Jury duty tests my patriotism.
Sure, a fair and democratic society needs juries to render justice —
Wait, is it too soon to make that Supreme Court joke yet? Spoiler: that’s coming!
Even the Court knows jury duty is onerous. A poster offering new books at the San Francisco Public Library reads: “Doing your civic duty does not have to be a trial.”
The point is most people don’t want to serve. While the show Jury Duty does make this civic requirement seem like a fun way to get out of your personal bubble (who wouldn’t want to meet James Marsden?), being sequestered without any cell phone service seems like a sentence suited for a defendant, not a law-abiding citizen.
Thinking I found the perfect window of time to serve my judicial penance, I moved my jury selection date to the week of July 4th. Certainly, no jury would be impaneled that week.
Each day that I checked my status and got an “all clear,” I felt Maxime Le Mal-ish glee, giddily rubbing my villainous hands together, knowing my plan was working.
Until July 3rd.
I thought there was nearly no point in calling at the end of that day — the next day would be July 4th — but decided to check just to be on the safe side.
Welp, my luck had finally run out. I had to report on July 5th at 12:30 p.m.
As I watched the orientation video, I thought about how AI would be a better alternative. Perhaps not now, with the reports of hallucinations, but eventually, AI would likely be able to render impartial justice without inconveniencing the rest of us. If we wanted to protect against bias, we could impanel the jury with different AI models.
Then I thought: why stop at juries? Why not replace judges too? For example, if the Supreme Court justices were replaced with impartial, fair AI, would we have seen the spate of recent decisions?
That led my sci-fi-addled mind to jump ahead to the Presidency. What if AI were to lead us? Sure, the idea immediately leads many of us to think of Terminator’s SkyNet, but what if our next leader were more like the Supreme Intelligence as portrayed by Annette Bening in Captain Marvel? What would it be like to have our country’s decisions be navigated by an incorruptible entity that would not be prone to sex scandals, memory lapses, corruption, or discriminatory biases?
It would be a nice change of pace.
Considering that Axios and others are dubbing this the “dread election” I can’t be the only one who would find this appealing. … Or, did the UK just show us that there’s hope yet?
