The Psycho-Matrix Test

— — — Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May in a SimCity meets Big Brother stimulation

When you go for a job interview, prospective employers often make you take a psychometric test to check whether you are fit for the job. In democratic elections aren’t the political candidates seeking a job where we, the voters, are collective recruiters?

Looking at the results of recent democratic ballots in US and UK, where the media manipulation has driven the voters away from sanity, it has become obvious that our current tools for verifying whether the political candidates are fit to represent us are incredibly poor. We urgently need a tool to help us determine who is fit for power in order to avoid Trump-like incidents in the future.

It is high time we combine our citizen duties with pleasure. How about using a form of entertainment to filter out candidates unfit for political office?

You ought to feel lucky as one of the first people introduced to the concept of Psycho-Matrix — a high class alternative to the hackneyed television debate.

I propose placing political candidates in a virtual reality simulation of events from the future. Like the film ‘The Matrix’ we would use the latest achievements in machine learning and prediction algorithms to simulate the possible scenarios in the next 4/5 years, given that a certain candidate has won This would give us, and the public, the opportunity to verify how well candidates would actually cope with the responsibility of power and allow us to foresee their unfulfilled pledges.

In fact, this is a classic concept. As long ago as in 381 BC Plato suggested a test in his ‘Republic’ to weed out the candidates for state’s rulers to verify whether the contenders had the potential to be ‘bewitched’ by the pursuit of their own pleasure.

Let’s apply this possibly coming soon UK elections. Imagine Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May playing an immersive game à la SimCity where, in the first level they have to meet Trump and attend a G7 summit, in the following level — they must react to a financial crisis and terrorist attacks, before finally, in a boss level natural disasters and nuclear war. Perhaps the public could even suggest and vote for the scenarios they would like to see the candidates responding to?

The candidates’ performance in Psycho-Matrix would then be edited into a new entertainment format — a ‘sci-fi documentary’ — which giving the voters an idea of what their electoral decisions might lead to in reality.

I suggest that Partnership on AI (an alliance between Google, Facebook, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft) as a sponsor for this project. According to The Guardian on Wednesday, 28 September 2016, the Partnership on AI is set to ‘conduct research, recommend best practices, and publish research under an open license in areas such as ethics, fairness and inclusivity; transparency, privacy, and interoperability; collaboration between people and AI systems; and the trustworthiness, reliability and robustness of the technology’

The Psycho-Matrix project would help these giant corporations fulfil their promises and give power back to people instead of facilitating of capitalist plutocracy.

Finally, it would be incredible opportunity for Theresa May, given that she has been compared to robot, as unlike in a television debate, in Psycho-Matrix she wouldn’t need to speak to real people at all.