An Artificial Intelligence government

“Faster than all but a few now imagine, micro processing will subvert and destroy the nation-state, creating new forms of social organization in the process.” ― James Dale Davidson (1997)

A few weeks ago OpenAI CEO & Co-founder Sam Altman was on the Joe Rogan Experience. During this podcast both of them discussed having an AI government; Essentially meaning that there will be no more people in power but instead algorithms and machines. Depending on where you are on the Techno-Optimist/Pessimist spectrum this may sound either great or horrifying.

The Sovereign Individual

Before we further dissect having an AI government, let’s jump to 1997. It was in this year that the book ‘The Sovereign Individual’ was written. In the book, many predictions around the rise of the internet, cryptocurrencies, cyberspace (Metaverse), self-ownership and decentralization of the state were shared. Many have been proven to be accurate. Let’s zoom in on the last prediction; Decentralizing states.
Although this scenario could still well play out looking at Blockchain technology in combination with a rise of digital Libertarianism, the scenario of digitally centralized states is somewhat already upon us. It was not explicitly mentioned in the book that AI may play part in this, but it has been said that existing nation states along with their governments will probably exercise tight control to prevent traditional hierarchies from slipping away due to the microprocessor. It was expected that this would happen in the first few decades of the 21st century. Quite accurate if you ask me. Some countries are already on their way to becoming a technocracy, introducing a whole new approach to totalitarianism in the process. Big Data and algorithms are used to control every aspect of citizen’s lives. 1984 on steroids if you will.

This is the techno-pessimist vision, but there is obviously another side of the spectrum. A more bright scenario.

Imagine the following; Citizens of a country have lost all trust in traditional politics, and have therefore created a social vacuum which demands a completely different setup to political decision making and governance. An AI is programmed in a way where certain values such as humanism, reason, ethics and responsible citizenship form the basis for what is hopefully a new way to organize society and provide the right steps forward for the nation. It is programmed to analyze historical data and real-time information to make decisions on behalf of the nation. There is no more parliament that needs to have discussions regarding certain topics; the AI keeps creating and updating its laws and policies to keep facilitating society in a constructive way.

Smart Contracts that run on public Blockchains have been programmed to reflect all laws and a court of justice therefore is no longer needed. The AI government is able to provide the same justice and laws for anyone in society, without having any biases, because the algorithm has been reviewed by everyone in society via some sort of referendum, thus reflecting fairness for most if not all. Bureaucracy is gone, because the AI executes in seconds rather than years or even decades. Decisions are always made based on evidence (data), reducing favoritism to zero. No more backroom politics from now on. Resources get allocated in a perfect way because calculations are done in seconds, and capital flows wherever it is needed the most based on the latest information, ensuring financial stability and wealth distribution. People are free to choose their currencies of use, whether that is government support in the form of CBDC’s or choose more volatility but also more reward using BTC or ETH. Not only can you be socialist or libertarian, you can actively contribute to a system which reflects that in society the way you want it to.

Although the scenario above obviously contains lots of gaps, this is definitely a scenario that 1) could be wanted by citizens and 2) is a technically feasible option. From an ethical perspective though this is mind altering and needs much more analysis.

A bit more from an imaginary perspective though; What happens when two countries get into cyberwar with eachother because the algorithms clash with each other over values? What if one country has more computing power and is able to hack another country, crashing supply chains, the (local) economy etc? Although still far off, this seems to be an inescapable scenario. The other side of the coin is the fact that AI does not possess any emotionality, so we could also say that war is a very preventable thing, considering that emotionality plays a big part in geopolitical conflict.

Besides all this, what happens when a few powerful people neglect -let’s say- a future international law which states that societal algorithms need to be open source and available to the public? Can they operate in the dark? Who will stop them? And how?

A new political frontier

Unfortunately politics has always been (and still is) a zero-sum game. It produces winners (people and parties with the most votes) and therefore automatically produces losers as well. The incentive for politicians is to stay in office as long as they can or want, which by definition means there is a chance that they don’t have society’s best interest at heart. But what if we programmed certain algorithms in a way where the only thing it is able to do is follow a protocol that is aligned with the values of a society? Is this a far fetched utopia or actually feasible?

AI is already interwoven with human political decision making, just look at China. Although we should question it’s uses there and actively decide whether we want something similar in the West, we should also ponder the current implications technology has on our social fabric.

There will soon be an inflection point where machines will have the proven ability to construct society in a much better way, reducing the ‘need’ for traditional governments. Along the same lines there needs to be much more debate on how to program these machines and align them with timeless values on which democracies are built.

This article is aimed at being provocative, to get you to think about it yourself. We are not at a crossroads, where we can decide what role AI will play in society. We are long past that, it is already here, and it is everywhere. And as traditional governments seem to reflect the slow decay of empires coming to an end, there will eventually be a vacuum in which citizens can choose in how far they will let algorithms replace tasks and execute on topics that would normally be done by humans. Without sounding too deterministic I think this is where we are headed and we need much more debate on this.