Robot for President

A different kind of political machine

Take a second and imagine what your ideal presidential candidate stands for. Think bigger picture.

• Does logic win over partisanship?
• Are they in the pocket of any interest groups?
• Do they have a strong sense of morality?
• Is it Kanye West?

Unless you’re supporting Donald Trump, chances are you won’t find whatever it is you’re looking for in this year’s field of presidential candidates.

But what if we could program the most desirable traits and create our perfect president?

This whole exercise originally started with a Reddit comment, a questionable Ted Cruz campaign tactic, and of course, Senator Marco Rubio’s “glitch” during the New Hampshire GOP presidential debate.

After a Redditor posted a photo of a check he had received in the mail made out to Ted Cruz’s campaign, another user commented that they’d rather vote for a robot president over any other candidate running for office.

Clearly it was meant to be a joke — one person’s modern day, “modest proposal” to show their disgust with the 2016 election. But with the rise of “Robot Rubio” and Hillary Clinton’s android comparisons, suddenly the idea didn’t sound so farfetched.

Why couldn’t a computer run for president by 2028?

If we‘re to carry out this elaborate what-if scenario, the first step we need to confirm is whether our robotic candidate is actually eligible for office. (Imagine the field day Donald Trump could have with this.)

The Constitution states, “no person except a natural born citizen shall be eligible to the office of President.” And since the idea of a robo-POTUS isn’t an entirely novel concept, Phillip Bump at the Washington Post has already carried out a portion of this thought experiment by defining what constitutional eligibility means for androids.

Bump concluded:

The Constitution does not stipulate that the president must be a human. It does, however, stipulate that no person except those that are natural-born citizens can be president, suggesting that one must at least be a person. But “person” and “human” are not necessarily the same.

If you are a corporation, you are given personhood, which grants you rights. If you are a chimpanzee and you want your rights recognized, you need personhood — and a friendly judge. Ironically, it may be corporations that help smooth the social path toward personhood for chimps and robots and others.

Natural born citizenship is a different hurdle that I won’t spend a lot of time with, mainly because it’s a ridiculously outdated concept that might cease to exist by the time we’re ready to campaign for our artificial friends.

To borrow from Bump again:

“If an android is considered to have personhood sufficient to vote and run for office, and if the interpretation of the “natural-born citizen” clause is meant simply as a native American, questions of age and residency — included in the Article II criteria — become somewhat less critical, particularly if you again look at purpose versus language.”

So, we’ve managed to legally get our robot on the ballot, what would make them an effective leader?

“I for one welcome our new computer overlords.” — Ken Jennings

Our best example for why a computer presidency could work comes to us courtesy of IBM’s Watson — a supercomputer most famous for its widely televised takedown of past Jeopardy champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.

Nowadays, Watson spends the bulk of its time diagnosing cancer, and not as a part of another marketing gimmick. In a little over three years, Watson’s successful diagnosis rate for lung cancer is around 90%, an incredibly significant figure when you consider that most doctors hover around 50%. IBM claims Watson has the potential to drastically reduce health care costs — Affordable Care Act Round II, anyone?

It’s not just a medical miracle worker, Watson’s ability to store and analyze vast quantities of data make it invaluable to a variety of industry fields. There’s even the potential for Watson to learn from peer-reviewed knowledge, meaning “experience” could be simulated.

Watson even has its own presidential campaign, another political statement born partially in jest, and certainly not affiliated with IBM in any way.

From that fake campaign, a Transhumanist who was also running for president in 2016 noticed Watson’s bid and wanted to weigh in. Zoltan Istvan, the founder of the Transhumanist movement, believes that robots could provide the solution for today’s current hostile political climate.

“Historically, one of the big problems with leaders is that they are selfish mammals,” Istvan said in an interview with Newsweek. “An artificial intelligence president could be truly altruistic. It wouldn’t be susceptible to lobbyists, special interest groups or personal desires.”

“I think in 2020 you will see a field emerge with competing AI robots for president, who want to debate and discuss policy. It’s unlikely any of them will be sophisticated enough to take on the job.”

Being a leader is clearly more than just being able to answer trivia questions and teach doctors, it’s about morality — a concept that may prove to be our biggest obstacle in electing an android.

Thanks to the Matrix, Terminator, Ex Machina, and a whole host of other pop culture tropes — humanity is well aware of the potential disaster artificial intelligence brings, with scientists and tech industry leaders frequently weighing in on the issue. Elon Musk compared their destructive potential above that of nukes, while Stephen Hawking predicts it will signal the end of mankind.

Which is why researchers are now attempting to teach robots empathy, or at least establish a protocol that mimics are own set of values. At Georgia Tech, AI academics teach computers how to read books, hoping that our stories can assist them in learning ethical behavior.

“For example, if a robot is tasked with picking up a prescription for a human as quickly as possible, the robot could a) rob the pharmacy, take the medicine, and run; b) interact politely with the pharmacists, or c) wait in line. Without value alignment and positive reinforcement, the robot would learn that robbing is the fastest and cheapest way to accomplish its task.”

But even if we can’t teach our hypothetical robot empathy, we can still fuse different parts of our current democratic system together to create a new kind of election.

Let’s assume our robot wins the election and needs to choose its Cabinet. It uses its ability to process data and finds two or three candidates for each department that are most qualified for the job, no political favors or nepotism here. We could continue to allow Senate the power to confirm, or have a separate election for America to decide. While we’re at it, why not give these department heads more power to override cyber-POTUS?

This is all uncharted territory of course, but if America proves willing to try and elect a non-human — what’s stopping us from reforming other parts of our archaic political system?

That isn’t to say that a robot president comes without its own flaws, far from it.

One of the biggest dilemmas involves using logic as the sole means for acquiring a solution. In the Georgia Tech example above, a robot would choose to rob a store if it provided the quickest answer.

It’s not too difficult to imagine this scenario in the realm of foreign policy — in which a robot could determine that the best way to handle North Korea would be to nuke it. (Cut to some of my fellow North Carolinians nodding in approval.)

Then of course there’s the issue of cyber security, a growing problem that our past two administrations have had difficulty handling. Why even jeopardize the chance of our leader falling under control of another government?

Not to mention the issues that could occur with day-to-day responsibilities and delegating — or even just the flaws that come with being a computer (glitches, programming errors, etc).

Okay, maybe assigning a robot to the most powerful political position is far from a foolproof plan, but is it any worse than our current situation?

With confidence in the government at an all-time low and distrust between the two leading presidential candidates hovering around 60%, electing a robot could provide us with the “change” we’ve clamored for, a real outsider that could deliver on some much needed transparency.

We already enjoy accusing our politicians of being robots, why not vote for one?