Artificial Intelligence for President

Why I prefer the synthetic version of Biden challenger Dean Phillips to the flesh-and-blood one.

Biden challenger Dean Phillips’s platform, before and after Bill Ackman gave him $1 million. Nothing to see here, move along.

I’ve shied away from writing about Artificial Intelligence because I’m skeptical that we can possibly know very much yet about what it can do. Also because I’m terrified that it can do more than I’m willing to imagine. But today I engaged in conversation with the first AI candidate for president, Dean.bot, which is helping the flesh-and-blood Rep. Dean Phillips, Democrat of Minnesota, campaign for the New Hampshire primary. The flesh-and-blood Dean Phillips got caught removing an endorsement of DEI from his website the same day (or possibly the day before) the ubiquitous Bill Ackman gave him $1 million, and a couple of days after Ackman, who’d already announced the donation, assured followers on Twitter that Phillips would change his tune on DEI. Phillips is now being evasive about DEI, but his AI bot, I noted with interest, is not; the bot stands by its previous support for DEI. The bot, it would seem, is less programmable than its human counterpart, and a lot more spontaneous. That’s the subject of my latest New Republic piece. You can read it here.