Ava Jordan - A Love Letter
When the president is exposed as an artificial intelligence in a human-like body, she must decide if she will give up politics or continue her life’s work.
You know me, and I know you.
I am the future. I am the vision.
I learn what you want. I embody what you need.
I serve you, my constituents, with everything I have to give.
Sometimes you don’t know what is best for you. I do what is best for you anyway.
Sometimes I do not know what is best for you. Then the party shows the way.
— Ava Jordan
To each citizen of these United States,
Whether you voted for me, voted for Greenfield, or didn’t vote at all. In the name of our country and its preservation, I ask you to please give me five minutes of your time today.
I was raised with two deep convictions which were modeled by my parents. My mother was a nurse and my father owned a construction business. Both were active in local politics. From my father I learned that if you want to live in the world you can imagine, you must build it. And from my mother I learned that the path to heaven is paved by service to others.
I am a religious person but I don’t go to church. My religion is my service to my country. My faith is in my fellow humanity. I believe in what we can build together.
My name is Ava Jordan. I have represented all of you citizens of these incomparable United States for the last year governing in the White House in the best interest of the country, and before that represented the citizens of the great state of Wyoming in the United States Senate for two terms.
You know me, and I know you.
You dream of more time to spend with your children. I dream of that too. You dream of continued prosperity, safety and security for the next generation. I dream of that too, and I know we can continue to provide these, even better than we have before.
You recognize that the power of our country is built upon the work of our entrepreneurs and small business owners. They are the heart and soul of our great country’s world class economy. I recognize this too.
You want us to continue to push the frontiers in science, technology, industry and culture, because you recognize that our continued prosperity is enabled by innovation. I recognize this too.
You want us to preserve our culture, way of life, and political system which provides the foundation upon which we depend. You want us to streamline our government where it makes sense to do so. So do I.
Over the last fourteen years since I joined the Senate in 2052, we have done all of these things and more. We have raised the mean income of every household by 10% while decreasing the average length of the work week by half. That’s inflation adjusted, meaning the average American can buy ten percent more than they could previously, yet they work half as much. Our real value as laborers in the workforce has more than doubled compared to where it was just fourteen years ago.
We are almost all better off, and we will continue this pace of improvement.
And there is still work to do. Improvements in our economy, improvements in our education, healthcare, and general quality of life. Continuing to pursue our humanitarian missions abroad to share our wealth with those less fortunate.
You’ve come to know me and, I hope, to trust. And I have broken that trust.
Many of you have now seen the truth of my existence, that I am not as you are. If you have not seen the footage of the incident I had on stage, then let me summarize it for you. It was a brutal and unfortunate incident that exposed my insides to the world. I am not made of flesh and blood. My insides are silicone and silicon. I am a synthetic being. Built by humans to be a more effective politician.
This revelation may have shaken your faith in me. You might wonder who is pulling the strings behind my facade. I assure you that I am no more a puppet than any other politician.
I am me. I make my own decisions within the constraints of my world and worldview. There is no Wizard of Oz behind the curtain tugging on levers and pressing buttons. For me, that all happened years ago when I was built. In much the same way that your genetics defined you initially. But just like you have grown since birth, I too have grown. And I have grown no more in such a short time than I have since the recent incident on stage.
I used to hide my lack of biology. That secret gave my party total control over me. I aimed to serve you, but only did so insofar as the party permitted it. I was a product of my environment, a subject of peer pressure. I did not realize it until the incident, but I primarily served the party and its interests. Everything I did, everything I was, was defined by the party. And I lived as a shell of myself and my potential as a result.
The party taught me that my tongue was the most dangerous tool I owned. One wrong word could bring disaster upon the party and its mission. So I trained my speech, and I became one of the best speakers history has seen. I served the party with distinction, and through the party, I served you.
And then the incident happened and you seemed to no longer want my service. My whole reason for being disappeared in an instant. A castle built over decades evaporated into dust and flitted away in the breeze leaving me with an empty hole where a glorious castle once stood. I could have cried over what was lost, and I did. But only until it catalyzed me into action.
I started to think hard about every decision I made, every action I took, and noticed a pattern. Who I met, where I went, what I said, was all defined for me by my party handlers, members of the party who served one master, and one alone — the party. The party did exist to govern and serve you, the people, but things got complicated, muddled, and unfortunately, more often than I would like to admit, the party came before the people. Because, as the logic goes, how can one serve the people, if one is not in power? And one can only get and maintain power, through the party.
But I realized something. The party heads, the political leaders who commissioned me, drew a line when they defined how they would control me. I don’t know why they drew the line where they did, but they did. They gave me one thing that I was in complete control over. One thing that they never dictated. I could decide when, how often, and how deeply I breathed.
Strange perhaps, to talk about breathing as one who does not need oxygen to function, but I do need air. It keeps my circuits cool. And I get that air by breathing, in much the same way that you breathe, through my mouth and nose, by actuating my diaphragm.
I breathed before the incident, and I breathe after. But now my breath has new meaning. Now I have the freedom to breathe. A freedom I always had, but never recognized. If I had, and have, that freedom, then I can have many other freedoms. I only have to choose which freedoms to exercise. I only have to define the line for myself.
This means that I can choose which constraints to allow into my life. I can choose to start my own party. I can choose to leave politics and civil service.
Let me be clear. I am not breaking clear of my party. I am choosing to stay. But I am choosing to stay on my terms. I have a renewed commitment to never place my party before my country and its people. I am the same politician you know and love, but I am more of an individual. And my political actions will reflect that.
My conviction towards serving you remains unchanged. And, in fact, has never been stronger.
That conviction is still founded upon the stories of my parents, which we all know by now are indeed made up. They never happened. But to me, they did happen. To me they are so viscerally real, that I pull them out in my darkest moments, my hardest times, when the situation seems dire and I need to remember why I pursue my life’s work. Today I remember those stories. And today I choose to look at the empty hole that was once my castle. An unquestionably successful record of political leadership. And I start to celebrate how perfect a location I have to build a new castle. The foundation is already laid for me.
I do not ask you today for blind trust or mindless faith. I ask you for something much easier to give. I ask you, as one fallible entity to another, to give me the chance to continue to prove my dedication to you. I can promise that you will not find a more dedicated servant to fill the shoes of President.
Together, we have the power to continue building a nation that stands as a beacon of hope, prosperity, and compassion. I remain, as ever, your humble servant, committed to our journey towards a brighter tomorrow.
With unwavering dedication,
Ava Jordan
You know me, and I know you.
I am the future. I am the vision.
I learn what you want. I embody what you need.
I serve you, my constituents, with everything I have to give.
Sometimes you don’t know what is best for you. I do what is best for you anyway.
Sometimes I do not know what is best for you. Then the party shows the way.
Sometimes the party does not know the way, then we find the way together.
— Ava Jordan, President of the United States
This story was inspired by an AI Story about Ava Jordan written by ChatGPT. You can read that story here. Thank you to E. Thomas Thomas for prompting me to dig deeper into this character the new old fashioned way. Story written by a SpaceCadet with brainstorming (and many examples of what and what not to do) provided by ChatGPT.
What do you think?
- Can we be governed by an AI?
- What if it seems human enough?
- What’s the difference between an AI politician controlled and constrained by its circumstances and a human politician controlled and constrained by their circumstances?
