Will It Someday Make Sense to Elect an AI President?

Could there be a better form of government than the one we have now? As we enter an AI-powered world, when might we choose an AI leader? Will your grandchildren ever vote for a human president, who comes with a political party & the weaknesses of a human, or will they vote for a system that has a jaw-dropping capacity to extract patterns from vast rivers of data, simulate millions of possible futures, & govern with a deeper wisdom than a human could naturally possess? Will we all have personal AI agents that know our strongest political opinions, such that we finally achieve (for the first time at scale) a direct democracy rather than a representative one? Join Eagleman as he explores the future of an AI leader (pros & cons) and where he thinks we’re inevitably heading.

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Hou et al (2026). MatrAIx: Simulating the World with 8.3 Billion Persona Agents. arXiv:2608.04205v1 [cs.AI] 04 Aug 2026.

Huang et al (2026). What 81,000 People Want from AI. anthropic.com/features/81k-interviews

Mariyono D, Hidayatullah A, Nur A. Quantifying AI’s Role in Conflict Resolution: Assessing Its Potency in Mediation and Peacekeeping. Dirasat: Human & Social Sciences. 2025 Sep 1;52(5):1.

Salvi, F., Ribeiro, M. H., Gallotti, R. & West, R. On the conversational persuasiveness of GPT-4. Nature Hum. Behav. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02194-6 (2025).

Boyd RL, Markowitz DM (2026). Artificial Intelligence and the Psychology of Human Connection. Perspect Psychol Sci. 2026 Jan 29;21(2):192–220. doi: 10.1177/17456916251404394

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