Vote for AI

Why the jobs that AI should really steal are those of our leaders

Homo sapiens has got its big-brained, bipedal but end-of-useful-life self in a right pickle over Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Armageddon aside, AI threatens to take our jobs, rendering us useless; shares in companies in the education sector fell recently in what the Financial Times called a “first scalp” for AI. From lawyers to teachers, surgeons to artists, no one’s job will be safe from AI, it seems.

But one particular job is not regularly cited as ripe for replacement by AI: that of the politician.

Which is odd – because why wouldn’t AI replace our politicians? Surely it could do a damned better job than the current incumbents?

Faced with a crunchy poly-crisis salad combining climate change, demographic oblivion, pollution, water shortages, economic turbulence and armed conflict, why wouldn’t we ask AI to step in, given our leaders have been so spectacularly useless faced with these same problems?

Armed with the knowledge gained from billions of terabytes of data, AI might be able to think a little further than the next electoral cycle and develop and implement policies that address long-term challenges. Or at least get the planet to 2050 without it burning to a crisp.

Think about it. If AI replaced our leaders, it wouldn’t necessarily be hostage to the extremes that influence many of today’s political parties and which encourage polarisation and sow division. Given that 72% of the world’s population lives in autocracies (up from 46% in 2012), it’s not as if giving AI the reins would mean abandoning a liberal utopia, anyway.

I imagine some concern about the inherent bias in AI and worries that the technology would bring its own particular flavour of discrimination to the sensitive business of leadership. Maybe it would, but our current leaders exhibit more than enough bias already. Witness an ex-US President describing an entire nation as rapists, a presidential hopeful rowing back LGBTQ rights, and another leader pushing racist policy. Hell, the inherent bias of our current leaders is one of the reasons we are currently in such a mess.

Yes, AI also has its “hallucinations” — or, as they are more accurately understood, “lies”. This is not good. But again, let me refer you to another ex-President who claimed not to have had “sexual relations with that woman” or a former UK Prime Minister who denied attending a party during lockdown. And that he respected all social distancing rules if, in fact, he did attend one, after all. Is that trippy enough for you?

Some fear that governance by AI would result in bloodshed, as the technology would most likely wage war, perhaps for the most trivial of reasons. This conveniently ignores present conflicts, such as the war in Ukraine, started because of “Nazis”, of all things, despite the entire lack of evidence of said, “Nazis”. No, this conflict and a host of others can all trace their genesis to good old-fashioned human ‘qualities’ like aggression, pride or misplaced superiority.

The world’s largest parliament, the Chinese National People’s Congress, has nearly 3,000 members but is overwhelmingly in favour of taking back neighbouring Taiwan — if necessary, with force — so it’s not as if large numbers of politicians provide a counterbalance to warmongering tendencies. It’s safe to say that humankind has a pretty strong track record of starting wars without any involvement from technology.

Far from starting wars, AI might have recognised the need to curtail a warmonger like Putin at the point he first started meddling in Crimea, so preventing the chaos and terror of the war in Ukraine. Trained on the entirety of human history, it may have dismissed the now laughable notion that autocrats can be bought off through trade agreements and acted at the point when forces under Russian control shot down a commercial airline, killing 298 innocent people.

The final argument against AI replacing our leaders concerns our woeful ignorance of what precisely is going on inside AI when it, er, intelligences artificially. Many computer experts claim that AI is effectively unknowable and that it represents a ‘Black Box’ that cannot offer up the secrets behind its thoughts and actions.

But be honest. Do you understand the intricate mechanics of the US political college system? Is the UK’s first past the post electoral system in any way logical? What’s the point of rules if a President can decide how many terms he wants to ‘serve’?

And if the systems are rotten, what about the motivations of our leaders? These are individuals who are mistrusted by large swathes of the public – nearly two-thirds of whom think “politicians are only in it for themselves.” That could be attributable to the avarice, pomposity and stupidity of many politicians if not all of them. Yet for every one of our leaders who sought election to make a difference, there seem to be plenty more who entered public office to make a few quid, bully juniors or seek sexual favours. AI is unlikely to pursue any of these squalid aims.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more convinced I am: let AI take all our jobs, but most importantly, take those of our leaders first.

Hell, in an irony that only its big brain could fathom, it could be that AI stands a better chance of regulating itself than our current rulers, who still bang on about the need for ‘guardrails' in opinion columns, which is like insisting the loaded gun pointed at your head should be silenced.

Don’t worry overly about the worse that might happen under the binary rule of computers. Consider this: the worse is already happening but under human command. What do we have to lose?