Can Artificial Intelligence Become US President
The non-profit independent organization Watson 2016 Foundation promotes an interesting idea : instead of choosing one of the candidates for the US presidency, they offer to opt for the IBM Watson analytical machine, the capabilities of which resemble the work of artificial intelligence.
Defending their point of view, members of the foundation (not affiliated with IBM in any way) write that the Watson system’s ability to evaluate information and make informed and transparent decisions makes it an ideal candidate for president.
The fund’s website claims that Watson is a computer system that can answer questions posed in natural language, originally developed by IBM for the Jeopardy! Watson collects information from various sources and on its basis gives an answer - moreover, the more this information, the more informed the answer.
Fund members also like the interface of the system - in particular, a visual representation of the current state of the analytical algorithm and a demonstration of the level of confidence of the system in the correctness of its answer.
In fact, the authors of the project offer their fellow citizens to take the first steps towards technocracy - the power of technology experts who effectively perform administrative functions, in this case, using an automatic decision-making system. One of the possible limits to the development of technocracy is autocracy of artificial intelligence - the transfer of state control to a complex intellectual computer system.
The Watson system, named after the name of the first director of IBM, was indeed designed specifically to play the quiz “Jeopardy!” (The famous program “My Game” is a licensed adaptation of this quiz for Russian TV). The attempt was successful - as a result, Watson beat the two most successful American scholars by recognizing questions posed in English and giving answers.
However, in this game there were some 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 the Second World War, and the second in size - in honor of the battle of the Second World War”. The participating people correctly answered that this city is Chicago, and Watson wrote “What is Toronto ?????” as an answer. However, due to the complexity of the system, the project manager was only able to make assumptions about why Watson gave such a strange answer.
In addition to participating in a game show, the developers set up Watson to create new food recipes , choose the best holiday gift , predict the likelihood of chronic diseases in people based on their medical parameters, and analyze a psychological portraitmembers 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 ready-made 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 talk about real, not puppet presidents) - this is decision-making based on available information.
However, the ability of a computer system to make informed decisions within the framework of managing an entire country is questionable. After all, making a decision is not a simple answer to a specific question, as in "Your game." In addition, in the quiz show, all questions have the only correct answer.
Making government decisions usually comes down to choosing the least evil, 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 very non-linear factors that will impede the implementation of decisions.
The developers of the Watson system spent several years just setting it up and debugging to participate in the quiz. It is hard to say how much time and effort it will take for the system to work reliably with questions, the answers to which affect the fate of millions of people. It is necessary to take into account factors such as the possibility of attacks on a computer system by ill-wishers.
Of course, one can imagine an option in which the person who runs the country consults with such a system when making decisions. But whether power-hungry people want to rely on a computer system developed by a commercial company is also a big question.
And even Stephen Hawking already warned us about the dangers that lay in the way of trusting artificial intelligence .
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