Could a Robot Be President?

Mark Waser, for instance, a longtime artificial intelligence researcher who works for a think tank called the Digital Wisdom Institute, says that once we fix some key kinks in artificial intelligence, robots will make much better decisions than humans can. Another big technical problem to solve before computers could run the country: Robots don't know how to explain themselves. In an approach called machine learning, the computer analyzes mountains of data and searches for patterns--patterns that might make sense to the computer but not to humans. In a variant approach called deep learning, a computer uses multiple layers of processors: One layer produces a rough output, which is then refined by the next layer, and that output, in turn, is refined by the next layer.