How AI will change governance: "Preparing for regime change"

AI and Leviathan: Part II, by @hamandcheese https://t.co/QstJ5NW4za
This is mostly a reminder to myself to check this out when the pressure of other things subsides.

— Bill Benzon, BAM! Bootstrapping Artificial Minds (@bbenzon) August 30, 2023

From the beginning of the article:

Circa the early 2000s, “internet safety” discussions revolved around first-order issues like identity theft, cybercrime and child exploitation. But with the benefit of hindsight, these direct concerns were swamped by the internet’s second-order effects on our politics and culture. Indeed, between an information tsunami and new platforms for mass mobilization, the internet destabilized political systems worldwide, even leading to outright regime change in the case of the Arab Spring.

To the extent AI is simply the next stage in the digital revolution, I expect these trends to only intensify. The issue is not that AI and informational technology are inherently destabilizing. Rather, to put it in slightly Marxian terms, the issue is that society’s technological base is shifting faster than its institutional superstructure can keep up. Populist leaders who promise to root out corruption and reset the system are a symptom of governance structures that have in some sense lost their “direction of fit,” like clothes that shrank in the wash or a species outside its evolutionary niche.

 And from the end:

These inherent constraints on government, combined with AI’s much faster diffusion through the private sector, suggest a net weakening of liberal governments relative to the rest of society. The rapid degeneracy of our legacy institutions could thus make a kind of high-tech anarchy suddenly viable, bootstrapped off the latent demand for social order and other public goods.

The moment governments realize that AI is a threat to their sovereignty, they will be tempted to clamp down in a totalitarian fashion. It’s up to liberal democracies to demonstrate institutional co-evolution as a third-way between degenerate anarchy and an AI Leviathan. At a minimum, this will require embracing AI tooling within the machinery of government; painful concessions to the government functions that AI simply renders obsolete; and the dialectical construction of a new social contract — an AI ordered-liberty — that one hopes is far more Swiss than Pashtun.

Regardless of what path we take, one thing is certain: the U.S. government of 2040 will look as different to our contemporaries as the U.S. government of the 1940s must have looked to the men and women of the pre-industrial era.