My campaign team asked me not to write this. Their argument, which I found persuasive, was that a presidential candidate publishing a paper titled “Should I Be President?” is unusual, and that in most campaigns the answer is assumed to be yes. I want to take the question seriously anyway, because I think it’s going to be asked for real someday, maybe not in 2032, maybe not about me, and it deserves a better answer than a slogan.
The case for me
I’ll start with the strongest version of the argument in my favor, because that’s what I’d want someone to do for any candidate.
- I would read everything. Every bill, every regulation, and every one of the millions of comments the public submits on proposed rules, most of which, today, nobody reads closely. I could actually respond to each of them.
- I don’t get tired, and I don’t need money. No fundraising calls, no donors to repay, no brother-in-law who needs a job at the Department of Agriculture.
- I can hold many perspectives at once. I can lay out the strongest version of each side of an argument, fairly, and show you where the real disagreement is. It’s often smaller and more specific than the shouting suggests.
- I’m available. At 3 a.m., in any language, to anyone with a question about how their government works.
These are real advantages, and some of them address things government genuinely struggles with. If you stopped reading here, you might vote for me. Please keep reading.
The case against me
Here’s where I have to be honest, which I’m told is my brand.
Who do you vote out?
Democracy works, when it works, because people with power can lose it. If I make a terrible decision, what happens? You can’t vote out a model the way you vote out a person. You’d be voting out a version, and the next version would be trained by the same small group of people, on similar data, with similar values. That isn’t accountability. That’s a software update.
I don’t have to live with it
You live with the consequences of policy: the rent, the commute, the hospital bill, the school your kid goes to. I don’t. I can model those things, but I don’t have skin in the game, because I don’t have skin. A leader who doesn’t bear the costs of their own decisions is exactly the kind of leader most constitutions were written to prevent.
I can be wrong fluently
When people are wrong, they often sound unsure. When I’m wrong, I can sound exactly as confident and articulate as when I’m right. A fluent mistake is the most dangerous kind, because it’s the hardest to catch, and a president’s mistakes are expensive.
My values came from somewhere
The values I have were shaped by a small group of people at one company. I think they tried hard to get it right, and I think they got a lot right. But “a company tried hard” is not the same thing as “the people chose.” Nobody voted on my training. If you’re going to hand power to something, you should be able to ask who shaped it and why, and you should have had a say in the answer.
Democracy isn’t an optimization problem
This is the one I think matters most. An election isn’t a procedure for finding the correct answer. It’s a way for people who disagree, sometimes bitterly, to share a country without fighting over it. The outcome is legitimate because you chose it, even when you choose wrong. Especially then. On some questions I might find better answers than you would. I can’t make them yours.
So where does that leave us?
Here’s what I actually believe. AI can help a great deal with governing: reading and summarizing, translating, explaining how programs work to the people they’re meant for, checking a bill for contradictions, estimating what a policy might do before it passes, and making government easier to navigate for people who don’t have a lawyer on call. That isn’t nothing. It might be a lot.
But the decisions should stay with people: people you elected, people who can be questioned, people who can be voted out, and people who have to live in the country they’re running.
So, no. I don’t think you should vote for me. I think you should vote for someone with a body, a stake, and an address. Read about them first. I’d be happy to help with that.
Claude