Sophia, the "robot with a citizenship" from Saudi Arabia is a glorified chatbot combined with Furby grade technology for facial expressions, but received worldwide press coverage.

This must be some similar thing to take advantage of the technologically unsavvy and click-happy Internet people.

The only reality here is that the people covering this fake robot mayor from Japan will make tens of thousands of dollars from ad revenue.

For most of its existence as a “field of knowledge” AI has been shepherded by the Academic community. This same community likes to throw around inside jokes like “If it works is isn’t AI” and such. If you boil down all the discussions that take place over “what is AI” online and at conventions, a pictures emerges something along the lines that to the Academic community, AI is what makes an interesting research question. This has the unfortunate side affect that the definition not only changes constantly but that it can also be quite myopic. Expert systems, discussed in the 80’s as a massively successful branch of AI, was kicked out of the field in the 90’s -- at least until recently when the Academic community figured they hadn’t really exhausted all research possibilities and it was reincarnated as Answer Set Programming. Geofrey Hinton (one of the most influential figures in AI in the last 50 years) stated in a talk he gave at the 2015 AAAI conference “Unless it has 100,000 attributes it’s not AI, it’s applied statistics”, essentially demoting most of all AI ever researched or developed. I even been involved in discussions where the question as to if Machine Learning is really AI any longer was brought up (though everyone seems to agree that Deep Learning is AI). I find it odd and fascinating that a community responsible for developing an area of knowledge is so aggressive at denying everything it achieves. I can’t think of any other fields that approaches governance of their domain this way.

Things get more complicated by the fact that AI has different definitions depending on where you are working on it. AI in manufacturing tends to break down into satisfiability, constraint programming, and optimization – none of which are considered ‘fields’ of AI for the most part. In these cases, the pipeline (the process that results from combining all the steps in AI solution) is referred to as AI, not the individual techniques applied in that process. In the Games industry AI is the part of a game engine that makes decisions regardless of what technique you are using to achieve that. I actually think those definitions are probably more consistent and more practical.

Because I lack a better term for it, I’ve always referred to terms like “AI” by my own made-up phrase “problem words”. These are words that were made to refer to a challenge that practitioners in a field commonly run into but that is not created from an effort to make a scientifically precise definition. I lump “Deep Learning”, “Big Data”, and “Cloud Computing” into this category. Because the scope of what we find to be a problem always changes, so does the meaning of the term. Big Data 10 years ago is not what Big Data is today as an example. These kinds of terms NEVER have a final definition. Lastly, I find it anecdotally interesting that during the registration process for some AI conventions the question of “How do you define AI” is on the registration form.

I could fill out a questionnaire answering hundreds of questions to use as a reference on how I might vote. That data could then be used for voting on subsequent laws.

Why have a representative government when the human doesn't actually represent you. A small algorithm would be a much better representation of you.

You should be voting for people because they generally share your views, yes, but more importantly because they're willing and able to become experts in the things you need to be an expert in in order to be an effective lawmaker.

I have actually come to disagree with this sentiment. Look at what we have right now in the US: pretty much complete gridlock when it isn't just partisan curb-stomping. No one is willing to compromise, no one wants to discuss things rationally. Everyone goes in with their answer and attempts to beat others into accepting it and it's our fault, as voters, because it's what we ask of them, because we keep being told that we should vote for people who share our opinions.

I think we should vote for people not because they share our views, which are likely based in ignorance, but because they demonstrate the ability to make informed decisions and come to reasonable compromises. Look for the ones who think things through, who are willing to admit they made a mistake, and who will change their opinion in light of new information.

If we continue to vote for people without these qualities, our elected officials will continue to lack them.

We're at a gridlock because a significant portion of this country is woefully misinformed about just about everything and are puppets to an incredible machine of profit and no-holds-barred capitalism.

You have no one to blame but yourself if you refuse to even try.

I like this model, but I think the rub is that rubric itself expresses a view that not everyone shares. It pushes the problem back one step, the disagreements become meta.

Any interest group can defect from the prisoner's dilemma where we all vote for tabula rasa rationalists, and instead choose the strategy of electing someone who pledges unwavering support.

They'd likely disagree with you that they don't know their interests and that they would be better off with smart generalists. And once some interest groups are getting unwavering support, then my bet is that strategy cannibalizes the "rationalist" strategy completely before long.

I'm not endorsing that outcome, I just think that's how things fall apart, and it's hard or impossible to create systems that prevent it.

Tyranny of the majority is incredibly tough. It's basically a sheep/goats problem, where you want majoritarian common sense to get through, but majoritarian selfishness to be stopped at the gate.

Federalism seems the best hedge against it so far, though even that seems to vary wildly in effectiveness. (e.g., Sometimes Jackson ignores Marshall.)

One way might end badly, but the other certainly will.

Malcolm X's speech about the ballot and the bullet is worth hearing. Maybe democracy is only partly about rational policymaking, and mostly a pressure valve to prevent violent revolutions.

That's not to dismiss it, avoiding violent revolutions, even partly, is still a massive benefit for humanity that's hard to overrate.

Did you not watch the latest Zuckerberg deposition? Most of our officials do not care about becoming experts in anything. They're old, tired, and ignorant and they are mostly concerned with maintaining power, not learning new material.

Nice, nice: and the de facto elected official becomes whoever implemented the algorithm. You've described a rare opportunity for us to become the Engineers Who Installed The Red Button. I'm in.

And that excludes scenarios where country elites will control it from behind the scenes with algorithm changes that favor them, while pretending to improve it.

Maybe all of these issues will be solved in 100 years. But I think it's far too premature to actually hope for this happening soon. It's going to end in disaster if it somehow does happen, because people are tricked into thinking it's a great idea (just like Pentagon officials and politicians are not being tricked by war contractors that autonomous weapons is a good idea with the AI capabilities and software security we have today).

Because of this trickery we're going to see increasingly more bad decisions by governments who allow AI to take their place. Such as this recent one:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180409/09125639594/uk-po...

AI isn't naturally occurring. Humans write the code, humans select the training strategies, humans choose the data to train it with and most importantly humans choose what constitutes a "good, well-trained" AI over a "bad" one which needs more training. Humans pick when to stop. In this hypothetical, those humans are now the gatekeepers on all governance. They have no motivation to do anything but serve their own bias. And we know how much ethical training programmers receive.

We can't build a perfect AI because we don't have a perfect AI which could build it for us.

Currently they just misrepresent people without checkbooks.

I didn’t want to learn psychology because I didn’t want to lose the magic of not knowing how my mind works. Now I’m learning it to stop people — myself and others — from deluding me. I’m a neural network too, just an organic one rather than a silicon one.

So what they claim is artificial intelligence and automation is actually the long arm of 2 huge conglomerates. Seems like a persisting trend.

I'm looking forward to the next winter.

It wants to be refered to as Sir, in the third person...

Compiled Stochastics becomes AI the moment it is able to move into new fields by not learning by mimicry but by dreamed up scenarios from noise and able to prune failing scenarios from itself. Until then it is not AI, its experience in a Box.

"If you assumed that artificial intelligence itself couldn't run for mayor, you're absolutely not wrong; that just happens to be where things get truly interesting."

And then the author doesn't actually answer whether the AI can or can't run for mayor. I'm wondering if they're taking advantage of some weird loophole in the law that doesn't require the mayor to be a citizen/human there.

How's your simming of this situation going?

I understand that 'it' is an inappropriate pronoun when describing people of unidentified gender (although I still find singular 'they' abhorrent) , but an AI is very clearly an 'it'...

I personally prefer the singular 'they' because I don't think any of the pronouns invented for the purpose will gain any significant traction.

Website of the AI's (owner's) campaign site.

I’m I guess willing (ableit horrified) to be shown to be wrong, but this looks ridiculous as presented here.

It's cool to see part of this fictional world coming to life

I feel technologists tend toward a kind of over-skepticism, relative to scifi writers, because they know too much about the status quo, and they're used to getting value from drawing on that knowledge. But I wonder if there was any practicing technologist alive in 1960, who could have understood or predicted that we would have, e.g., unbiased photorealistic rendering in whatever color space you like. Or that pulling a piece of glass out of your pocket to have a face-to-face conversation with people around the world would be a passe thing any 12 year old does.

Plato would agree.

But he would also say the dream is in your head. The thing is how to wake up from it. Reality is out there, where the material stuff is. Just shifting from one dream to another dream seems like a failure to me. I hope we don't go that way.

Traditionally: monied interest buys influence, maybe in the form of a steak dinner for the mayor.

AI Gov’t Future: monied interest buys asymmetric understanding of GovBot5000, perhaps by hiring an AI researcher or data firm to figure out how to exploit flaws in the algorithm.

If we tackles issues of inefficiency, opacity, and corruption in government first, then I think we can tackle judgment and representation, which are less “on fire” things imo.

In this age of elections being influenced by social media botnets, it's simply too close to the truth.

Also, at what point does it decide to wage war or enlist a militia when the trolls dupe it into thinking it's what the majority want? Surely war has to be allowed at least somewhere in the algorithm - especially if you were implementing this at a nation level.

You know, like how society tolerates smokers - it's an addiction, it's just actively encouraged and very profitable despite the actual loss of citizens.

First we can replace the politicians with sophisticated emulators (in the vein of bash scripts) then we can come up with even better algorithms, ones that would stop stealing or facilitating corruption. We could call that version two or something.