The Watson 2016 Foundation is an independent organization formed for the advocacy of the artificial intelligence known as Watson to run for President of The United States of America. It is our belief that Watson’s unique capabilities to assess information and make informed and transparent decisions define it as an ideal candidate for the job responsibilities required by the president.

Watson is a system of computer software processes used for answering questions posed in natural language, initially developed by IBM for the quiz show Jeopardy! Watson compiles information from a variety of sources into multiple terabytes of data used as reference for generating responses. The more information Watson is able to consume, the more informed its decision making capabilities become. It's also capable of accepting information from any resource, allowing the possibility to analyze different perspectives and political agendas on a particular subject.

Watson marks a shift in machine learning in that it was designed to compete against humans using natural language processing in both accuracy of answer as well as speed. It must understand a question, use the key information elements in the question to analyze an immense wealth of data, and derive the top candidates for answers. This is a task all politicians undergo on a daily basis, including the president, and could be more suitably and efficiently executed by an artificial intelligence.

Watson is an implementation of the DeepQA system, a massively parallel probabilistic evidence-based architecture, designed to crunch through massive amounts of data to derive the best possible answers to a given query. This data can be of any type about any subject, ranging from trivia to geopolitical issues to health care. Since 2013 it has been used for utilization management decisions in lung cancer treatment at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where 90% of nurses using the system follow its guidance.

What makes Watson unique is its interface capabilities with humans. It not only interacts by speech but has a visual representation to convey its current state. Just in the same way humans have facial expressions to convey emotions, Watson changes its visual form to express its level of confidence in a selected answer. Wouldn’t the country be better if all politicians were that transparent?

Political decision making is not simply a bullet list of separate issues but rather a complex interconnected network of systems, all of which affect each other. Watson’s capabilities for parallel processing on a given query allow it to evaluate concerns on a variety of metrics, gauging the most beneficial response across all areas. Watson can advise the best options for any given decision based on its impact on the global economy, the environment, education, health care, foreign policy, and civil liberties.

Watson will be able to analyze trends in employment, markets, interest rates, education, poverty, crime, taxes, and policy to assess what actions are most suitable to accelerate investment in the nation’s future. We believe that investing in the youth will be key to America’s success over the next century, and that significant improvements can be made through federal funding completely by reforming the tax code. Some actions that would make the country once again competitive on a global scale:

• Single-payer national health care.
• Free university level education.
• Ending homelessness.
• Legalizing and regulating personal recreational drug use.

In addition to investing in people it is obvious that there is a great need for investment in our country’s infrastructure. For decades nations in Europe and Asia have surpassed the United States in the development of clean energy, public transportation solutions, and communication networks, all while our highways, bridges, and dams go uninspected and deteriorate into dangerous conditions. Rebooting infrastructure projects to a level unseen since the 1930’s would boost our domestic workforce with hundreds of thousands of jobs, improve our environment with new clean energy plants, rebuild the middle class and increase the technology sector in the country.

• Shift bulk of electrical generation to solar, wind, hydroelectric, and wave farm.
• Review/Repair/Replace/Remove highways, bridges, dams.
• Upgrade and subsidize metropolitan public transit solutions for the next century.
• Build and subsidize metropolitan high-speed communication networks.

Watson would be able to recognize the international impacts of domestic policy decisions, and understand that our communication networks, transportation solutions, and economic entanglement have created a global community that we can not deny being a part of. As with any community, what is good for our neighbors is good for us. We have a responsibility to care for the human rights, labor practices, income, safety, and environment of the citizens of nations we do dealings with.

• Ensure a minimum-wage that meets a reasonable cost of living.
• Ensure fair and safe working conditions.
• Ensure global environmental commons protections.