The Program¶
According to Mark Waser, the project of replacing human politicians with algorithms would yield positive results, far in advance of its nominal accomplishment. As he concludes: “I think that AI leadership is a tremendous idea, not the least because the path towards it necessarily improves human leadership (and civic debate).”
The extent to which the deep Anglo tradition tends in this direction is easy to under-estimate. Magna Carta was already a beta version draft of machine governance, as every serious initiative at constitutionalism has been. The principle of limited government finds its consummation in the ideal of rigid algorithmic constraint, and the impracticality of such an objective in no way diminishes the well-springs of motivation behind it. The programmatic erosion of political charisma is one obvious spin-off benefit.
In the Anglophone world — at least, until the most recent spasms of its degeneration — the call to empower the people has always been an unfortunate derivation from attempts to disempower government authority, by subjecting it to structural checks, and subtracting its discretion to the greatest possible extent. Computerizing a fast food restaurant gets you a cheaper hamburger. Computerizing government promises something far more deeply attuned to ancient political-economic impulses.
As Waser suggests: Merely letting politicians know that their definitive abolition is in prospect sends a valuable signal in its own right. Perhaps, in the interim, it could even train them to behave more like machines.