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.

Episode Audio

Episode Video

More information

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

SUBSCRIBE AND LISTEN ON:

"David Eagleman may be the best combination of scientist and fiction-writer alive."
- Stewart Brand

"David Eagleman offers startling lessons.... His method is to ask us to cast off our lazy commonplace assumptions.
- The Guardian

"A popularizer of impressive gusto...[Eagleman] aims, grandly, to do for the study of the mind what Copernicus did for the study of the stars."
- New York Observer

"[A] neuroscientist and polymath."
- Wall Street Journal

"What Eagleman seems to be calling for is a new Enlightenment."
- Sunday Herald

"David Eagleman is the kind of guy who really does make being a neuroscientist look like fun."
- New York Times

"Eagleman has a talent for testing the untestable, for taking seemingly sophomoric notions and using them to nail down the slippery stuff of consciousness."
- The New Yorker

Wednesday is Indigo Blue

Sum

The Runaway Species