Will an IBM computer be your next mayor?

The Mayor of Pasadena got a good laugh (and sparked some serious discussion to boot) at IJCAI 2009 (<a href="http://ijcai.org/~ijcai09/" rel="nofollow">http://ijcai.org/~ijcai09/</a>) when he proposed something like that. There's often an opening "I'm the mayor and thanks for bringing some convention dollars to our city" speech at large conferences, which is usually horribly boring and full of platitudes, but his was short and more or less said, welcome to California, I wish you all luck in developing artificial intelligence, because we're currently looking for a better government.

following the principle of headlines ending in a question mark...<p>No.

The government will still run the city. The good ones have always stayed out of the implementation details, because they are no good at it. That's why we have a permanent bureaucracy of full-time unelected government employees, as well as civilian contractors.<p>Do Ford and GM run cities now, since they implement everything from police cruisers to garbage trucks? Do plumbers and engineers run the city because they implement the details of the sewer system and running water?

I think its worth exploring this concept. I wouldn't mind living under an AI controlled meritocracy ;). I don't care if an AI or a person is running a city as long as they are good at their job and they make sensible balanced decisions that are in the best interest of the people. If that's a machine intelligence then so be it, I for one welcome our IBM supercomputer super controller overlords.

I think the author accidentally a verb "Once you replace a skilled worker with a computer-controlled robot, it’s very to go back."

Of course the answer is no. Far too many legal and social hurdles to cross (not to mention technological).<p>However, in the spirit of playing along, and in light of the fact that it's Friday, I'll throw in this quote from Deus Ex which I always found interesting:<p>&#62; The checks and balances of democratic governments were invented because humans themselves realized how unfit they were to govern themselves. They needed a system, yes. An industrial age machine.<p>&#62; Without the use of computing machines they had to arrange themselves in crude structures that formalized decision-making. A highly imperfect and unstable solution.