The Valley is fairly different from most of the country and most of the world. It relies on logic over slogans, on mathematics over speculations, on technology over politicians. Most people living in the Valley can reel off a list of well-known entrepreneurs, yet have no idea who their mayor or other elected representatives are. In a part of the country where new ideas are turned into new start-ups and new technologies are built as solutions to world challenges, tech entrepreneurs are often celebrated and embraced over politicians. And all of this happens on a small stretch of land between San Jose and San Francisco called “The Valley.”
Silicon Valley is built on computers, which are made up of mathematical algorithms and logic created by computer scientists. These computers have no slogans, no promises, no politics. They don’t need to be fact checked. They are programmatic, and respond to inputs with related outputs.
If the election was to be decided in the Valley, there is a very real possibility that people would elect a robot computer – one that could take in inputs such as the country’s challenges (education, healthcare, economy, deficit, etc.) and provide mathematically derived programmatic outputs to these challenges. The computer robot would then suggest the most logical output based on mathematical computation that yielded the best results within a given time period, taking into account potential statistical probabilities for failures and unpredicted consequences. Remember the “decision tree” from your game theory class in college? The robot would master it.
I am half joking that a robot could replace the president, but I am serious that the Valley would vote a robot into offices. If it was a race between Obama, Romney and a Silicon Valley robot computer, the Valley would overwhelmingly vote for the robot computer.
The good and bad thing about electing a computer robot – instead of a human – are that the robot has no emotions. On the negative side, that means that the robot wouldn’t be able to relate to real human problems on a personal emotional level. On a positive note, the robot will only react to logic, math and common sense.
I don’t think we’re ready for a president that’s a computer robot. I think the president should have a deep emotional understanding of human beings, their needs, concerns, goals, and problems. However, living in a place where technology provides solutions to so many problems, and seeing the inefficiencies of politicians, a robot computer doesn’t sound all that bad.
In the debates, the robot would be really hard to beat. It would simply provide factual outputs and would avoid useless rhetoric. It would be hard for the politicians to beat the computer robot, because it would mean that they would have to derive their arguments to mathematics and facts – sounds fairly hard for politicians, but straightforward for the computer scientists of Silicon Valley.
Thus, if it were just up to the Valley to elect a president, a computer robot would win the elections.