Gormless in the Machine: On Running AI and Meat Avatars For Elective Office

Photo by Vasiliymeshko, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Cheyenne, Wyoming, is famous for Cheyenne Frontier Days, one of the largest rodeos in the country, and still has the feel of being on the frontier of America nearly 150 years after founding. It’s a city entrenched in cowboy culture and frontier spirit that is still an oasis of civilization in a seemingly endless open countryside.

Not the place you would expect an ambitious technophile to pitch the fine citizens of Cheyenne on being governed by, and this is a direct quote “himself as a ‘meat avatar’ and separate from the AI-program he chooses to call VIC.”

The Washington Post:

Laramie County last month officially permitted Miller’s candidacy. There was a caveat: The ballot would no longer say “VIC” but instead “Victor Miller.” The county also declared that there was no AI candidate running for office.

“Victor Miller, through countless interviews and statements to media, has consistently maintained a distinction between himself as a ‘meat avatar’ and separate from the AI-program he chooses to call VIC,” Laramie County Clerk Debra Lee said in a statement, referring to a term used to describe the human behind a chatbot. “To allow VIC to be listed as a candidate would both violate Wyoming law and create voter confusion.”

Miller had a different take. He decided he would start going by “Vic” and he’d call the bot VICTOR, which, according to the chatbot, would stand for “Virtual Integrated Citizen, The Official Robot.”

“They can’t stop me from doing what I’m doing,” Miller said. “It doesn’t matter what kind of word games they play.”

Let us just pause right here for a moment. Forget the AI, forget the technology, forget the novelty and made-for-social-media WTF aspect of the story, and forget the possible psychological implications of pitching your ChatBot as superior to your own skill set…

“They can’t stop me from doing what I’m doing” tells you all you need to know about Victor Miller.

Now, that Washington Post article takes 2300-odd words of nascent background to get to that nugget of knowledge touching on Miller’s ongoing fight with the AI companies who want nothing to do with politicized application of their products as the entire AI industry is both courting more and more investment and drawing more and more calls for regulation. Not to mention the legalities of whether a candidate can run as a declared proxy for a computer program. Plus, there is Miller himself, who admittedly is running mostly to “show that AI could make the city operate more efficiently and transparently.”

All this feeds into the ongoing discourse over AI.

There is no doubt that government on all levels from local to federal suffers from inefficiency. Bureaucracy is the norm, not the exception. There are valid arguments and promising applications for things like AI in roles such as sorting through records, data, and regulations. Improving efficiency is usually good medicine for the afflictions that ail representative government sick with bureaucratic bloat.

There is also no doubt that abrogating all the decision making of an elected office to an over-glorified search engine ought to be an automatic disqualifier from public service.

Like any medicine or drug, misuse can kill the patient before, or shortly after, killing the disease itself. Thinking AI can completely replace the human factor of governing humans is also misguided at best and maliciously tyrannical at worst. The etymology of the word politics is slamming the words “Citizen” and “City” together in Greek before it was filtered through Latin, French, and Middle English. Taking people out of politics is the autocratic dream of the dreamers of picture perfect, sanitized societies where if friendship is magic then just imagine how magical being governed by unaccountable algorithms will be. Treating inefficiencies in government by getting rid of the human element is a course of treatment that demands a discussion on quality of life after.

To quote Kyle Reese, ““It can’t be bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity! Or remorse or fear and it absolutely will not stop!… ever… until you are dead!”

While that line of dialogue from The Terminator might be coming at it a tad bit high for dramatic effect, the overall sentiment is true. AI cannot do anything it isn’t programed to do and cannot learn anything it cannot find from somewhere else. AI, especially the currently pitched version, which is just a souped-up search engine, isn’t going to be SkyNet and take over the world, nor will it be the technological equivalent of penicillin, curing all social and political ills.

While the Victor Millers of the world are longshot novelties for the moment, the press for such things is not new. With advancing technology, what is now novelty has the potential to be more prevalent in times to come. While it is doubtful SkyNet headlines a major party ballot anytime soon, the big tech companies that pour millions into AI hoping to make billions will do what all half-smart tech peddlers do: try to get government as a perpetual customer. While putting AI itself on the ballot probably isn’t going to work, backdooring government by AI in the form of contracts, consulting, and curated citizen commitments is not only probable, but probably inevitable.

The thing about representative government is we end up with the government we deserve. Whether through the front door of elections or the backdoor of governmental creep, there are plenty of not only tech wannabe overlords wanting to grab the levers of governing power, but plenty of citizens that might be disillusioned with the mess they themselves seem unwilling or unable to do anything about willing to let them try it.

“Meat avatars to the AI system” just doesn’t have the same je ne sais quoi as “Land of the free, and home of the brave,” or “the man in the arena” does it? Maybe they will come up with a hologram projected, AI powered Tocqueville avatar to explain that America is great because America is AI, or something.

Actually, the real-life Alexis de Tocqueville wrote “Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

The moves in technology and AI make not only more rules or ways around rules but processes those rules at speeds far past what humans can do. Miller and folks like him will say this is a vast improvement on flawed human factors. Citizens who want a government that continues to be by, for, and answerable to We, The People, should push back against such malicious nonsense and extoll the virtues of messy, imperfect, but still going strong experiment in a free people self-governing the old-fashioned way.

Hopefully, the frontier spirit of Cheyenne, Wyoming, will put down this first attempt at empowering AI and meat avatars with elected office. But, if we are being honest — and update the analogy from a shepherd to the latest and greatest AI — how many American citizens would be ok being the flock as long as Google ads steered them to it is a depressingly open question.

You could ask ChatGPT the answer to that question but, well…round and round we go.

“They can’t stop me from doing what I’m doing” guy isn’t unique in history, and just slapping AI as the excuse isn’t going to change the bad outcomes “Can’t stop me, bro” guy always brings to anything they attempt to do better than has ever been done before. You don’t have to say no to the potential good of AI and government to know that this ain’t it for government that first and foremost is a business of humans being.