Eric Wilson (00:00):
Campaigns need to start thinking about how do you prove what is real and what is not. Welcome to the Campaign Trend Podcast where you are joining in on a conversation with the entrepreneurs, operatives, and experts who make professional politics happen. I'm your host, Eric Wilson. Our guest today is Robert Moran, the author of Lincoln 2.0, a political thriller novel and scientific romance. We'll dig into that in a minute about a political operative who resurrects Abraham Lincoln with the power of artificial intelligence. Robert is a data-driven strategist and pollster working at the intersection of business, public policy, and emerging consumer attitudes. We last spoke with Robert about AI way back in 2023 and there's a lot to catch up on. In our conversation, we talk about his new book and the latest on AI in politics. Alright, Robert, tell us about the new book. Give us a brief synopsis.
Robert Moran (00:57):
Sure. So Lincoln 2.0 was long in the making. I first wrote about the idea back in 2015 in the Huffington Post article as you know, and since I've written a lot about the topic. But then finally finished the book and it's out. The book follows a hero Ross and a robes gallery of political consultants backed by a tech billionaire and they build and run for office and AI Abraham Lincoln, all hell kind of breaks loose, but they get it up and running. And then it turns out that not everybody likes the big, bright, beautiful tomorrow of AI candidates. And so the villains plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.
Eric Wilson (01:37):
So ripped from the headlines it sounds like. I want to ask you about why did you turn to fiction to expand on some of the earlier conversations we had when you were writing nonfiction. What did this shift in mediums allow you to do?
Robert Moran (01:54):
I think there are a number of reasons for that. I think that the first is once I started writing about it in a nonfiction capacity, I wrote about it in campaigns and Elections magazine and op-ed in the Baltimore Sun and Immense magazine always I realized, wait, this is a good story. This could actually be an interesting novel. So is that the second thing is I wanted a wider audience to get it beyond political professionals, the think piece kind of environment. I wanted to get it out into the body politic so that we can actually have this discussion because this book is really a thought experiment masquerading as a tragedy and I wanted to get it out in the public domain. And then I think the last thing, which I'm sure that many of your viewers can resonate with is I grew up in the political polling environment. I'm still an analyst. I look at a lot of numbers and I have to write things based on the numbers, based on facts. And so being able to write fiction where you could just use your imagination and it doesn't have to be more to sort of basic facts is free. And so I've really actually enjoyed writing fiction quite a bit.
Eric Wilson (03:00):
Yeah, it seems like that speculative fiction genre is really freeing exactly for what you described and sort of say, Hey, we can suspend some disbelief over here and imagine what's here in service of the truth. And so you're saying something true that is not factual. And so I think it's a shame that more people don't expand into that and think about the possibilities there. But it seems like it's a good medium for you to talk about ai. And one of the things that I think is really important for us, and I've done a little bit of writing about this not in the fiction, but what can we imagine the future of AI to look like? Because we have one side that's very vocal in this doomsday situation of it's going to be the terminator, we're all going to be screwed. We're not going to be able to tell what's true from false. But what's missing I think is the more optimistic view of how can AI be used to do that. Having spoken with you before, I suspect you take a more optimistic view about ai.
Robert Moran (03:58):
I do. So one of the core things I explore in the novel is the challenge that the West has when it comes to AI and any sort of things that are like automation or robotics. So if you go back in time, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein and the West struggles with the Frankenstein mythos, which is that we create something and then it turns on us and we regret it. And so I explore that quite a bit, but what if we create something and it helps us? And so a lot of the novel turns on that mytho and how we think about is a thing that we create helpful or hurtful. And so I challenge a lot of the conventional wisdom on that and try to explore it. I think we're already seeing clues. So for example, in the mayor's race in Cheyenne, Wyoming,
(04:49):
There was an attempt to run Vic, which was of ai. It did not succeed. There was an AI candidate for Parliament, Steve. So that's one thing. It's already starting to happen. But the second thing I think you're going to see is a merger. You saw this in the last election in India where Modi's team had built an avatar that allowed the avatar Modi to speak in multiple languages on WhatsApp to voters, something similar. I think it's called AI U was done in South Korea. So I think what you're going to see is candidates essentially digitally clone themselves for campaign purposes. And I think there are a lot of good reasons for that.
Eric Wilson (05:30):
Yeah, I want to get into that a little bit later on in our conversation. I have some thoughts about how do we decide which way do we go, but it is an important thing that we have to point out here. We worry a lot about the unintended negative consequences of new technology, but very rarely do we spend some time to think about the unintended positive consequences. And so that's why I think speculating is really helpful. I want to dig into the central point of your novel here, which is that why do you think that the first AI candidate we're likely to see is going to be a deceased great leader like Abraham Lincoln or George Washington and not a totally new construct?
Robert Moran (06:10):
So it's funny, I had just finished being at the Festival of Politics in Endura, Scotland when I wrote the Huffington Post piece back in 2015. And I came to this weird startling conclusion that you could bring back long ago politicians of ai, especially if they have a large corpus of material of writing, of speaking, et cetera decisions. You could train the AI on those decisions. And so I wrote about it and when I started exploring it, I came to the view that at least in the US context it would be Lincoln, because Lincoln is the second most biograph person after Jesus in the English language sharing America. We have tons of biographies of him, we have his telegrams, we have his writings, we have his speeches. And you could use all that material to train. You could probably do this with FDR and maybe Reagan because he had his television show for a long time.
(07:01):
There's some presence that had such a long career that you could build something to be very close to the way of thinking. But I came to this conclusion because I don't think voters would vote for some generic super intelligence. That's kind of scary because they don't know if there are boundaries to this personality. But if you base it on a real historical human, you know have boundaries to their personality, you understand how they thought about things they know and no go zones. And so it's a known quantity. It's like selling a product that already has a brand versus selling a new product that has no brand. So I think generic super intelligence agent five for president is probably a little scary. But Lincoln 2.0, you know who a henick is.
Eric Wilson (07:48):
I take that. My perspective I think is sort of let's build on that because, and this is something I emphasize in my trainings is that I don't think Abraham Lincoln could win election in 2025 and beyond. I think the skills that made an effective politician back then are vastly different. And so I think that's an interesting point of debate and I kind of lean towards I guess the middle ground, which is the avatar where it's melding human personality with super intelligence. What needs to happen with AI development for this future that you're imagining to come true? Could we run an AI for president today? I mean, just from a technological perspective
Robert Moran (08:28):
You could, but I think the short answer is you need a GI, artificial general intelligence. You need something that is, if not thinking very close to thinking that you could train
Eric Wilson (08:39):
For the listeners. We don't have that yet. There's a lot of speculation of is it a year away? Is it 10 years away and what will happen?
Robert Moran (08:46):
Correct. So in fact, for the listeners, there have been surveys of experts in AI on when do we get a GI And the span of years that is estimated is a immense, some experts don't think you ever get it. Some experts think, oh, it's right around the corner. And you could see meta is trying to go for that moonshot right now. But in the book, the tech billionaire that's underwriting this thing, who also probably has a number of alternative ulterior motives here, he builds two teams or he tasks two teams. One is a super, what we would think of now as a super LLM team and the other is an A GI moonshot team. And so in the book, the LLM team is way ahead and then the moonshot a GI team leaps ahead. And then Lincoln 2.0 is unveiled to us at a nationals baseball game on the fork of July.
Eric Wilson (09:37):
You're listening to the campaign trend podcast. I'm speaking with Robert Moran about his new novel Lincoln 2.0 and all of the advancements on the horizon about AI in politics. So I think we would probably agree that the biggest obstacle facing Lincoln 2.0 is actually regulatory and not technological. And so we've already seen dozens of states pass laws that specifically target the use of AI in political campaigns. Unfortunately with the one big beautiful bill that moratorium on this patchwork of state legislations didn't make it through. How will Lincoln 2.0 overcome these roadblocks, this patchwork of regulation?
Robert Moran (10:18):
It's interesting. So we explored this in the novel as well. So in the novel Ross and his political consulting team, they initially want to argue that this is a reincarnated link and put this thing on the ballot, but they realized it is too much of a constitutional hurdle because to run per president, you must be a
Eric Wilson (10:39):
Citizen, for example, right?
Robert Moran (10:41):
35 years old or older they thought they had nailed, but the argument about whether this is actually him was an open debate and it's a little bit philosophical. So instead what they did is they have found a volunteer that would change their name and then they could put that person on the ballot and then that person would promise to relinquish control if elected. So that was their workaround, sort of a human, a fall guy, a patsy, a human avatar for the ai.
Eric Wilson (11:09):
So Robert, when we spoke back in 2023, there was some really early concern about AI wreaking havoc on 2024 elections. We had elections around the world. You've already mentioned India, we had European parliamentary election, it was the year of elections, and people were really worried about what would happen here in the US with deep fakes and all this kind of stuff that didn't happen.
Robert Moran (11:31):
Why not?
(11:32):
Well, I think it didn't happen because humans still control all the key levers. It's hard to deceive humans who have good intent on this kind of stuff. And of course humans still had the vote. We have all the resources and things like that. And the media was already sort of looking out for it. It's interesting. The challenge from deep fakes is indeed a very serious thing. And so in the novel, the villains have a three-part strategy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. One is actual fiscal violence against the campaign team. Two is to delete him from the circus, essentially a digital assassination. And the third is to create so many fake copies of his avatars saying crazy things that all those deep fakes should be indistinguishable from the real thing. And so those are the three attacks. And so I think the third is something that a lot of campaigns may see over time, especially if there's sort of nation state interference in elections. I think we can estimate will happen at some point.
Eric Wilson (12:34):
And we've had other experts on the podcast talking about why that didn't happen. I'm afraid it's not good news. It's because the old tricks still worked. They didn't need to invest all the time in the technology. I suspect you're right that it's going to continue to blur the lines between fact and fiction. And we'll think about it's like, do you know, is this luxury handbag real or not? That's going to be the challenge. And I think campaigns need to start thinking about how do you prove what is real and what is not? And there's some technical solutions out there, but we've got to flood the market with our own positive content and not create that opportunity or a gap for something to come in and be a fake. So that's really interesting to see how those three attacks play out. What can campaigns do now to prepare for a future when Lincoln 2.0 is a reality?
Robert Moran (13:23):
I think that the biggest thing they can do is they can consider how they can merge with the technology. So how do they take a real life candidate and use digital avatars, use things like that to basically give them a force multiplier effect. Because in the book, what the political consoles stumble upon is they have huge advantages. They don't have to run television advertising because Lincoln 2.0 and speak to every American voter retail politics 24 7, 3 6 doesn't get tired, just 100% retail. So I do think that something like this could be done for physical candidates that are looking to sort of get a force multiplier effect. I also think that something like this can be done for speech and debate prep where you could create the AI version of your opponent and just start debating it. And I think it would work, and I think people are going to do this probably in the next election.
Eric Wilson (14:23):
Well, we actually saw a really cool example of that here in Northern Virginia, I think Virginia's eighth congressional district, there was a candidate running as an independent could not get representative Dom Byer to agree to debate with him. So he loaded up all of his four speeches and things like that. There was enough training material, created an avatar, and he and another candidate had a debate with the representative and it was pretty even-handed. But I think that the big thing here, we can obviously imagine the future where this is going to happen and we have black mirror episodes of it. This is not hard to imagine, but humans still get a vote. And so I think that we are going to see in similar ways that the social media era has upended the perfectly scripted talking point driven fresh TV ad kind of political campaign, we may see people react negatively to AI and say, look, we like humans. AI is staking my job. It's the reason why I can't do what my dad did for a career. There could be a real tech lash to that and then being human and not driven by AI would be the upside. And I don't know which way it goes.
Robert Moran (15:37):
Well, it's funny because that argument is made by at least one portion, one subgroup of the vts. Okay, so the vows I learned later, I made many mistakes on this novel and I learned from talking to other writers and they said, Bob, you got to write the villains first.
Eric Wilson (15:55):
Oh wow.
Robert Moran (15:56):
I didn't write the villains first. But in this case, the villains do what villains do right now, which is they meet in online video games and they plot. So in different chapters throughout the book, the villains meet in a video game that's like Red Dead redemption. By the way, they can't fire, they all have digital identities, but they plot, one group of them are anti ai. They think AI is an existential threat to humans and they think that any violence they do is warranted. Another group happens to be part of some section of the US officer Corps who refused to answer to or report to or be ordered to battle by an AI or chief. They have a philosophical problem there too. The villains make a lot of good arguments in fact, and it was a lot of fun writing the villains, but I didn't write the mails first.
Eric Wilson (16:46):
Alright, well pro tip for aspiring novelist out there. Alright, what are the signposts that we'll see along the way that people will know that Lincoln 2.0 is coming,
Robert Moran (16:57):
The famous novelist, William Gibson is a famous science fiction. All of a sudden the future is here. It's just not evenly distributed, so So for example, you already had Modi's team having a digital avatar. You have this in South Korea as well. You have a candidate in Cheyenne, Wyoming. You have somebody standing for parliament with an ai. So you're already seeing some of that. I think that one or more presidential library is going to create a digital clone of the president. I've spoken with a couple presidential libraries urging them to build that clone now fast before the kind of people I write about in the book, build It interesting, be better on the public interest if the presidential libraries built it because they have all the resources. So I think you'll see one or more presidential library build something like this very soon. I think that people will become much more comfortable with AI and start to think about it as a friend and confidant and helper. And so I'll explain why. So in the book, it's said in the near future and in that future almost everybody has an AI assistant that they talk to usually through their glasses, but they also joke around about people having AI boyfriends and girlfriends, which is already
Eric Wilson (18:12):
Already happening.
Robert Moran (18:13):
And so I think the degree to which you see more AI paramours and more AI assistance blew and grow, I think you're going to see people even more accepting of that technology and it becomes part of the ripe and they're a little bit more used to it. I think you're going to see that. And then I think somebody is going to do this as a publicity stunt, but then somebody's going to try it for real.
Eric Wilson (18:38):
Well, I think all of those predictions are spot on and we're already starting to see them. I'm interested to see which way it goes. Of course there's going to be the where do people land, where does the regulation land? That's going to be a big question. And United States is going to take a different tack than some other countries. Really fascinating thing to think about and looking forward to finishing your novel. Encourage everyone to check that out. It's wherever you can get your books. I'll include links in the show notes. My thanks to Robert for joining me for another fascinating conversation. It feels like we're through the Looking Glass into the future. If this episode made you a little bit smarter, gave you something to think about, all we ask is that you share it with a friend or colleague. You'll look smarter in the process. More people here about the show. It's a win-win all around. You can subscribe to the Campaign Trend podcast wherever you get podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, apple podcasts everywhere. And you can also sign up at our website campaign trend.com for even more news, best practices. We're sending stuff out all the time. With that, I'll say thanks for listening. See you next time. The Campaign Trend Podcast is produced by Advocacy Content Kitchen, a media production studio.
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