Watson For President? - ValueWalk

The time is coming when AIs will have better judgment than most politicians." Imagine that you were given two choices for the next president. The first choice is a person from a different political party with a set of policies or beliefs that you strongly disagree with. The second choice is an AI designed by a party with the sole purpose of achieving the policies you like. Eventually, says Joshua Davis at WIRED, AIs will also prove themselves superior when it comes to human governance. This idea may sound a little too sci-fi for many right now, but "the time is coming," he says. We spoke to him recently on our podcast (see Man vs. Machine – Who Will Govern Us Better?) about this radical idea, what it might look like to have an AI as President of the United States, and whether this is even possible from a constitutional standpoint. First, it wasn't the current political climate that spurred Davis to raise this idea, he noted. Rather, it came from examining the nature of our current political system in relation to how AI is evolving. "We vote for people, more often than not, based on the way they look, their hairstyle, or the way they talk," Davis said. "These are not really at the heart of the issues." To Davis, human personality--particularly our tendency to be drawn into scandals--has gotten in the way of governance. History, he says, shows that we're not very good at governing ourselves. At the heart of Davis' argument is the fact that artificial intelligence has been outperforming humans at specific tasks for a long time. For example, in 1996 the program Deep Blue beat then-world-champion Garry Kasparov at chess. More recently, AI created by Google beat the world's leading Go players. Go is considered by many to be even more complex than chess, and many top Go players were astounded with how quickly the program was able to master the game and win 60 games in a row. "It was doubly remarkable because of the way that it won," Davis said. "It won by doing things that Go players had never seen before.