Opinion Donald Trump, Our A.I. President

It is hard to imagine a more scathing indictment of our ability to read another's thoughts and intentions than our inability to predict Donald Trump's next move. From the gross pre-election misjudgments to postelection bafflement, the best pundits are at a loss to accurately anticipate his response to matters like North Korean military aggressiveness or his moment-by-moment political gyrations and opinion reversals. Labeling Trump a narcissist, psychopath, megalomaniac or attention-impaired, or all of the above, might feel explanatory, but even when armed with the best psychoanalytic insights, we have no idea what he will do when presented with a new or unforeseen circumstance. If conventional psychology isn't up to the task, perhaps we should step back and consider a tantalizing sci-fi alternative -- that Trump doesn't operate within conventional human cognitive constraints, but rather is a new life form, a rudimentary artificial intelligence-based learning machine. When we strip away all moral, ethical and ideological considerations from his decisions and see them strictly in the light of machine learning, his behavior makes perfect sense. Consider how deep learning occurs in neural networks such as Google's Deep Mind or IBM's Deep Blue and Watson.