8 ms·

Having an AI as the president would make it clear to all that there is an invisible group of people behind the president, pushing them to act and say things tha

by clort 11y ago

Having an AI as the president would make it clear to all that there is an invisible group of people behind the president, pushing them to act and say things that they want. I agree that even now Watson could probably make decisions better based on actual facts but if Watson says something that is unpalatable to its owners then they can reboot it with a different set of facts. IIRC they did that after they fed it the urban dictionary and it started swearing too much[1] At least with a human president, there is the chance that they will grow up and shrug off the orders they are given. The power actually lies with the person that was elected, not the invisible people who paid to get them the job. [1] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/01/ibms-watson-memorized-the-entire-urban-dictionary-then-his-overlords-had-to-delete-it/267047/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/01/ibms-w...

mtgx 11y ago
Exactly. Some people actually think this would be more "fair", but we can't guarantee an AI would be "fair" for the same reason we can't guarantee that online voting would be safe. Others could easily manipulate it, and not necessarily people from the same country either. Having AI's as advisers, that would be totally different. In the end we can still hold responsible the people that listened to that advice as it's their responsibility to check if the advice from their AI advisers is real.
- babbish 11y ago
  Would you have the same qualms if the AI's source were open and the public voted on which pull requests to accept?
  - privong 11y ago
    > Would you have the same qualms if the AI's source were open and the public voted on which pull requests to accept? I interpreted @mtgx's statement as referring to the information that would be input into the IA. Namely that if presidents are getting bad advice from advisors already, replacing the president with an AI might not improve things, if the same bad advice is still being fed in.
    - babbish 11y ago
      If that's what he said, then I agree wholeheartedly. "Garbage in, garbage out" is pretty hard to argue against.
  - varelse 11y ago
    In that case, one might as well boot up the President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho Bot...
  - binarymax 11y ago
    When it comes to AI, source is only part of the system. The trained model would be a black box. We don't fully understand why some NNs work - so something of this complexity can't simply be cracked open and vetted accurately.
    - babbish 11y ago
      Barring military secrets, perhaps, there's no reason the AI program's current state would necessarily have to be a black box. Nor would it need to be a neural network. I also disagree with the assertion that complex things cannot be vetted.
  - pjc50 11y ago
    That sounds even worse. I wouldn't trust binding public voting on pull requests on my text editor; I'd expect it to break down fairly rapidly.
    - babbish 11y ago
      Assign negative weights to people who submit damaging pull requests? Insert a layer of expert representatives (akin to congresspersons) to generate the PRs? Making the system resilient doesn't sound like anything more than another engineering problem to me.
      - Cyph0n 11y ago
        The nuances of politics cannot be boiled down to a Github repository. It's not as straightforward as you think it is I'm afraid.
        babbish 11y ago
        Who said anything about GitHub? The situation would call for a highly specialized, custom-made solution. If you think that's impossible, please share your reasons for thinking so. Comments like yours are pure FUD and aren't in any way helpful.
      - stefs 11y ago
        well, how to identify "damaging" pull requests? i mean, that's what politics is.
  - mclovinit 11y ago
    I take it the definition of public here is inclusive of all citizens in which case, the majority of citizens should understand the fundamentals of AI and the given software implementation. Many citizens are fluent in English and for those who are not, such individuals often confide in trusted sources to translate for them prior to making decisions. I am not sure if this approach of publicly voting on AI would work, but then again many people today do not fully understand each candidates political agendas yet they still end up voting. So I could be wrong.
- zanny 11y ago
  You could guarantee online voting with distributed trust and proof of stake. There are several papers on it now that are a good search away. That doesn't change the AI, though - since it still is physical hardware in some place, even if you could verify the software you can still exploit the hardware.
- pault 11y ago
  > In the end we can still hold responsible the people that listened to that advice as it's their responsibility to check if the advice from their AI advisers is real. This has so much potential for a Phillip-K-Dick-ian rabbit hole of paranoia and insanity that it made me chuckle. I think you might be hand-waving away a lot of complexity here. :)
DominikR 11y ago
> there is an invisible group of people behind the president, pushing them to act and say things that they want. It is absolutely normal to have an establishment and an elite that influences the governments and the presidents decisions. Only in the most dictatorial and absolutist types of governments you would see a lone person at the top deciding on issues without consulting with anyone. But I'm not sure that such a thing has ever existed. Even maniacs with a cult following behind them like Hitler had to balance the interests of different factions within the system. What we have to get rid off is certain categories of influencing decisions that have a negative impact for the majority. (bribery)
- conceit 11y ago
  That's nonsense. The very idea of dictatorship is to dictate, i.e. to prescribe the rules. It doesn't matter whether that is given from any number of individuals directly or channeled through a representative.
akerro 11y ago
> IIRC they did that after they fed it the urban dictionary and it started swearing too much[1] This was literally the best usage of AI as comedy ever made.
maxander 11y ago
Political decisions made via artificial reasoning have the advantage that it can keep a log of all the steps leading up to any given decision. Then, even if this log is too long and complex for humans to handle, AI run by civilian interest groups could inspect it to ensure that everything was done logically and proceeding from appropriate principles- interference from outside sources would presumably appear as conclusions made without rational basis. A whole new level of government transparency! Granted, it may not work out so rosily in real life- the reasoning log would likely be liberally redacted due to factors classified from public knowledge (just as some of Obama's more puzzling stances may, charitably, be explained by things he's not allowed to tell us)- but that's its own problem.
pdkl95 11y ago
> reboot it with a different set of facts Not just facts - the designers of the AI also choose the underlying assumption and models. Even the very idea of using an AI implies a certain set of biases and intentions. Characteristics that are truly common enough in humans that can safely be extracted as a factor are rare. Most of the time we try to compromise so we can call our differences "close enough". The process of finding and/or creating those compromises is what we call "politics", and while computers can certainly help as a tool, but the process needs human involvement by definition. Attempts to turn over any kind of political or social decision-making to an algorithm is simply a way to disguise the concentration of power. The algorithm's designers ultimately end up with the power, while others are denied power. The racist tactic known as "redlining"[1] is a pre-AI example. Black people aren't denied hosing directly, they simply "don't quality" for a loan, with the real reasons obscured behind a proprietary "credit worthiness" equation. [1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case... edit: Instead of using AI as a decision-maker, a place where AI (and other technology) might actually be useful is as the facilitator and/or part of the "panel of experts" used in Delphi methods[2]. While the people tend to jump on bandwagons and make stupid decisions when unorganized, we have a lot of examples where a general crowd of people make very good decisions when they are focused on a specific goal and have enough structure to allow for iterative refining of ideas. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_method
- pdkl95 11y ago
  By the way - I should mention that the last part about using modern technology to as organizational structure instead of decision making as part of some sort of Delphi method is originally from a 2014 interview[1] with James Burke (Connections, The Day The Universe Changed). A few of his comments that are relevant to the use of technology with politics and society: We have these extraordinarily limiting constraints from a past in which we did not have the tools to have anything other than extraordinarily limiting constraints. But, now we do have the tools, and the tools are running away with us faster than the social institutions can keep up. ... I think countries ought to set up Departments of the Future. [...] We are on the edge of having the technology to be able to say, let us run a constant, dynamic, updated review of everything that science and technology is thinking about [...] then let us use the same techniques to ask the public in general, not politicians, whether they like that idea, whether they feel that they could live with that idea. And then, like a Delphi technique, re-run it until everybody stops changing their mind. ... Collate all [research laboratories and business R&D] together and process them using stuff like big data to see what the pattern looks like becoming, and then layering on top of that social media analytics to say, if this was coming, would you like it, and if not, why not? In other words, to have a sort of 24 hour a day referendum The other parts of the interview are very interesting as well: ... it’s no longer important to teach people to be chemists or physicists or anything ‘ists because those jobs are gone, and if they’re not gone today they’re gone tomorrow. And unless we know the old tools of critical thinking and logic and such, we will not be able to handle what follows. So, we’re wasting our time training people to be things that will no longer exist in 10, 15, 20 years time. ... Every single value structure is meaningless [...] commercial society will be destroyed at a stroke. The trouble is the transition period [...] how we get from here to there. The vested interests, I mean, we’re going to have to shoot every one of them – nobody, nobody is going to give way to this. [...] All cultural values relate to scarcity, ultimately. [1] http://youarenotsosmart.com/transcripts/transcript-interview-with-james-burke-from-episode-020/ http://youarenotsosmart.com/transcripts/transcript-interview...
stray 11y ago
I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that.
rajacombinator 11y ago
This has pretty much been the case for decades if not longer and yet it is still not apparent to people! AI represents the people, hope, and change, surely.
mbrock 11y ago
The site's creators perhaps acknowledge this in a way, by listing a number of bullet points that they expect Watson to advise on and presumably agree with: single-payer health care, recreational drug legalization, and so on. But how do they know Watson would find the expected value of these things positive? Maybe Watson would be a republican. And this all points down a huge rabbit hole of ethical and political philosophy and stuff. Like, should Watson take into consideration his likelihood of being elected? In that case, much of his neural network should be dedicated to predicting voter outcome. And that seems pretty obviously problematic.
- kuschku 11y ago
  > Maybe Watson would be a republican That’s very unlikely. Any logical system based on the concept that human life is worth existing on its own (no matter what the person has contributed to society) automatically ends up with the necessary conclusion that things like subsidized healthcare are mandatory. Obviously, one could give the program the basic assumption that human life is not worth anything, and it should instead focus purely on profit, and it might end up with a more republican ideology. But giving an AI with access to nuclear weapons the assumption that human life isn’t the most important factor is... a bad idea.
  - mbrock 11y ago
    What if the logical system determines that the introduction of single-payer healthcare would lead to some kind of political crisis in the next 8 years, for complex predictive reasons that the human mind can barely understand? It's easy to derive conclusions from moral axioms, but very difficult to do actual politics in a country full of voters, corporations, lobbyists, etc. Artificial intelligence is not a magic solution to that.
    - DonHopkins 11y ago
      It would certainly be a political crisis for the Republican party if their base were to realize how much they've been lying about health care. Bring it on!
roymurdock 11y ago
Reminds me of how people think Bitcoin/blockchain tech can solve a lot of the inherently human problems in finance. At the end of the day, it's the group of core developers who change the codebase that are truly in power.
- gruez 11y ago
  That's not a really good comparison. You can always make your own fork of bitcoin, and if there's enough like minded people, your fork will "win".
  - roymurdock 11y ago
    It's the same with governments and political parties. One group wants it done one way, another group wants it done a different way, and so two parties, styles of governing, blockchains emerge. My main point though is that we tend to place too much emphasis on how much new tech can help solve age-old, human nature driven problems.
    - nitrogen 11y ago
      Our first step should be replacing first-past-the-post voting with something that isn't mathematically guaranteed to result in a polarized two-party system.
      - r3dk1ng 11y ago
        something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting?
        nitrogen 11y ago
        IRV has the problem where gaining support can actually cost one the election (nonmonotonicity). From http://zesty.ca/voting/sim http://zesty.ca/voting/sim it seems that approval voting would work reasonably well.
Outdoorsman 11y ago
The old joke, thrown out from time to time by politicians and pundits, to describe a lack of quality candidates,is that: "Anyone smart enough to be a good president wouldn't want to be president." This, because of the pressure and stress involved... Watson, with human advisers, should be relatively stress-proof...a possible plus... I guess then the joke would evolve to: "Anyone smart enough to be a good adviser wouldn't want to be."
- sp332 11y ago
  It isn't about stress, it's about the greed for power. Anyone who wants that much power definitely shouldn't be trusted with it.
speeder 11y ago
I play online the game Paranoia. The game backstory is that during cold war, it became a hot war, nukes were launched, and in the US was built one (or more) underground cities, that are administrered by a paranoid computer that hates and fear communists. My current Paranoia character works on "TechServices" and sometimes make his opinion known (something that is actually illegal to do) that "The Friend Computer" ins't the real ruler, his designers and programmers are. It is fun to see the implications in the game, specially as the mindset of players affect their characters and behaviour, some people are loyal to the computer, some people consider the computer the enemy, and some people consider the computer only a tool, and are loyal (or enemy) of the "High Programmers" that have access to the administration computer code.
- tariqali34 11y ago
  I've ran a Paranoia campaign where the players were all High Programmers. Technically, the players could reprogram The Computer, but they usually refrain from doing so, partly out of fear of offending all the other High Programmers and partly because trying to reprogram The Computer require a skill check (with failure causing more bugs to be introduced into the system). Any programming that they do is rather subtle, to avoid raising alarm. The end result is a rather byzantine situation where everyone (including The Computer) is plotting against everyone else, all being sufficiently paranoid.
conceit 11y ago
> The power actually lies with the person that was elected ... unless there's leverage against the elected, something that would subjectively seem to compromise the integrity more than the slowly gotten used to corruption.

by clort 11y ago

mtgx 11y ago

Exactly. Some people actually think this would be more "fair", but we can't guarantee an AI would be "fair" for the same reason we can't guarantee that online voting would be safe. Others could easily manipulate it, and not necessarily people from the same country either. Having AI's as advisers, that would be totally different. In the end we can still hold responsible the people that listened to that advice as it's their responsibility to check if the advice from their AI advisers is real.

babbish 11y ago
Would you have the same qualms if the AI's source were open and the public voted on which pull requests to accept?
- privong 11y ago
  > Would you have the same qualms if the AI's source were open and the public voted on which pull requests to accept? I interpreted @mtgx's statement as referring to the information that would be input into the IA. Namely that if presidents are getting bad advice from advisors already, replacing the president with an AI might not improve things, if the same bad advice is still being fed in.
  - babbish 11y ago
    If that's what he said, then I agree wholeheartedly. "Garbage in, garbage out" is pretty hard to argue against.
- varelse 11y ago
  In that case, one might as well boot up the President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho Bot...
- binarymax 11y ago
  When it comes to AI, source is only part of the system. The trained model would be a black box. We don't fully understand why some NNs work - so something of this complexity can't simply be cracked open and vetted accurately.
  - babbish 11y ago
    Barring military secrets, perhaps, there's no reason the AI program's current state would necessarily have to be a black box. Nor would it need to be a neural network. I also disagree with the assertion that complex things cannot be vetted.
- pjc50 11y ago
  That sounds even worse. I wouldn't trust binding public voting on pull requests on my text editor; I'd expect it to break down fairly rapidly.
  - babbish 11y ago
    Assign negative weights to people who submit damaging pull requests? Insert a layer of expert representatives (akin to congresspersons) to generate the PRs? Making the system resilient doesn't sound like anything more than another engineering problem to me.
    - Cyph0n 11y ago
      The nuances of politics cannot be boiled down to a Github repository. It's not as straightforward as you think it is I'm afraid.
      - babbish 11y ago
        Who said anything about GitHub? The situation would call for a highly specialized, custom-made solution. If you think that's impossible, please share your reasons for thinking so. Comments like yours are pure FUD and aren't in any way helpful.
    - stefs 11y ago
      well, how to identify "damaging" pull requests? i mean, that's what politics is.
- mclovinit 11y ago
  I take it the definition of public here is inclusive of all citizens in which case, the majority of citizens should understand the fundamentals of AI and the given software implementation. Many citizens are fluent in English and for those who are not, such individuals often confide in trusted sources to translate for them prior to making decisions. I am not sure if this approach of publicly voting on AI would work, but then again many people today do not fully understand each candidates political agendas yet they still end up voting. So I could be wrong.
zanny 11y ago
You could guarantee online voting with distributed trust and proof of stake. There are several papers on it now that are a good search away. That doesn't change the AI, though - since it still is physical hardware in some place, even if you could verify the software you can still exploit the hardware.
pault 11y ago
> In the end we can still hold responsible the people that listened to that advice as it's their responsibility to check if the advice from their AI advisers is real. This has so much potential for a Phillip-K-Dick-ian rabbit hole of paranoia and insanity that it made me chuckle. I think you might be hand-waving away a lot of complexity here. :)

DominikR 11y ago

> there is an invisible group of people behind the president, pushing them to act and say things that they want. It is absolutely normal to have an establishment and an elite that influences the governments and the presidents decisions. Only in the most dictatorial and absolutist types of governments you would see a lone person at the top deciding on issues without consulting with anyone. But I'm not sure that such a thing has ever existed. Even maniacs with a cult following behind them like Hitler had to balance the interests of different factions within the system. What we have to get rid off is certain categories of influencing decisions that have a negative impact for the majority. (bribery)

conceit 11y ago
That's nonsense. The very idea of dictatorship is to dictate, i.e. to prescribe the rules. It doesn't matter whether that is given from any number of individuals directly or channeled through a representative.

akerro 11y ago

> IIRC they did that after they fed it the urban dictionary and it started swearing too much[1] This was literally the best usage of AI as comedy ever made.

maxander 11y ago

Political decisions made via artificial reasoning have the advantage that it can keep a log of all the steps leading up to any given decision. Then, even if this log is too long and complex for humans to handle, AI run by civilian interest groups could inspect it to ensure that everything was done logically and proceeding from appropriate principles- interference from outside sources would presumably appear as conclusions made without rational basis. A whole new level of government transparency! Granted, it may not work out so rosily in real life- the reasoning log would likely be liberally redacted due to factors classified from public knowledge (just as some of Obama's more puzzling stances may, charitably, be explained by things he's not allowed to tell us)- but that's its own problem.

pdkl95 11y ago

> reboot it with a different set of facts Not just facts - the designers of the AI also choose the underlying assumption and models. Even the very idea of using an AI implies a certain set of biases and intentions. Characteristics that are truly common enough in humans that can safely be extracted as a factor are rare. Most of the time we try to compromise so we can call our differences "close enough". The process of finding and/or creating those compromises is what we call "politics", and while computers can certainly help as a tool, but the process needs human involvement by definition. Attempts to turn over any kind of political or social decision-making to an algorithm is simply a way to disguise the concentration of power. The algorithm's designers ultimately end up with the power, while others are denied power. The racist tactic known as "redlining"[1] is a pre-AI example. Black people aren't denied hosing directly, they simply "don't quality" for a loan, with the real reasons obscured behind a proprietary "credit worthiness" equation. [1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case... edit: Instead of using AI as a decision-maker, a place where AI (and other technology) might actually be useful is as the facilitator and/or part of the "panel of experts" used in Delphi methods[2]. While the people tend to jump on bandwagons and make stupid decisions when unorganized, we have a lot of examples where a general crowd of people make very good decisions when they are focused on a specific goal and have enough structure to allow for iterative refining of ideas. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_method

pdkl95 11y ago
By the way - I should mention that the last part about using modern technology to as organizational structure instead of decision making as part of some sort of Delphi method is originally from a 2014 interview[1] with James Burke (Connections, The Day The Universe Changed). A few of his comments that are relevant to the use of technology with politics and society: We have these extraordinarily limiting constraints from a past in which we did not have the tools to have anything other than extraordinarily limiting constraints. But, now we do have the tools, and the tools are running away with us faster than the social institutions can keep up. ... I think countries ought to set up Departments of the Future. [...] We are on the edge of having the technology to be able to say, let us run a constant, dynamic, updated review of everything that science and technology is thinking about [...] then let us use the same techniques to ask the public in general, not politicians, whether they like that idea, whether they feel that they could live with that idea. And then, like a Delphi technique, re-run it until everybody stops changing their mind. ... Collate all [research laboratories and business R&D] together and process them using stuff like big data to see what the pattern looks like becoming, and then layering on top of that social media analytics to say, if this was coming, would you like it, and if not, why not? In other words, to have a sort of 24 hour a day referendum The other parts of the interview are very interesting as well: ... it’s no longer important to teach people to be chemists or physicists or anything ‘ists because those jobs are gone, and if they’re not gone today they’re gone tomorrow. And unless we know the old tools of critical thinking and logic and such, we will not be able to handle what follows. So, we’re wasting our time training people to be things that will no longer exist in 10, 15, 20 years time. ... Every single value structure is meaningless [...] commercial society will be destroyed at a stroke. The trouble is the transition period [...] how we get from here to there. The vested interests, I mean, we’re going to have to shoot every one of them – nobody, nobody is going to give way to this. [...] All cultural values relate to scarcity, ultimately. [1] http://youarenotsosmart.com/transcripts/transcript-interview-with-james-burke-from-episode-020/ http://youarenotsosmart.com/transcripts/transcript-interview...

stray 11y ago

I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that.

rajacombinator 11y ago

This has pretty much been the case for decades if not longer and yet it is still not apparent to people! AI represents the people, hope, and change, surely.

mbrock 11y ago

The site's creators perhaps acknowledge this in a way, by listing a number of bullet points that they expect Watson to advise on and presumably agree with: single-payer health care, recreational drug legalization, and so on. But how do they know Watson would find the expected value of these things positive? Maybe Watson would be a republican. And this all points down a huge rabbit hole of ethical and political philosophy and stuff. Like, should Watson take into consideration his likelihood of being elected? In that case, much of his neural network should be dedicated to predicting voter outcome. And that seems pretty obviously problematic.

kuschku 11y ago
> Maybe Watson would be a republican That’s very unlikely. Any logical system based on the concept that human life is worth existing on its own (no matter what the person has contributed to society) automatically ends up with the necessary conclusion that things like subsidized healthcare are mandatory. Obviously, one could give the program the basic assumption that human life is not worth anything, and it should instead focus purely on profit, and it might end up with a more republican ideology. But giving an AI with access to nuclear weapons the assumption that human life isn’t the most important factor is... a bad idea.
- mbrock 11y ago
  What if the logical system determines that the introduction of single-payer healthcare would lead to some kind of political crisis in the next 8 years, for complex predictive reasons that the human mind can barely understand? It's easy to derive conclusions from moral axioms, but very difficult to do actual politics in a country full of voters, corporations, lobbyists, etc. Artificial intelligence is not a magic solution to that.
  - DonHopkins 11y ago
    It would certainly be a political crisis for the Republican party if their base were to realize how much they've been lying about health care. Bring it on!

roymurdock 11y ago

Reminds me of how people think Bitcoin/blockchain tech can solve a lot of the inherently human problems in finance. At the end of the day, it's the group of core developers who change the codebase that are truly in power.

gruez 11y ago
That's not a really good comparison. You can always make your own fork of bitcoin, and if there's enough like minded people, your fork will "win".
- roymurdock 11y ago
  It's the same with governments and political parties. One group wants it done one way, another group wants it done a different way, and so two parties, styles of governing, blockchains emerge. My main point though is that we tend to place too much emphasis on how much new tech can help solve age-old, human nature driven problems.
  - nitrogen 11y ago
    Our first step should be replacing first-past-the-post voting with something that isn't mathematically guaranteed to result in a polarized two-party system.
    - r3dk1ng 11y ago
      something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting?
      - nitrogen 11y ago
        IRV has the problem where gaining support can actually cost one the election (nonmonotonicity). From http://zesty.ca/voting/sim http://zesty.ca/voting/sim it seems that approval voting would work reasonably well.

Outdoorsman 11y ago

The old joke, thrown out from time to time by politicians and pundits, to describe a lack of quality candidates,is that: "Anyone smart enough to be a good president wouldn't want to be president." This, because of the pressure and stress involved... Watson, with human advisers, should be relatively stress-proof...a possible plus... I guess then the joke would evolve to: "Anyone smart enough to be a good adviser wouldn't want to be."

sp332 11y ago
It isn't about stress, it's about the greed for power. Anyone who wants that much power definitely shouldn't be trusted with it.

speeder 11y ago

I play online the game Paranoia. The game backstory is that during cold war, it became a hot war, nukes were launched, and in the US was built one (or more) underground cities, that are administrered by a paranoid computer that hates and fear communists. My current Paranoia character works on "TechServices" and sometimes make his opinion known (something that is actually illegal to do) that "The Friend Computer" ins't the real ruler, his designers and programmers are. It is fun to see the implications in the game, specially as the mindset of players affect their characters and behaviour, some people are loyal to the computer, some people consider the computer the enemy, and some people consider the computer only a tool, and are loyal (or enemy) of the "High Programmers" that have access to the administration computer code.

tariqali34 11y ago
I've ran a Paranoia campaign where the players were all High Programmers. Technically, the players could reprogram The Computer, but they usually refrain from doing so, partly out of fear of offending all the other High Programmers and partly because trying to reprogram The Computer require a skill check (with failure causing more bugs to be introduced into the system). Any programming that they do is rather subtle, to avoid raising alarm. The end result is a rather byzantine situation where everyone (including The Computer) is plotting against everyone else, all being sufficiently paranoid.

conceit 11y ago

> The power actually lies with the person that was elected ... unless there's leverage against the elected, something that would subjectively seem to compromise the integrity more than the slowly gotten used to corruption.