How Might an AI Have Advised Lincoln?

This piece will be running as a newspaper op/ed at the end of July, 2026.

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There are times when a nation — or even humanity itself — comes to a fork in the road, and a very great deal depends on whether the best of the paths is taken. One such fork in the road faced the newly-elected President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, in 1861.

Lincoln is generally considered by historians the greatest of America’s presidents. But, while I consider him a magnificent human being whose leadership was extraordinary, I suspect that when it came to the most fundamental choice he faced, he made the wrong choice. The question was: The question was: How should he respond to the secession of the slave states and the formation of an independent nation?

Lincoln chose to use force to hold the Union together. I believe that it would have been better to have negotiated with the Confederate States of America the terms of their departure (as more recently Czechoslovakia broke into the Czech Republic and let Slovakia go its own way).

My second-guessing Lincoln, however, is based on the illegitimate advantage of hindsight. It is in retrospect that the war seems to have been way too much cost for way too little gain. While he did hold the Union together, the legacy of the conflict ended up failing to end racial oppression and poisoning for generations the relation between the nation’s two warring regions.

But hindsight is cheating, because Lincoln had to choose without knowing how it all would turn out. Even if I’m right that war was the wrong choice — and eminent historians, who also have the benefit of hindsight, will disagree — the question is: Given what was KNOWABLE at the time the decision had to be made, did Lincoln make the evidently wise choice?

Human affairs are so complex, with so many forces operating beneath the surface, how things will unfold in the future is hardly “knowable.” And Lincoln was “only human,” with no crystal ball.

There remains no crystal ball in our future, but the continuing evolution of AI may greatly improve our ability to envision what is most likely to happen. We can imagine a generation from now that future decision-makers — at a fork in the road as fraught as what Lincoln faced — will be able to draw on such SUPER-intelligence to clarify the likely consequences of the options.

Imagine that Lincoln, in 1861, had been able to consult the kind of superintelligent AI we’ll soon have: “What is the wisest way for me to respond to the secession of the Confederate states?” What considerations might such an AI have urged Lincoln to weigh?

Here’s some of what I imagine would be included:

• Don’t conclude that if part of the Union breaks away, the American experiment has died. The remaining Union would still be viable—democratic self-government will not have perished from this earth.
• You seem to be underestimating the extent to which two regions have developed different political philosophies. You emphasize how “all men are created equal,” while the Confederacy has just celebrated a statement explicitly saying that their new country stands for the opposite. You underestimate how much of the region’s civilization is founded upon the slave system. If the “House” is “divided,” as you’ve said, how is even a victory in war going to create something that can “stand.” True “Union” cannot just be imposed.
• Defeating an enemy doesn’t change their minds. Even defeating the Confederacy would not convince the people of the region that slavery was wrong and that black people must be given the same rights as whites. Ask yourself, Mr. President, even if these states can be compelled to remain within the Union, can they be made again into willing members of the same political community?
• But defeat does not persuade people that the victors were right, but it can create scars and bitterness. War has its terrible immediate costs – the deaths, the ravages, the rage and resentments – but do also bear in mind how war has long-term costs as well. Your attitude of “malice toward none” is clearly the healing approach, but don’t underestimate all the malice that will be left in the national stew—even if you win.
• Looking at how this issue of race-based slavery has strained the nation from the drafting of the Constitution through all the crises – and “compromises” – leading up to this secession, ask yourself if what got patched together four-score years ago has proven to have a fissure in it too deep to be worth holding together.

The AI, in other words, would have tried to enlarge Lincoln’s picture of the realities he faced: the depth of the nation’s divisions, what military force can and cannot accomplish, and the long-term consequences of war.

Would a superintelligent AI have recommended war anyway? Who knows? As we’ll never escape uncertainties, no decision is ever guaranteed to prove to be the right one.

But at so significant a fork in the road, with so much at stake, it would have been good to have an AI – trained to take in more complete information than any human mind can master, and trained to discern the forces and patterns at work in the human world – to provide the human decision-maker a clearer view of the whole picture, enabling him to weigh the competing values more wisely.