Should We Be Excited or Terrified about AI Politicians?

November 2, 2015

(Pacific Standard) – Richard Brautigan’s 1967 poem “Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” has the hopeful, reverential tone of a prayer. What Brautigan longs for in the poem is a utopia without work, where humans are “joined back to nature, / returned to our mammal / brothers and sisters” through “cybernetic ecology”—humans being fundamentally too flawed to be trusted with their own paradise. Unfettered by personality, machines would be rulers without greed, fear, hate, or love, going about the drudgery of administering to human clients free of the disastrous trappings of the ego.