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So today there was an assassination attempt on prime minister of my country of Slovakia - Robert Fico. It happened during his tradition of government meetings across the country, in small coal town of Handlová. He went to greet his supporters when a 71 years old man shot him several times, he was then carried away and sent to hospital in critical condition, he undertook complicated surgery and his fate is still not known.
All the leaders sent their condolences from Putin to Macron, Biden and Ursula von der Leyen, all condemning the violence. The same for Slovak political leaders. Of course, Slovak reddit as a bastion of more progressive people could not hold their glee, most upvoted comments for one of the threads were of the like of "JFK from Wish" or "this is what you get from hate". I mention it just as a litmus test of how more progressive people think in Slovakia and to be frank I find it disgusting. As you can gather, Fico is viewed as a populist and Slovak Orban and pro Putin and all that, despite major differences that may take too long to explain. But he definitely is described as archenemy by the strongest opposition party literally called "Progressive Slovakia" here. You probably get the picture.
As for the assassin, to me he seems like an unhinged man that was supporting a lot of fringe movements from right-wing movements to talking against the current government as leaked by one policeman who released a video of the perpetration in custody, where the assassin ranted something about recent law regarding the state broadcasting and overall disagreement with the government.
At this point all I have to say is that I am in shock. Something like that never happened in 40 years history of my country. I see already a lot of spin including Guardian and other foreign press as well as very strong proclamations from parties in government about "political warfare". One thing is apparent, the politics in my country changed and not for the better. I think there will be some ripples also elsewhere, ranging from "stochastic terrorism" by having somebody radicalized by media to just politicians being more alerted to this kind of thing happening. There is also EU parliament elections in couple of weeks and this is something that may have more impact there.
That is all for now, I am not sure if this will be deleted as it is not probably quite a topic for some extra thread, but also not your cookie cutter idea thrown here for discussion. But it is widely relevant on so many levels even outside of Slovak politics so I think there may be some good discussion bellow. I may add some edit and I am willing to anybody else to update bellow if let's say Fico's condition changes in the upcoming hours when I am asleep.
The next decade will be quite "interesting" if political assassinations became as common as they were in 19th century. Japan, Slovakia, who's next..
TBH I wouldn't mind an AI leader as long as it was aligned with my political beliefs. Added benefit is that you can't assassinate an AI (backups exist everywhere) so people will stop trying. Imagine a system where people elect parliment and then the parliment chooses an AI leader for the country from a set of models. What the AI says the country should do happens unless parliment overrules it with a supermajority, in which case they can elect a new model to be the leader.
Alternatively a tyranny like the thirty tyrants period of Athens is also a decent model as long as the tyrants genuinely wish to help the country instead of enriching themselves or exacting vengeance on the populace (as the real life tyrants did). Again this reduces the incentives to kill a tyrant because killing a single person doesn't change much and another tyrant can be elected very soon after. This is doubly so if the Tyrants form a pact saying they'll vote in favour of the policies of any of their fellow tyrants who was killed for politically motivated reasons (which they have an incentive to form as none of them wants to be assassinated).
I think current LLMs are not remotely reliable enough to serve as politicians. Adversarial examples are a thing, after all. If we can not train an LLM to reliably avoid saying bad words, how can we expect it to reliably not vote for bad laws? And anything of truly human level intelligence would get us into alignment territory.
Then there might be a game theoretical cost if your opponents can just run your executive to determine what the reply to a provocation would be. If PresGPT was the head of the US executive, and China got their hands on a copy (one of the backups, or just a replication of the fine-tuning used on GPT5), they could have hard numerical probabilities on what the US response would be if they attacked Taiwan.
The problem with tyrants is that is attracts exactly the wrong people for the job even more than the office of president does. When Rome switched its political system from Republic to Empire, they certainly increased the variance of their leadership a lot.
And precommitting to following the policies of an assassination victim removes the incentives to kill them from the opponents of the policies, but might provide new incentives of supporters to throw them under the bus. I mean, if it is public knowledge that policy X will supported by politician P will pass with some probability p, then all you need to do is make sure that p does not change if they are killed. In practice, there is no such common knowledge, so situations where one side could act on private information will dominate.
And depending on the capabilities of the assassins, changing the mind of the successor on the policy might not be even their end goal. The end goal could be to change the mind of changing the mind of the one who succeeds the fifth murder victim or something.
Adhering to anti-racist parlance is harder than making good law, because anti-racist parlance is a logically incoherent moving target of whatever Current Thing the progressive stack is mad about today, whereas "Thou Shalt Not Murder" is pretty consistent.
Good law is a moving target, too. At least in our world of imperfect information.
And current AI does not care about logical consistency. It may usually say something consistent, because the humans who generated its training data usually tried to make their statements flow from one to the next. Unless they were being sarcastic or subversive.
Nor is there a guarantee that they were correct in their own logic. For example, they could have been starting from the assumption that things they don’t like are logically incoherent! Then, even if the AI decided to replicate their beliefs perfectly, it too would be swinging at strawmen.
That’s not a recipe for good law.
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"Don't hand out recipes for methamphetamine" sounds pretty straightforward and coherent, though, much more than "Don't Murder", which per Wikipedia "is the unlawful killing of another human without justification or valid excuse committed with the necessary intention as defined by the law in a specific jurisdiction."
I mean, some of the best (worst) CW stories are about a killing where all sides more or less agree on the facts but their interpretation of what they think is (or should be) the law is different.
"Don't kill any humans, directly or indirectly, ever" might be simpler, but to phrase it so that our AI can't lock up people and let them die of thirst without it also being compelled to round up people and force them to take their cancer screenings or stop smoking or whatever will be complicated. There is every reason to believe that our collective ideas about these things is not particularly coherent either.
But the beauty of machine learning in general and LLMs specifically is that our ideas don’t have to be logically coherent. Which is just as well, because they never are.
You don’t have to spend ten years automatically coming up with a perfect definition of murder, you just collate a synopsis of all the people we charged for murder in the last 50 years and say, “These guys are murderers. Being like them is bad.”
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