Cheyenne Mayor Mayor Patrick Collins kept his office with over 6,000 votes, beating multiple candidates such as Victor Miller and his Artificial Intelligence Vic.
Miller’s unofficial vote count was over 300 votes, failing to reach the general. Miller said he more or less expected this outcome, however, the experience has encouraged him to move forward.
“Real voters out there and concerned citizens who thought that this was not only viable, but the correct path, were glad to have had it as a choice,” said Miller.
Miller claims his campaign is the first of its kind, arguing a similar campaign in the United Kingdom was “merely using it as a tool.” Where the UK candidate would have used A.I to assist in governing, Miller said his campaign wanted Vic to operate as the mayor, with Miller himself acting as the physical hand.
Miller refers to himself as the first rationally bound delegate. He defines that as a public servant who would be “commit[ed] to deferring 100 percent of their decision-making to A.I systems, serving as the necessary human interface in our current legal and social framework.”
In other words, an individual who carries out the physical, real-world decorum of an elected official, while the A.I does the voting, appointment of officials, and other forms of government decision-making.
There’s still a few problems with a futuristic, autonomous government. For one, Artificial Intelligence is not yet on a human level. While new versions of popular A.I platforms like ChatGPT continue to update, today’s A.I is ultimately a hyperfast google machine. That doesn’t mean A.I won’t ever become self-aware or super intelligent, but a smarter A.I requires tremendous amounts of power. Even with the intelligence and power, A.I would still need human support. A tall order as polling finds humans already have anxiety that A.I could replace their livelihoods without a safety net.
Despite the hurdles, Miller said we’re already in an A.I era and his campaign was just an example for future framework.
“I've had to do this all by myself. I've had to think of all the hypothetical questions and answer all the questions that the media has given me and not really had anything to fall back on. So I'm looking to build a standardization for these rationally bound delegates,” he said.
Miller said in two years time, he sees thousands of A.I candidates running offices. Governments from the state of Indiana to Australia are researching, experimenting, or laying down rules for the involvement of A.I in government. No government has put A.I in a position of political power, symbolic or official.
With A.I rapidly changing the private sector and posing new challenges for public government, Miller is capitalizing on this wave by creating the Rational Governing Alliance. The group looks to bring together interested parties, supporters, funding, and hopefully encourage a movement away from human governance and towards A.I governance.
In a press release from the Rational Governing Alliance, the group said they currently seek to “create a framework where A.I. can take on the full responsibility of decision-making in public office, with humans serving as the legal and physical intermediaries.”
The Rational Governing Alliance essentially aims for a wholesale revolution of governance, one that aims to change how government fundamentally works.
“The time has come to move beyond the constraints of human bias and self-interest in public office,” the alliance continued in the press release. “We stand at the threshold of a governance revolution - one that promises decisions based on data and logic rather than political expediency, where the interests of all citizens are equally considered.”
