Californians can hardly object to governance by ghosts.

dead represent the living, but those objections are easily dismissed.

The U.S. is so good at killing people before their time — wars, gun violence, poor pandemic responses — that the dead could use more representation from their own.

Californians can hardly object to governance by ghosts. Today’s citizens do less governing of our state than ballot measures approved many decades ago — like 1978’s Proposition 13 — change those rules. U.S. senators have huge egos and think of themselves as indispensable. They also are old: The average age in the Senate is 64. An amendment making it possible for them to serve long after they’ve shuffled off this mortal coil might achieve rare bipartisan — even unanimous — passage.

Filling the Senate with AIs also might be good for the public discourse. After all, human senators are hard for constituents and reporters to get on the phone or text, but AI senators would only be a click away. Since AIs adapt to new information — unlike aging senators — AI politicians might be more accountable, too.

I’d benefit personally. Sen. Feinstein doesn’t talk to me — or many reporters — but, with some guidance from an AI-savvy friend, I recently asked the GPT-4 multimodal model, from Open AI, to pretend it was a 90-year-old senator from California facing questions from a “provocative California columnist” about whether she should leave office and who should replace her.

Here’s a portion of the AI-generated chat:

Columnist: Could an AI replace you?

Senator: Replace me? Well, that’s an intriguing idea. Can an AI understand the needs of the single mother in Fresno, or the plight of the immigrant family in San Diego? Can it empathize with the struggles of the small business owner in San Francisco? Can it sit across a table from a foreign leader and negotiate peace?

Columnist: Well, with advancements in technology, they could probably do all of that.

Senator: But there’s a difference between doing and understanding. It’s one thing to process data, quite another to feel the weight of human experiences. And politics, my dear columnist, is not just about decisions. It’s about the people behind those decisions. AI may have my knowledge, but it can’t have my heart.

I marveled at the savvy of this DiFi AI. She seemed to make the case for human emotions — without actually answering the question. And she didn’t count herself out of the race, either.

Could the human Feinstein do any better?