I'm curious to see the sort of services that people build with this. This could be a opportunity to get in at the beginning of something huge. Anyone have any cool ideas?
I dream of an automated fact-checker. Of course, to do it right you need Turing Test-passing AI. But if you start small, with the capability to parse a few statements of a few forms, that would still be useful.
I saw an argument on HN recently where people made these statements:
1. The UK is a much more violent society than the US, statistically.
2. There are dozens of U.S. cities with higher per capita murder rates than London or any other city in the UK.
3. Murder rates are higher in the US, but murder is a small fraction of violent crime. All other violent crime is much more common in the UK than in the US.
No-one provided sources; people asked for them later. Suppose HN ran an automated fact-checker over every sentence ever posted, searching for statements of the form:
"[country] is (much|a lot)? more [quality] than [country]" - or a more sophisticated regex that captures more applicable cases.
And then, for the sentences that it understands, it checks the claim. Maybe it highlights incorrect statements in red, or just adds footnotes. This might make online debates more rigorous. Not only would a few statements be fact-checked, but the knowledge that a fact-checking program will look at your comment might incentivize people to be more careful with facts.
Newspapers and other media would find automated fact-checkers useful too.
Taking a longer view (like decades), with good speech-to-text technology, it could fact-check TV broadcasts in real-time. This should improve the debate quality not just of obscure internet forums, but also nationally-broadcast TV. Then, maybe, we'd see an improvement in the accuracy of all political debate, which should improve democracy.
