Politics

Wattle Labs has created a "Large Behaviour Model" (LBM) of the human population. The LBM, an analogue of LLM's, which seeks to understand human behaviour, rather than language.

This video explains how our technology can can enhance politics.

#datascience #AI #digitalmarketing #ecommerce #behaviourchange #BehaviouralScience #psychometrics #nudging #boosts

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTFbLTmrDyg

Transcript

Hello Australian political parties, my name is Aaron and this is Wattle Labs. Wattle Labs is an AI and machine learning startup with a focus in sales and marketing. However, there's a great overlap between marketing and politics — in both, you're trying to affect change within the population, communicate effectively, and understand your audience. Wattle Labs technology can help you know your constituents better in the same manner as it helps a company understand its customers. We can help you connect with your constituents in a more meaningful way, understand what the silent majority are thinking, and potentially help inform policy.

So I'll just get into it. I threw in all the Commonwealth electoral divisions, and what our technology can do is psychologically and behaviourally profile every person in Australia. It can also profile cohorts — so we can create a cohort of people who live in your electoral division and profile those people en masse. Fenner is the first on my list. We've profiled approximately 158,228 people to create this profile. The people who live in Fenner — the constituents of Andrew Lee MP — are low income, low education, and live in a provincial city. In our model, we classify Canberra as a provincial city. There's a very Australian culture in Fenner: family-orientated, office workers with a responsible personality, community focused, an active schedule, and in good health. They're married or in domestic partnerships, and your constituents are professionals working in public administration and safety — which is not surprising given Canberra.

What our technology can do is create a persona of your constituents and then identify the statistically significant highlights of that persona. The lifestyle factor — again, this is Canberra rather than a typical provincial city — is the biggest factor. A responsible personality is also very significant, and the typical age is 35 to 39: young families working for the federal government, driving to work, and working full time in an office. So firstly, that's understanding who your constituents are. But where we can really help you is in creating a persona. The prototypical Fennerite is John — a dedicated and responsible office worker in the public administration sector in a bustling provincial city. At 37 years old, he's known for his active involvement in community initiatives and his commitment to his job.

We can then look at dreams, desires, fears, worries, goals, motivations, principles, interests, entertainment, hobbies, sports, and brands. The predictions we can make about Fennerites are quite extensive, as you can see. We can do a great deal of psychological and behavioural profiling.

Now, we're a marketing and AI startup, so we can also help you craft and frame a message — for example, around increasing tax — specifically for a Fennerite. Instead of having one message for all Australians, you can be more targeted and use sophisticated techniques to adjust that message for different Commonwealth electoral divisions. This makes your messaging feel more personalised and relevant to the target audience.

The way you'd sell a tax increase in Fenner is something like: "Increasing tax is a practical policy change that speaks to your sense of responsibility and fairness as an Australian office worker and public administrator. It can support better funded local services and stronger community infrastructure, and a more reliable future for Canberra, where every dollar should be used wisely." We'd also suggest framing it around a fair contribution for better local services — investing tax revenue in roads, hospitals, and schools, supporting essential public services and the Canberra community, and shared responsibility for a stronger Australia. The features of the new tax system you'd want to highlight are that it protects essential local services, keeps funding for roads and schools stable, supports a fair contribution from everyone, improves community programmes and public safety, may reduce pressure on future debt, and helps maintain reliable government. And a slogan you could use: "Invest a little today for a safer and better public service tomorrow."

So yes, we're a startup in sales and marketing, but this technology can clearly be applied to politics. The use of AI and machine learning in the context of voting is only going to increase. We've shown you who your constituents are, and we've shown you how you can connect with them.

But why does no one like MPs? I'd put it to you that it's because politicians do not understand what the silent majority are thinking. All behaviour follows a normal distribution, and in terms of policy, what you'll find is that 80% of people never respond to anything, while 20% won't stop talking about everything. Of that 20%, around 10% are very vocal in support, and 10% are very vocal in opposition. But what happens in the middle? The silent majority won't answer your surveys, you can't do market research on them, if you try to call them they'll hang up — they simply will not engage. So what our technology does is focus on what that 80% actually thinks. What are their wants, needs, dreams, and desires?

This gap in politics — and it's a gap in media too, which is why our media landscape is so bifurcated — is where all the subtlety and nuance lives. In fact, your elections are decided by the 80%, not by the vocal 10% on either side. But it seems to me that the vocal minorities at the fringe edges of society are the ones who most often end up informing policy. It's not the wishes of the average Australian — the silent 80% — it's typically the louder and more organised minorities who drive policy outcomes. This is why it's almost impossible to know what the silent majority actually thinks.

Our technology can help you understand what the silent majority thinks, and therefore could potentially serve as a lens through which to view and inform policy. Anyway, thanks very much for listening, my name is Aaron, have a good day. Goodbye.