For politics and governance in the US, does there exist a tool that:
Prompts the user to enter their rough location (e.g., town, county, state)
Prompts the user to select interest keywords (e.g., housing, animal welfare, cannabis)
Lists pending local (town / county), state, and federal level laws and regulations w.r.t. these interests
Lists current local (town / county), state, and federal level laws and regulations w.r.t. these interests
Includes summaries of current local (town / county), state, and federal level laws and regulations for accessibility
Lists special interest groups that typically support/counter laws and regulations relating to these interests at the local (town / county), state, and federal level
Lists ways in which the user could influence laws and regulations w.r.t. these interests (e.g., a step-by-step tutorial for participating in a certain election)
If this tool doesn’t exist, how much value would people get from it if it existed? How difficult would it be to implement each part? (please point me to any tools / organizations that roughly fulfill the duties outlined in the bullet points)
Lastly, w.r.t. the point
Includes summaries of current local (town / county), state, and federal level laws and regulations for accessibility
I think GPT-X might work well for summarizing and distilling legal language—has this been done already?
The thing you’ve outlined sounds to me like news media, sort of, as well as implicitly leaning on existing news media. The amount of information entailed is comparable; having up-to-date info on over 3000 United States counties is a far from trivial endeavor.[1]
It’s different of course in that existing news media isn’t remotely incentivized to support this kind of work, instead being caught in the tar pit of getting eyeballs and ad dollars, as well as being an arena which monied interests know they need to optimize for. Of course if the tool you’re describing became well-known, it would also become subject to competitive pressures from without.
And in practice, the number of people who would get value from it is probably not all that much different from the number of people who already are already immersed in activism. You get marginal gains from more efficient allocation of some of the ones who are just kind of being pulled along by their social networks.
Could a GPT-X in principle maybe help scrape through every local paper, every town council pdf, and output useful insight that current activist communities don’t already have access to if they’re sufficiently motivated? I think eventually yes, but by the time AI is that powerful there might be more important things to worry about.
If you want to offer info at the town level, it gets even worse. There are nearly 20,000 incorporated towns cities and villages, although 3/4s are under 5k population.