Could a robot be president? – Hot Air

If youre imagining a Terminator-style machine sitting behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office, think again. The president would more likely be a computer in a closet somewhere, chugging away at solving our countrys toughest problems. Unlike a human, a robot could take into account vast amounts of data about the possible outcomes of a particular policy. It could foresee pitfalls that would escape a human mind and weigh the options more reliably than any person couldwithout individual impulses or biases coming into play. We could wind up with an executive branch that works harder, is more efficient and responds better to our needs than any weve ever seen.

Theres not yet a well-defined or cohesive group pushing for a robot in the Oval Officejust a ragtag bunch of experts and theorists who think that futuristic technology will make for better leadership, and ultimately a better country. Mark Waser, for instance, a longtime artificial intelligence researcher who works for a think tank called the Digital Wisdom Institute, says that once we fix some key kinks in artificial intelligence, robots will make much better decisions than humans can. Natasha Vita-More, chairwoman of Humanity+, a nonprofit that advocates the ethical use of technology to expand human capacities, expects well have a posthuman president somedaya leader who does not have a human body but exists in some other way, such as a human mind uploaded to a computer. Zoltan Istvan, who made a quixotic bid for the presidency last year as a transhumanist, with a platform based on a quest for human immortality, is another proponent of the robot presidencyand he really thinks it will happen.

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Could a robot be president? - Hot Air