  8. combining
  9. compromises
  10. conservative
  11. democracy
  12. direct
  13. engine
  14. full
  15. give
  16. human
  17. idea
  18. imagine
  19. issues
  20. jacquard
  21. liberal
  22. libertarian
  23. loom
  24. millions
  25. nowadays
  26. nuanced
  27. obvious
  28. packages
  29. people
  30. political
  31. politicians
  32. progressive
  33. putting
  34. read
  35. represent
  36. representative
  37. represents
  38. senate
  39. senators
  40. software
  41. steam
  42. time
  43. views
  44. vote
  45. weird
  46. world