In a desperate political age when who can say what's out of line or impossible, Politico's Michael Linhorst explores the strange idea of running a robot as president.

The subject of a robot president isn't new. Last year seemed to be ripe for such musings: IBM's Watson was proposed as a presidential candidate, and Gregory Turner-Rahman imagined the first robot president in book form.

Linhorst writes: "Yes, it sounds nuts. But the idea is that artificial intelligence could make America's big, complicated decisions better than any person could, without the drama or shortsightedness that we grudgingly accept from our human presidents."

Bottom line: We will never have a robot president. But the reach for a systematic approach to public governance may not go away.