I mentioned that in response to an article by Ben over on medium regarding his talks with the government of Malta about granting robots citizenship. One assumes that any national of a country can try to get elected leader of the country. Now while I disagree with granting robots citizenship (I disagree with citizenship in general and prefer a globalised citizen. The very fact that we’re trying to give a medieval primitive concept like nationality to robots and agi which will be non location specific seems a bit perverse and underderserving.

Now the actual topic of an ai leader. The only issue here is how to get it done, not if it will make more sense. I think that it will initially have to be done in secret with a human actor doubling in for the AI decisions. If we have to wait till people accept the idea of anything but a human to lead us we’re going to wait forever… It is clear how fearful people are of change and will stick to misguided opinions in the face of evidence.

I picture something like a political party being set up in what seems like a grassroots movement with a charismatic leader but whose head honchos are actually the scientists who created the agi. They will act as advisors, relaying the agi’s strategies and propositions, the leader might not even have to know where the advice is coming from, the more of a puppet he is, the better.

The movement will have international ‘branches’ so that all the Western world becomes governed by the same AI albeit with different puppets in every country. Current dictatorships and less democratic countries will be much harder to infiltrate…although the agi will no doubt have a solution to that, let’s not get bogged down with the stuff the agi will think of.

Once the agi leader is in place we can finally hope of achieving a utopia which will in fact probably be very different than what we imagine.

I expect we will revert to more of a bystander role on planet earth. We won’t need to work, make scientific discoveries or do anything other than what we please as everything will be done better, faster and more efficiently by robots and ai. Problem is that even art will be better done by ai, understanding what ‘tendencies’ are picking up and taking it to its ‘best’ level.

The big question for me is what is ‘doing whatever we want’ going to be.