Too many people think they have to run for congress or president instead of thinking more locally. Jesse Ventura is a great example of what the founders envisioned as encouraging people to get involved in politics. He was unhappy with the local city government. He ran for mayor and won and spent four years in charge. Went back to his private sector life and then five years after leaving office, ran for governor and won.
I've had friends get involved in their local politics and have been effective. My buddy was a professional skateboarder and run twice for a local office and he barely lost both times and has vowed to stay involved in his cities politics.
You're seeing more and more people getting involved at the national level who said they never had any inkling of getting involved in politics but have thrown their hats in the ring.
There was a reason the founders made the barrier extremely low to get involved in politics, either locally or nationally. They wanted people to have a say in how their governments are run and to make it simple for them to be the change they want to see.
There is a pretty clear double standard there.
Looking at the numbers: Grey parrots have almost 1 billion 'forebrain' neurons ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n... ). Estimates for the average number of synapses per neuron range in the thousands, so a conservative estimate for the total would be 1 trillion synapses.
If you assume that LLM parameters are comparable to synapses, then such a bird brain is similar to the frontier LLMs in size ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_large_language_models ). Yes, the bird brain is far more energy efficient, but with regard to intelligence modern AI absolutely smokes birds.