An AI bot is (sort of) running for mayor in Wyoming
wired.com
wired.com
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-human_electoral_candidates
>Lajitas, Texas, held an election that included candidates Tommy Steele (incumbent human mayor), a trading-post wooden Indian, a dog named Buster, and a goat named Clay Henry. The goat won "by a landslide", and goats have been mayors ever since.
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/10/02/when-the-yogurt-took-...
There's... nothing impressive about it at all (I guess the impressive part is "man successfully captures media attention, gets everyone talking about him" - that is an actual challenge, and props to him).
It's also a bit rich to think "this is smarter than me, and so it is definitely smarter than some of the politicians out there". It just smacks of someone who has no idea what political work involves, and thinks a chatbot that can recite legal jargon is literally all it takes to be a politician.
"oh this chatbot can recite all the documentation for all these different libraries, it's way smarter than some developers I've seen"
It also smacks of someone who might be vastly overestimating themselves. There might be a lot of things out there smarter than him, including every other politician, so let's not jump to conclusions just yet.
To be fair, there are some pretty awful politicians out there
I would argue that there are a few politicians underperforming random choice or not making choices whatsoever. So it's not exactly a high bar to cross.
There is a lot of evidence that many politicians don't have even a ChatGPT-level grasp of public policy, the legal system, or economics, but make up for it by being charming, personable, or subjectively "inspiring". It's fascinating to think about what a GPT would do with all the information that politicians have to work with, and whether that could actually result in more effective political decision making.
Yes, letting ChatGPT call the shots doesn't solve the problem of actually _getting things done_, but that doesn't trivialize the effort to elect a "human being enacting ChatGPT instructions".
As a side note, I smile at the idea that a GPT chatbot is a "simple" thing - how quickly we become inured to incredibly complex technology dressed up to be easily consumable.
Handing over decision making to a GPT would just be handing over the power to the one who writes the prompts.
It would be interesting to be able to have a public record of both the input and the output for stuff like this - maybe a future where we have votes for "County Prompt Engineer", and candidates get to show off the prompts that best demonstrate their ability to get 'competent' responses that have resulted in life improvements for their constituency!
At the very least, ChatGPT will admit a mistake when someone points it out. "I'm sorry for the error, you are indeed correct that corruption is unacceptable, here is my revised proposal:"