A fantasy

For the avoidance of doubt, I should start by saying that I am a long-time supporter of assisted dying, promoted in this country by the people at reference 1. What follows is, however, prompted by some of their activities. While the image above was turned up by Bing from Western Australia, where things have moved along a bit faster than they have here. 

So suppose that you care about some problem which requires legislation to fix. In the UK, one of your ways forward is to form or join a campaigning group which is more or less devoted to that problem and which is made up of like minded people, more or less agreed on what the legislation should be.

In our representative democracy, one of the things that such a group can do is organise its members to approach members of our Houses of Parliament to try to impress on them the importance of the issue and the right way to deal with it. To impress on them the strength of opinion. Which is, of course, equally open to those who do not agree with you.

For most people, without fancy contacts, this means writing letters (or sending emails) to your MP, perhaps to some friendly Lord, or perhaps to some relevant member of the government. Drafts of such letters will likely have been put together by the campaigning group, for the convenience of their members.

On occasion, this can reduce to the campaigning group issuing postcards to their members to sign, stamp and put into a letter box. Such postcards do not usually attract replies, but they might be weighed in, as a crude measure of the strength of opinion.

But sticking with letters to rank-and-file MPs, what do we expect our MPs to do with them? Are they going to do more than just weigh them in?

Now MPs are busy people who get a lot of mail. So they might find it convenient to rent an AI agent to do the work for them: to read the mail, to generate polite and sensible replies, and, occasionally to flag up something for personal attention. The MP would have to explain to the agent what his views were, but after that he would not have all that much to do. He would get a report from his agent from time to time, and decide on any positive action - like attending a debate or voting - on that basis.

The sort of thing that good constituency offices used to manage in the olden days with volunteer clerks, before the volume of mail got too much. And even then, the replies, while polite, were formulaic, assembled from a roster of paragraphs, and were sometimes a bit wide of the mark. An AI agent could no doubt do better.

Not that a constituent would be terribly impressed if he knew that his nicely packaged up reply, complete with fancy envelope embossed with the seal of the House of Commons, was actually generated by a computer, untouched by human hand.

Speculating further, the campaign groups might save themselves some bother by renting their own AI agents, to help them generate the mail in the first place. Agent versus agent. Who can afford the biggest and best agent?

So where will it all end? Will the cause of dignity in dying have been advanced, will our democracy be in a better shape?

PS: I still find it slightly odd that assisted dying campaigns seem to be dominated by women, as in the snap above. OK, so they are more likely to be at the sharp end of looking after dying people, more likely to be aware of the problem, but I would have thought men were just as likely as women to end up with a messy and painful death.

References

Reference 1: https://www.dignityindying.org.uk/.