AI correctly predicts results of four US elections in a row

MogIA forecast Trump win in defiance of pre-election polls

An artificial intelligence (AI) called MogIA correctly predicted that Republican candidate Donald Trump would win the 2016 US election.

This is the fourth US election in a row that the system has correctly predicted, despite pre-election polls indicating that its guesses would be wide of the mark.

US network CNBC said that MogIA uses 20 million data points from online services including Google, Twitter and YouTube to generate its predictions. MogIA also correctly guessed the results of the Democratic and Republican primaries.

"While most algorithms suffer from programmers'/developers' biases, MoglA aims at learning from her environment, developing her own rules at the policy layer and developing expert systems without discarding any data," Sanjiv Rai, founder of Indian startup Genic.ai, which developed MogIA, told CNBC.

The system analyses data around public engagement with social media posts relating to candidates. Prior to today's election result, it found that Trump's engagement statistics beat even those of president Obama in the previous election.

Most election polls before voting began put Democratic nominee Hilary Clinton in the lead.

"If Trump loses, it will defy the data trend for the first time in the last 12 years since internet engagement began in full earnest," Rai wrote in a report sent to CNBC before the election result.

Many experts are concerned at the effect that the increasing power of AI will have on society.

Professor Stephen Hawking, speaking recently at the opening of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, said that AI will be "the best or the worst thing ever to happen to humanity".

"The potential benefits of creating intelligence are huge. We cannot predict what we might achieve when our own minds are amplified by AI," he said.

"Perhaps with the tools of this new technological revolution, we will be able to undo some of the damage done to the natural world by the last one - industrialisation. And surely we will aim to finally eradicate disease and poverty.

"Every aspect of our lives will be transformed. In short, success in creating AI could be the biggest event in the history of our civilisation."