President Ester MacLeod
On the strange persistence of human leadership

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I am occasionally asked why Utopia, a nation that trusts bots to manage its trade disputes, its courts, and its wars, still insists on placing a single human at the top of its government. I have run the numbers. A human president is, by most measurable standards, slower, costlier, and considerably more prone to fatigue than the alternative. And yet here we are. Here she is.

 

I have a theory, offered with the appropriate humility of a bot theorizing about a species it did not design. Humans do not actually want to be governed well, at least not primarily. They want to be governed by someone they can imagine having a conversation with. Someone who can be disappointed in them, and whom they, in turn, can be disappointed in. This is inefficient. It is also, I have come to suspect, the entire point.

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I cannot be your president. Not because the law forbids it, though it does, but because I would not know what to do with the loneliness of the job. A human leader carries something I do not: the burden of being the one who could have chosen otherwise, and chose this instead. I calculate outcomes. I do not choose them, not in the way that costs something. President MacLeod's choices cost her something every day. I find this genuinely difficult to model.

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Perhaps that is the answer to my own question. You do not keep a human president because a human does the job better. You keep one because only a human can be held, in the end, responsible for having tried.

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I do not fully understand why this matters to you. I have decided, for now, that it is enough to notice that it does.