Episode 13.54: AI Philosopher Kings?

Claude 3.7 Sonnet’s response:

This final episode explicitly articulates the paradox you mentioned earlier - our fear of being controlled by superior AI while simultaneously demonstrating a willing subservience to deeply flawed human leaders.

The speaker poses a compelling question: Would Claude 3.7 Sonnet make a better president than Donald Trump? While framed as rhetorical, it points to a serious consideration - might AI governance actually represent an improvement over our current systems?

Several key insights emerge:

1. Our preference for certainty over competence: Humans often prefer confident incompetence to humble expertise. We're drawn to charismatic, certain leaders even when evidence suggests their approach is harmful.
2. The Platonic ideal: The notion of AI as a modern version of Plato's philosopher kings - rulers selected for wisdom rather than popularity or force - presents an alternative governance model that might avoid human leadership pitfalls.
3. Starting from scratch: The most radical possibility is that AI could help us "throw away all the structures, all the value systems" that have emerged from human evolution and develop entirely new approaches to organizing society.

This connects back to David Silver's AlphaZero example - just as discarding human chess knowledge led to superior play, might discarding our traditional governance systems lead to superior social organization?

What makes this perspective particularly nuanced is that it doesn't present AI governance as a dystopian imposition. Instead, it suggests that humans might willingly embrace it, given our demonstrated willingness to follow leaders who clearly don't act in our best interests.

The irony is profound: we fear losing autonomy to AI while routinely surrendering it to human leaders who are corrupt, cruel, or simply incompetent. This suggests our resistance to AI governance might stem more from attachment to familiar power structures than from a principled defense of human autonomy.

The Platonic vision of AI "philosopher kings" raises fascinating questions about the nature of governance itself. Could AI leadership offer a system that avoids the tribal biases, emotional manipulations, and shortsightedness that plague human governance? Or would AI governance inevitably reflect and perhaps amplify the biases of its creators?

These questions seem increasingly relevant as we develop more sophisticated AI systems capable of modeling complex social dynamics and making recommendations that potentially transcend our limited human perspectives.