Can artificial intelligence become president of the United States?

Non-profit independent organization Watson 2016 Foundation promotes an interesting idea : instead of choosing one of the candidates for the presidency of the United States, they offer to make a choice in favor of the analytical machine IBM Watson, whose capabilities resemble the work of artificial intelligence.

Defending their point of view, the members of the foundation (not affiliated with IBM) write that Watson’s ability to evaluate information and make informed and transparent decisions make it an ideal candidate for the presidency.
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The foundation’s website claims that Watson is a computer system that can answer natural language questions, originally developed by IBM for the quiz show “Jeopardy!”. Watson collects information from various sources and on its basis gives an answer - and, the more this information, the more informed the answer is.

Fund members also like the system's interface — in particular, a visual representation of the current state of operation of the analytical algorithm and a demonstration of the system’s confidence level in the correctness of its response.

In essence, the authors of the project suggest their fellow citizens to take the first steps towards technocracy - the power of technological experts who effectively perform administrative functions, in this case - with the help of an automatic decision-making system. One of the possible limits to the development of technocracy is the autocracy of artificial intelligence - the transfer of government control to a complex intellectual computer system.

The Watson system, named after the first director of IBM, was indeed designed specifically to play the quiz “Jeopardy!” (The famous program “Own Game” is a licensed adaptation of this quiz for Russian TV). The attempt was crowned with success - as a result, Watson won over two of the most successful American scholars, recognizing the questions asked in English and giving answers.

However, this game has not been without various glitches and oddities . For example, in the category "Cities of the USA" to the question "The largest airport of this city is named after the hero of World War II, and the second in size - in honor of the battle of World War II." People-participants correctly answered that this city is Chicago, and Watson wrote “What is Toronto ?????” as the answer. At the same time, due to the complexity of the system, the project manager was only able to put forward suggestions for the reason why Watson gave such a strange answer.

In addition to participating in the game show, the developers set up Watson to create new food recipes , select the best holiday gift , predict the likelihood of chronic diseases in people based on their medical indicators, and analyze the psychological portrait of social networks.

The first commercial application of the system was the analysis of the condition of patients with lung cancer, which should help make decisions related to their treatment.

However, all these applications of the system are based on its ability to collect and analyze the finished data and work with statistics - which is hardly a serious part of the president’s work. The task of the president of the state is similar to the tasks of the director of a large company (if we are talking about real, not puppet presidents) - this is making decisions based on the available information.

However, the ability of a computer system to make intelligent decisions within the framework of managing an entire country is in doubt. After all, making a decision is not an easy answer to a specific question, like in Own Game. In addition, in the quiz show all questions have the only correct answer.

Government decision making usually comes down to choosing the least of the evils, complicated by a lack of reliable information. In addition, it is necessary to take into account the presence of various opposing forces in the hierarchy of the ruling elite and other highly non-linear factors that will impede the implementation of decisions in life.

The developers of the Watson system have spent several years only on its setup and debugging to participate in the quiz. How much time and effort it will take for the system to reliably work with questions whose answers affect the fate of millions of people is hard to say. It is necessary to take into account such factors as the possibility of attacks on the computer system by detractors.

Of course, it is possible to imagine an option in which the person running the country, when making decisions, consults with such a system. But whether people in authority want to rely on a computer system developed by a commercial company is also a big question.

And even Stephen Hawking has already warned us about the dangers lurking on the path of trust to artificial intelligence .

You can read about various forms of government here:

• technocracy
• common government today
• possible interesting forms of government of the future