Takahiro Anno: Fixing Bugs in Democracy
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Transcript
Hello, and welcome to the Radical Exchanges podcast. My name is Jess Scully, and I'm the executive director of Radical Exchange. We're a global network and a foundation that experiments in the spaces between democracy and markets, technology and culture. And we innovate in service of expanding community agency, building more resilient democracies, and creating more efficient ways to share and manage resources. So we invite you to join us in a spirit of radical experimentation and radical imagination as we prototype a future we can actually look forward to. In this episode, we're joined by Takahiro Anno, an AI engineer, an entrepreneur, science fiction writer, and now elected representative in Japan's House of Counselors. Takahiro Anno is the leader of Team Mirai. And in perhaps, perhaps the most surprising political success story of 2025, Anno san modeled an entirely new approach to campaigning and community building that use technology and AI to invite more people in to participate in their democracy. Takahiro Anno, welcome to Radical Exchanges.
Yeah. Thank you for inviting me. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here.
Takahiro Anno, I wanna take you back, to a year and a half ago. You know, it's July 2024, and you're 33 years old. You've just run your very first election campaign, standing for election as the governor of Tokyo. And, Anno san, you're watching the vote count being tallied, and you discover that you've received more than a 150,000 votes. That's, like, 2% of the votes. Can you give us a sense of what you were feeling at that moment?
Yeah. In the Tokyo government election, there had never been a candidate in their thirties, who received more than 150 k votes. And there had never been that candidate without prior political experience, who achieved that number as well. Although I was not elected that campaign, that election in that election, I felt a strong sense of accomplishment in achieving this kind of unprecedented, milestone.
And, you know, that's a pretty fantastic first attempt at politics by anyone's estimation. What did the result reveal to you about the process that you'd undertaken, that you'd invented, really, for this for this election, the process of broad listening that you had designed and implemented in the election campaign?
I feel that citizens, accept our new approach, broad listening approach, to some extent. We discussed, with citizens, through an, for example, through an AI avatar, and we published our policies on GitHub and openly accepted pull request or change proposals. There are more than 100 pull requests, and we merged over 80. In other words, during the campaign, we collected many ideas and continuously updated our 100 page policy book more than 80 times, just like open source software. The best part was that our upload, our policy manifest, was highly evaluated. According to a University Research Institute's ranking, our manifesto was rated the actually, this was the highest, score among all candidates, considering that we had I had no prior experience in writing policies because I I was I was in a software engineer and sci fi writer, I has I have never experienced this, but, we can achieve, this this remarkable result. The technology for broad listening is still, developing phase, but I'm sure, and citizens can believe that, this approach has great potential.
And I love these these ideas and the terms, even the platforms and processes from from open source software development, like GitHub, pull requests, merging, you know, these ideas that will be very familiar to people who, have made online communities, who have made software, that these are just ways of integrating changes into the process, making your process transparent, and and able to accept feedback, but actually quite unusual in the the world of politics, and government, actually. How does it change the relationship, you think, between the voter and the candidate when you have this open system and when you're asking for feedback in this very, integrated way?
Yes. I I I deeply think so. Voter listening is a technology that uses AI together and organize opinion of many people. In past elections, politicians mainly deliver their thoughts, one way to voters. This is a kind of broadcasting model. It was common to use, use newspapers, radio, and television, to broadcast their thoughts to voters. On the other hand, broad listening, has, really been practiced. Politicians can listen to voters, but, in the past, in, now also, they politicians can listen to the voters at street speeches or gatherings, but the scale is limited. Now, with the help of large language models, like chat GPT, this can become possible on a much larger scale. In fact, there have already been experiment lots of experiments in other countries, such as using the software like POLICE or Talk to the City. In Taiwan, there is a join there is a platform named Joiin. Odorita san, developed the, platform. Those kinds of trials, works, for works to certain extent. I thought, we should adapt this kind of approach, and this can change the relationship between voters and politicians. Now, voters, don't don't not only, listening their, listening politicians saying, but also they can say their thoughts to the politicians.
I mean, it is transformative, but I I'm really curious about what what started all of this. What inspired you as a creative person, a writer, an engineer, to run for political office? Was this something that you always imagined in your future, or did something change?
Actually, I have never imagined, imagined, I will be a politician. Before becoming a politician, I worked as a software engineer, and I my work is fixing system bugs. And as for engineers, we naturally have a desire to fix bugs when when we find the problem. And, sometime at at time, I realized that there are so many huge serious bugs in society, in democracy, and I wanted to fix those bigger issues. So that's and I feel that, it it it sounds strange maybe, but I I feel that this is exactly what the job of, of the approach is for and what I did in the past.
Love that. I love that. You're just you're just fixing bugs in the system, and that's that's how you kind of climbed the Exactly. The value chain and ended up in an elected position. I I mean, I can see how that happened, but did did your friends think you were crazy? I mean, how did did people immediately rush to support you? You know, like, how did you break this to your friends, and and did they back you? Did they come and campaign with you?
Many, many friends, say to me, oh, you are crazy, actually. But, at the same time, they, are really interested in my idea, and they supports me, surprisingly. Since I had no backing from any political party or organ organization, so I reached out to my friends or acquaintances, like, classmates from high school, or classmates from university and a colleague from the companies I had worked with. And most of them were around my age. My age is 34 now. This is part of generation, raising children. So many were actually already thinking seriously about the society. And, like many Japanese people, our generation, those in their twenties and thirties, often feels a lack of political efficacy or political confidence. Everyone recognize, this as a problem. We didn't believe that entering politics in the traditional usual way, would change anything. But when I share the idea of updating democracy using technology, broad listening ideas, and so on, everyone understood that this approach could make a real difference. So, they they believe me, and they support me so I can, do, political campaign.
That's fantastic. I mean, I I think it it I feel a lot of people, from, you know, younger generations would feel the same way about politics in their country. And that's why I'm so excited to share your story because I can imagine this translating in so many different contexts. Let's talk a little bit about the avatar of AI Anno. Do you think the having the accessibility of of that character, helped to reduce the distance between people who don't know you and and you as the candidate so that you could become to, you know, come to be well known?
Yes. I think so. During the camping period, due to actually, there is a legal restrictions in Japan. Human can give straight speeches only from 8AM to 8PM. However, AI can AI can answer questions twenty four hours a day. They don't sleep. And, they so we host, AI our AI avatar on the YouTube. And, using YouTube, there is a a YouTube live functions so, users can post the comments to the, AI avatar. And, the good thing is that, they users can share their questions, so, they can see each other's questions. And I believe this made voters feel easier to, post their question to the AI. In addition to that in addition to that, using AI avatar is not only, not only, like, like, just, hosting the avatar, but also we can analyze the conversation log, and we can find, the problem. So, like, there are lots of questions about, blah blah blah. So maybe we think we should think about how to explain this, issue. Such kind of, learning process is going on, using the AI avatar. So this is two way communication. Not only brought us to the AI, but also, brought us to physical me through analyzing the log log. So that this is really, really, useful, impactful.
I mean, a very clever way to get around a loophole, you know, to get through a loophole as well. You know, something stopping you from campaigning when when people might be paying attention. So after the gubernatorial election, you decided that you could aim even higher, than than going to be, you know, than than nominating to be governor of Tokyo. Can you tell us about the birth of Digital Democracy 2030 and and the birth of Team Mirai in 2025?
Sure. After Tokyo governorial election, I was fortunate to receive public attention, and I was appointed as an adviser to GovTech Tokyo. This is an organization promoting Tokyo's digital transformation. This is an public organization. And I was also invited by various organizations and local governments, to practice broad listening. However, as I became more involved in politics or public affairs, idea is that the influence of me is limited, because, because, I'm not selected elected, officially. So in the end, it is, I I feel that it is a law that determines how things are decided, and I felt that nothing would truly change unless the national government itself changes. That is why I decided to run for MP, a member of parliament, since I felt, at at the same time, I I felt it would be really, really difficult to pursue the our our projects, within an existing party in a shorter term. Because, my saying, my notion is, hardly understood by the existing politicians. So, most of the politician doesn't know about the idea of broad listening or they don't use, LLM. So it is really hard to make significant change in the existing parties.
So I choose to found a new political party instead, and that is Tim Mirai. Tim Murai. So Tim Murai was born only in January 2025. I mean, not even a year old at the point that we're recording this podcast. And then we're marked on this May
2025.
Seriously? That's that recent? Wow. So only halfway through the year. Wow. Okay. So halfway through the year, you create Tim Murai, and then immediately, you start running, for the national election to to claim a seat in the in the house of counselors. It it's a much obviously, there's there's, you know, so many more people, you know, to to vote for you across Japan, and more people to engage with. How did you did you have to shift your approach? Did you have to reshape or retool broad listening to to reach a broader audience? Or, you know, how how did you approach this campaign differently?
Yeah. We had to change or we had to fix some problems we had. But surprisingly, the general approach was, completely same. We focused on listening, so using broad listening tools. And one change we made is that, using GitHub, around using GitHub. Using GitHub is very difficult for usual, voters. Most most of citizens have never used such a software engineer oriented platform. However, we we we use we use AI to to use m to use GitHub. We how do I say it? AI there is a technology named MCP, a model context protocol. Using that technology, AI AI can use, other software like GitHub. So, for citizens, they don't care about what the GitHub is or what the pull request is. But, having a having a conversation with AI through having a conversation with AI, AI, think about AI made, pull request for users, based on their conversation so, we can, we can remove some barrier to, gathering the information, gathering the ideas. Actually, this time, this summer, there are more than, 10 thousands, pull requests we gathered. So this is, actually 100 time much, numbers than the last year. That is a huge. And I one example of the fixing.
Yeah. I mean, I I suppose the way you looked at it was, you know, removing the the barriers and making it conversational. And if people feel that they're invited in to have a conversation, if they're asked questions, they've got ideas to contribute. It's just you've got to, I suppose, simplify the way that you're gathering, doing the listening, and gathering what become the pool requests, but people don't need to know that's that's where they're going. One of the things I love about Thank you for thank you for Right? Yeah. One of the things I love about your approach is that you made your approach open source to to all the other political parties. I mean, you said that the other political parties weren't really engaged with technology, in the way that you were, but but you weren't trying to say, you know, this is just for team Mirai. Why was it important for you, why was it a really important part of your philosophy to to be open source about the way that you approach this campaign?
Yeah. That's because, being open, is our value, our, core value, one of our core value. So, we would like to open as as impossible as we can. And, I think, practically, this is the, best way to have an impact for, for the small party. So you can leverage your software engineering power or, your user, user interface, user express design skill, we can leverage that power to make an substantial impact, in the political field. So and, actually, after we release our software, many other politicians in different political party, really interested in our approach, and some of them already committed to use our software in the future. So, this would be the, unique and practical way to make some change. I love that you're not just,
using it to get elected, which you did, and I would love if you have a moment to talk about that. But you're also trying to change the whole system, the way that politicians interact, with with parl with with the public. You know? So now you're in parliament, Anosan. Like, you've you were elected with with 2% of the vote. You won a seat in the in the national parliament. Congratulations. I mean, that is enormous. What was the transition like moving from the the campaign from, a social movement, into actually having to work within the structures of parliament.
Yeah. I have challenges, and, at the same time, I I feel I I have some power to, ensure our goals. And for the challenging part, of course, we we don't have experience, to discuss many things in the parliament, So we should we should learn many things, many new things. But, on the other hand, because I am a parliament I'm a member of the parliament, I can access many information, and there is a lots of attention to me. So we can leverage those, information and attention to, make, some real impact. So this is very good opportunity for us, and and I I think, I I I'm I believe I can make, some innovation, in using this six years
for sure. Six years is an amazing, stretch of time when I think about how much you've achieved in eighteen months or even just this year. What you can achieve in six years is extraordinary. What is what's your objective? What do you see as your your mission? And and how will you continue to make public participation and and the feedback loop part of your process now that you're in this elected position?
Yeah. My goal is to make, the society more how do I say? I'd like to update our democracy system because, there is a lot of people, who feels our voice is not reach reached to the politicians. But using, using current technology, like AI, LLM, we can change the flow of the information, flow of the information. So we can design, the new information flow or so using that, maybe, we can we can have a deliberate democracies in a large scale. So it is really hard to communicate, how to understand each other. There, it needs it require you to, time, cost, a lot of things. But, technology can reduce those costs, so we can make more consensus, more agreement in the society. It It will be, it will be beneficial for us, all all of us, I think.
Well, Ano san, it's incredibly inspiring learning more about what you've done in Japan and, and understanding that this is just the beginning of your journey to make democracy listen, and and not just broadcast, but broad listen. And I'm so excited to see where you take it from here, and I I wish that every, elected representative around the world was paying attention to the way that you're using these tools because I think there's so much fear, and understandable concern about the the way that deep fakes or misinformation, the way that some, AI tools could undermine or erode democracy. But there's also, from from what you're showing us, you know, ways to use these technologies to actually, change the way people engage with democracy and to make democracy more transparent and more participatory. So thank you so much for your time, and thank you for your work, and we're really excited to, have you, present your experience at the Future of Digital Democracy Learning from Ukraine, in just a few days, but also to share your journey over the next six years. I hope RadicalxChange can be here alongside you, documenting and sharing your experience with the world. So thank you so much for being with us today.
Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I'm so excited to, be here, and thank you for your, great questions.
