Using AI to improve our institutional infrastructure

Three things that legal and policy wonks should be exploring are how to use AI to improve state capacity, fix liberal democracy, and bust regulatory/legal bloat. I'm bored so quickly typing out a few half-baked ideas:

State capacity: ensuring the state can do and deliver what… pic.twitter.com/evt22TNdVq

— Séb Krier (@sebkrier) February 19, 2026

The effect of the collapse of the USSR on the American electorate [Collapse? Part 3]

On Friday, July 4, I had a post in which I asserted, without argument, my believe that our institutions are probably fatally compromised. There’s no way we can back to the way things once were. The next day, July 5, I had a post where I presented a conversation I had with Claude about how an explanation about that belief might go. In that post I gave a quick precis of how I have experienced the socio-political sphere from my childhood up through and into this millennium. Claude and I gave a special place to the collapse of the USSR in 1989. On the one hand that was a major event in world affairs. On a personal level, moreover, it forced me to revise my priors, to put it informally in Bayesian terms. I grew up during the Cold War and had come to think that it was an all-but permanent feature of the world order. When the USSR collapsed I had to revise my sense of the world on the deepest and broadest level. Perhaps significant change WAS possible.

Additionally, Claude pointed out that, early in my life, I had experienced major institutions at maximum effectiveness (e.g. the founding of NASA as a response to Sputnik, a steel strike that affected the entire nation for half a year) and then, later in life, experienced weak and ineffective institutions. Most people have not lived long enough to have experienced that. And that leads to the topic of today’s dialog with Claude 4.0.

With the election of Donald Trump, and the actions he’s taken in the first half of the year, we are in a state of political crisis, a chaos that the administration has spread to the rest of the world as well. How is this going to play out in America? The answer to that question depends, in part, on what people think about socio-political possibilities: What is possible? What is unlikely to ever happen? Surely people’s experience of that will depend, in part, on their own life experience. What roll has the collapse of the USSR played in that experience?

That obviously depends on a person’s age. Someone born in, say, 1975, has probably not had enough life experience in the Cold War for that, and the subsequent collapse of the USSR, to register deeply in their experience. They will have learned about the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR in history classes in school and from reading. Because of their relative, youth, however, the collapse itself would not have caused them to rethink their sense of the national and international political arena. It’s merely history.

With that in mind, I asked Claude to “think” about the effects of that event. Not surprisingly it reported that we don’t have much data on the question, but offered some remarks and speculation. I then asked it to suggest research we might conduct into the repercussions of that collapse.

As before, my prompts are highlighted in blue, while Claude’s response are clear. 

* * * * * 

Repercussions of the collapse of the USSR

Attitudes as a result of the collapse of the USSR

Previously we’d identified the collapse of the USSR as an inflection point in the course of recent history. At the time I identified is as an important event in my understanding of history. I’d grown up during the Cold War and, in effect, thought of the conflict between the democratic nations and the communist nations as an all-but permanent feature of the world. I expected that conflict to continue as long as I lived. Thus, when the USSR collapse I realized that, “hey,” maybe things can actually change. A colleague of mine who was born in 1967, 20 years after me, said he experienced that collapse the same way. I was in my early 40s when the collapse happened; he was in his early 20s.

This raises a general question: Across the whole population, what effect the collapse of the USSR had on people’s attitudes toward politics and the future? On the one had we have people who are old enough to have lived during the Cold War and hence to have experienced collapse of the USSR. OTOH we have those too young to have experienced the Cold War and the subsequent collapse of the USSR. Do the attitudes of these two groups differ in a systematic way that can be attributed to their lived experience of the Cold War? Do we have any relevant survey data? Any other evidence?

This is a fascinating question that touches on how major historical events shape generational political consciousness. Let me search for relevant research on this.Your observation about the USSR collapse as a pivotal moment for understanding the possibility of systemic change is profound, and you're right to wonder about its generational impact on political attitudes. While I didn't find extensive survey data specifically measuring this phenomenon, the available evidence suggests significant generational differences shaped by lived experience of the Cold War.

The Generational Divide

The research does reveal clear patterns:

Cold War Generation (born ~1930-1975): Americans from the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, and Generation X, believe it is best for the United States to take an active role in world affairs and show higher support for global engagement. They experienced the full arc of the Cold War and its dramatic conclusion.

Post-Cold War Generation (born after ~1980): Americans from the Millennial Generation and Generation Z are far less convinced of the merits of active global engagement and are more selective about how the U.S. should engage internationally. Unlike their elders, young Americans don't buy into US exceptionalism and are divided on whether the United States should play an active role or stay out of world affairs.

The "Change is Possible" Effect

Your insight about experiencing the USSR collapse as proof that "things can actually change" appears to have had lasting effects:

Fukuyama's Optimism as Cultural Zeitgeist: The immediate post-Cold War period was characterized by unprecedented optimism about systemic change. Fukuyama's "End of History" thesis captured this mood, arguing that liberal democracy had triumphed and would inevitably spread globally. This wasn't just academic theory - it reflected a broader cultural belief that fundamental transformation was possible.

Evidence of Generational Political Efficacy: While direct survey data is limited, we can see the effects in:

1. Higher Political Engagement: Those who lived through the Cold War tend to show greater belief in America's ability to shape global events
2. Institutional Faith: Older Americans may take pride in the United States' role in WWII and stance during the Cold War, contributing to their greater embrace of US global engagement
3. Systemic Thinking: Experience with one major system collapse (USSR) likely increased openness to other possibilities for change

The Complexity Overload Connection

This generational difference may be crucial for understanding our current institutional crisis. Those who experienced the USSR collapse know viscerally that:

• Seemingly permanent systems can disappear
• Change can happen faster than experts predict
• Alternatives to current arrangements are possible

Meanwhile, younger generations who grew up during American institutional dominance may paradoxically be both:

• More critical of current institutions (having seen mostly dysfunction)
• Less confident in the possibility of systematic alternatives (having no experience of fundamental change)

Why I think our institutions are collapsing [Collapse? Part 2]

Yesterday I ran up a post (Is the system broken? The Legislative Process (+NATO)) in which I asserted my belief that our institutions are collapsing, probably beyond repair. But I didn’t give any reason for that belief. That’s the purpose of this post, to suggest how an argument could be made.

First I run through my personal history from about the age of ten up into the current century. That tells a lot about why I feel this way but it is not itself an explanation. It doesn’t justify that feeling.

Most of this post takes the form of a conversation I had with Claude about this subject. As the subject is deep and complex, that conversation doesn’t itself provide an explanation. But it does indicate how I think an explanation should be constructed. About two thirds of the way through I made a long prompt in which I run through my personal history. Claude’s response to that was a bit surprising to me, and quite interesting.

How things look from my life experience

I was born at the end of 1947. During the mid-1950s Walt Disney had several episodes about man in space on his TV program. They had me enthralled, as did Forbidden Planet, which I saw when it came out in 1956. Then Russia launched Sputnik in 1957. That’s when my personal life, with fantasies of space exploration, intersected with world history. I followed the space program for years, also building model kits of space craft and making a painting or two.

A ten-year-old is not going to have a very sophisticated grasp of world affairs. But it doesn’t take long for a ten-year-old to become 13 and then 14. I’m very aware of the Cold War. I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, just barely, and the assassination of President Kennedy. I remember the Civil Rights movement, mostly from TV, the news, and discussions in school civics classes.

And then we have the Vietnam War, which played a major role in my life during my teens and early 20s. I protested the war and served as a conscientious objector. I was a fellow-traveler in the counter-culture, turning on and tuning in (I played in a rock band from 69-71), but I never really dropped. Still, I was sufficiently alienated from mainstream America that I was indifferent to the moon landing in 1969. I remember the OPEC oil embargo and its aftermath, which trigged the demise of the steel industry in the USA. And so forth. I was deeply disappointed when Ronald Reagan was elected President.

Let’s more or less say that the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-90 was a major inflection point. I’d grown up during the Cold War so I’d believed that conflict between the United States and the USSR was written into the nature of the world. That event proved me wrong, though I didn’t believe in Fukuyama’s end of history (and, yes, I did know that he was talking about history in a very special and specific way), nor that international conflict was at an end.

Not long after that we have the first Iraq war, which went by quickly. Then 9/11 and the second Iraq war leading into the “war on terror” and the war in Afghanistan. The USA had now repeated the Vietnam debacle twice. Did we not learn?

We have the rise of inequality, the consequent Occupy movement – I visited Zuccotti park in Lower Manhattan – and a nation where the working class no longer has their interests effectively represented in the federal government. Linking back to my youth, I remember when labor unions were strong and a steelworker’s strike shut things down for half a year. Now, unions are struggling to survive. All of this feels like institutional collapse.

* * * * * 

A conversation with Claude on civilization-level collapse

 My Prompts are set in bold and highlighted in light blue.  

Claude's replies are plainface and unadorned.

Institutional Collapse

I believe there is a relatively recently academic literature on the collapse of civilizations. Would you give me a quick review of it. What are the major hypotheses and debates?

The academic literature on civilizational collapse has flourished over the past few decades, producing several influential theories and ongoing debates. Here's an overview of the major approaches:

Key Scholars and Works

Jared Diamond's Environmental Determinism (Collapse, 2005) Diamond argues that civilizations collapse primarily due to environmental degradation, often following a five-factor framework: environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, trade disruption, and society's responses to problems. His case studies include Easter Island, Maya civilization, and Norse Greenland.

Joseph Tainter's Complexity Theory (The Collapse of Complex Societies, 1988) Tainter proposes that societies become increasingly complex to solve problems, but eventually hit diminishing returns where the cost of complexity exceeds its benefits. Collapse represents a rational response - simplification when complexity becomes too expensive to maintain.

Peter Turchin's Structural-Demographic Theory Turchin uses mathematical models to identify cyclical patterns, focusing on "elite overproduction" - when societies produce more elites than can be supported, leading to internal conflict and institutional breakdown.

Major Hypotheses

1.     Environmental/Resource Depletion: Overexploitation of natural resources leads to ecological collapse (Diamond, Wright's "progress traps")

2.     Complexity Overload: Administrative and social complexity becomes too costly to maintain (Tainter)

3.     Social Fragmentation: Loss of social cohesion, trust, and shared institutions (Putnam, Fukuyama)

4.     Elite Dynamics: Conflict between competing elites when resources become scarce (Turchin, Goldstone)

5.     External Shocks: Climate change, pandemics, invasions, or economic disruption overwhelming adaptive capacity

6.     Institutional Failure: Decay of governance structures and inability to respond effectively to challenges

Key Debates

Monocausal vs. Multicausal Explanations: Critics argue that single-factor theories (like Diamond's environmental focus) oversimplify complex historical processes. Most recent work emphasizes multiple interacting factors.

Gradualism vs. Sudden Collapse: Whether collapse is typically a slow decline or rapid breakdown. Recent work suggests both patterns exist, often depending on system resilience and feedback loops.

Predictability: Whether collapses follow predictable patterns that can be modeled (Turchin's approach) or are fundamentally unpredictable due to complex system dynamics.

Definition of "Collapse": Ongoing debate about what constitutes collapse versus transformation, adaptation, or reorganization.

Recent Developments

• Network Analysis: Studying how trade networks, information flows, and social connections affect resilience
• Climate-Society Interactions: More sophisticated modeling of climate-civilization relationships
• Big Data Approaches: Using large datasets to test theories across multiple cases
• Resilience Theory: Focus shifting from causes of collapse to factors that promote survival and adaptation

Criticisms and Limitations

The field faces several challenges:

• Survivorship Bias: We study failed civilizations while successful adaptations may be less visible
• Definitional Problems: What counts as a "civilization" and what constitutes "collapse"
• Data Limitations: Historical records are often incomplete or biased
• Modern Relevance: Debate over whether lessons from pre-modern societies apply to contemporary global civilization

The literature increasingly emphasizes that collapse and resilience exist on a spectrum, and that understanding both failure and successful adaptation is crucial for addressing contemporary challenges like climate change, technological disruption, and social polarization.

Is the system broken? The Legislative Process (+NATO)

I have a recent post where I stated, without argument, that our current set of institutions, political and otherwise, is so badly broken that we need to come up with new ones. This article is one example of the sort of thing I have in mind: Brendan Buck, Is This Really How We’re Legislating Now? NYTimes, July 4, 2025:

Speaker Mike Johnson once again defied skeptics and found a majority in a high-stakes vote, with the House passing the president’s big policy bill on Thursday along party lines. He and John Thune, the Senate leader, ably made whatever deals and promises were necessary to get the bill through their chambers, and Republicans are celebrating it as a major victory. But the wobbly passage of the fiscal package says more about the frivolity of the game Congress now plays than it does about how well G.O.P. congressional leaders played it.

Few seem happy with the actual product. Republicans and Democrats alike have found plenty to criticize about the substance of the bill: the cost, the cuts, the gimmicks. Just as concerning, though, is the way it came together — and what that says about America’s once admired legislative body.

The process was marred by dynamics that have increasingly undermined Congress’s status as a dominant and deliberative institution: The bill lacked a clear and inspired purpose; it supplanted the expertise of congressional committees for the whims of holdouts and the president; and it relied on the make-or-break reconciliation mechanism that limits the ability to write sound policy.

Congress is no longer in the business of thoughtful legislating. Its role has been reduced to putting political points on the board for the president.

There has been a series of changes in how leadership and legislating in Washington work.

Committees and expertise:

Congress, particularly the House, is a body built around committees, which have jurisdiction over various areas of policy. This is where expertise is supposed to be housed. Historically, members of these committees have jealously defended their policy terrain, and they have been given deference to do their jobs.

However, this critical architecture has been collapsing in recent years. In this instance, Mr. Johnson allowed rank-and-file members to end-run the committees of jurisdiction. After the committee process, the bill was workshopped through a series of hasty negotiations with holdout members such as with the changes to the state and local tax deductions. Medicaid policy, affecting tens of millions of Americans, appears to have been made on the fly. Editors’ Picks Should I Be Worried About Arsenic in Rice? What Makes Someone Cool? A New Study Offers Clues. Can the ‘Princess Treatment’ Go Too Far?

In the Senate, the bill didn’t even go through a full, open committee process, and policy was still being written last weekend as senators began voting to proceed.

With committees relegated, there was no ownership of the product — and certainly little pride in it. [...]

Bad process can lead to bad policy and bad politics.

I don’t mean the all-night voting in the Senate or both chambers passing legislation before official scorekeepers had even provided final cost estimates. Those are just unfortunate realities of legislative politics. There’s another process story that has been building for decades across both parties, as Congress increasingly relies on large legislative vehicles like this. Many of the issues with this package can be traced to the decision to put everything in one big bill. With little interest in policymaking through regular order, or bipartisan compromise, the majority is left to place all its eggs in the basket of the budget reconciliation process.

The wonky rules of the reconciliation process give the majority a narrow crack at avoiding the Senate filibuster — but the process also significantly limits how policy can be written. Generally speaking, everything must be drafted to address matters of spending or revenue. The 1974 Budget Act that created this process was intended to help Congress balance the budget. It’s now being used for issues like artificial intelligence standards and immigration policy.

This is a poor mechanism for addressing the nuances of complex policy. It also functionally means that the biggest policy changes both parties are making are increasingly partisan ones.

That's only one example. 

* * * * *

And then there's this article over at 3 Quarks Daily: Bill Murray, Managers and Clowns, July 4, 2025. I won't attempt to excerpt the whole thing, but the first part is about NATO, and then comes America under Trump:

For a long time the United States held on to one huge advantage: since World War II it presented a template for how the world’s most successful prevailing models of both politics and economics could work in tandem. Now eighty years on, American Democracy just delivers volatility and gridlock, and American Capitalism has come to represent rent-seeking inequality.

•••••

Institutions once held weight and countries addressed each other through them. Now no country has a particular reason to aspire to former goals like transparency; the US doesn’t itself. So countries follow their own self interest and the world fumbles about.

What is NATO but a series of nerve-wracking meetings managed to assuage the erratic Americans? What is the G7 but a string of photo-ops with resort backdrops? What is Davos but grating opulence?

Nobody has confidence in any of it.

There's more at that link.

The current political situation in the USA and the possibilities for radical change [Collapse? Part 1]

Trump’s presidency has been a disaster so far, and there’s no reason to think that it will get any better. But it may get a whole lot worse.

The DOGE rampage through USAID has cost 100s of thousands of lives, many of them children, in countries where USAID had programs. The anti-university tantrum has, at least, weakened the research capacity of the top universities. Cuts at NIH and NSH have done the same. It may be impossible to restart many of those research programs if and when funding is restored – intermediate results will have been lost, researchers will have dispersed. And those are only the most obvious damages.

It’s clear that this would not have happened if Kamala Harris has been elected. Let me be clear, yes, I voted for her, but that was more a vote against Trump and a positive affirmation of her politics. Her politics are the same as Biden’s. It would have been more of the same.

Those assessments are near-term assessments, say, from now to the next presidential election in 2028. It’s not at all clear what will happen in the next decade much less then next quarter of a century or longer. And it would be silly to attempt such assessments of a merely hypothetical Harris victory. We just don’t know.

But I’m going in a different direction. How you evaluate the current situation depends on whether or not you think our current institutions are basically sound, but in need of some repair and maintenance, or whether you think that are fatally flawed. If you think the former, then, yes, Harris would have been better than Trump, much better. A Trump presidency followed by, say, eight years of Vance-and-the-techbros, that might well wreck the nation, turning it into a technologically advanced feudal state.

However, I think the current institutions are fatally flawed and are likely to unravel under pressure from AI, not to mention climate change. So, for me the questions are: 1) what kind of new institutions will we need, and 2) how do we get from here to there? I don’t have clear answers to either, but if that’s way we need to go, then Trump-induced chaos may have an upside.

For one thing, it gets (my kind of) people used to the idea that things are bad, really really unsustainably bad. So people may actually start thinking about alternatives. Moreover, the chaos, ugly and destructive as it is, also creates opportunities (I’m thinking of how that asteroid crashing into the Yucatan made opportunities for mammals 65 million years ago). ICE raids have provoked people to protest. And then we have the No Kings Day protests. Wikipedia:

The No Kings protests, also known internationally as the No Dictators or No Tyrants protests, were a series of demonstrations that took place on June 14, 2025 (labelled as No Kings Day by the participants), largely in the United States, against Donald Trump's policies and actions during his second presidency, including his purported fascist tendencies and associated democratic backsliding in the U.S.[3][4][5] The protests took place on the same day as the U.S. Army 250th Anniversary Parade and Trump's 79th birthday.

Organizers estimated that more than five million people participated in more than 2,100 cities and towns, including the flagship event in Philadelphia.[6][7][8] More protests took place in the U.S. territories of Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the United States Virgin Islands, and in 20 foreign countries, including Canada, Japan, Mexico, and in Europe. In countries with constitutional monarchies such as Canada and the United Kingdom, the alternate "Dictators" or "Tyrants" titles were favored over "Kings" to avoid confusion with anti-monarchic movements; Hawaii did the same to avoid confusion with a King Kamehameha Day parade held on the same day.

Protests themselves do not bring about change. But they get people moving, and perhaps even thinking. They’re something that we can build on.

It’s with that in mind that I had a conversation with Claude in the middle of the night. I started by asking it about the formation of the current regime of nation states: Was it born out of political violence? I ended up talking about local events in Hoboken, where I currently live. My prompts are highlighted in blue. Everything else is Claude’s.

* * * * *

Nation-State

We live in a world where perhaps the single most important political structure, the one that dominates the world, is the nation-state. It’s my impression that conceptually the nation-state is an 18^th century 19^th century idea and that most current nation states originated after that time. For example, the USA was born out of revolution in the last quarter of the 18^th century; the same for France. Britain has been more or less continuous for centuries, but there’s been wars and revolutions. More recently, the 20^th century, nation states have originated in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, through colonialism, often through a revolt. That is to say, the current regime of nation-states is the result of one kind or another of politically motivated violence. Is this more or less so?

Your observation is largely accurate and touches on a fundamental aspect of how the modern international system emerged. The nation-state as we understand it today is indeed primarily an 18th-19th century concept, and violence has played a central role in its development worldwide.

The conceptual development: The modern nation-state combines two ideas that weren't necessarily linked before: the nation (a people sharing culture, language, history) and the state (a sovereign political entity). This fusion was powerfully expressed during the French Revolution and spread through 19th-century romantic nationalism.

Violence in nation-state formation: Your assessment is correct - most contemporary nation-states emerged through some form of politically motivated violence:

·       Revolutionary violence: American Revolution (1776), French Revolution (1789), various European revolutions of 1848

·       Wars of unification: German and Italian unifications through multiple wars

·       Independence wars: Latin American independence movements (1810s-1820s)

·       Anti-colonial struggles: The vast majority of Asian and African states gained independence through armed resistance or the credible threat of it

·       Civil wars: American Civil War consolidated the federal state; many others resolved questions of territorial integrity

Some nuances: While violence was predominant, there were variations:

·       Some transitions involved negotiated independence (though often with implicit threats)

·       Some states evolved more gradually from existing political structures

·       The intensity and duration of violence varied considerably

The deeper pattern: What you're identifying connects to a broader truth: the current international system of sovereign nation-states largely emerged from the breakdown of previous orders (empires, city-states, feudal systems) through violent ruptures. Even "peaceful" transitions often occurred against a backdrop of demonstrated or threatened violence elsewhere.

This has profound implications for how we understand legitimacy, sovereignty, and international law today.

Future & revolution

OK. Now I’m thinking about the future. As I am a citizen of the USA that’s where my concern is centered. I’m thinking that the democratic state is currently fragile. I’m worried about whether or not it can continue. I note that AI is developing rapidly and is going to be widely deployed over the coming decades. It’s hard to see the implications, but I can’t help but think that current institutions are going to be stressed. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that major structural change will probably be necessary. How’s that going to happen? Revolutionary political violence doesn’t seem very plausible to me, the central state (i.e. the federal government) has too much power.

What’s going to happen? I know that there are various secession movements in a number of states; I’m thinking particularly of Vermont, which has a long-standing secession movement. So far these movements haven’t gotten anywhere. But perhaps things will change in the future. On the face of it, I can vaguely imagine secession happening without revolutionary violence.

You're grappling with a fascinating and genuinely uncertain question. The combination of AI disruption and existing institutional fragility could indeed create pressures for structural change that our current political framework might struggle to accommodate.

Why revolutionary violence seems implausible: You're right about federal power - not just military, but surveillance capabilities, economic control, and the sheer complexity of modern infrastructure make 18th-century-style revolution practically impossible. Plus, the geographic and demographic distribution of political divisions doesn't map neatly onto clear territorial boundaries.

AI as a structural disruptor: AI could stress institutions in ways we haven't fully anticipated:

·       Economic displacement creating new forms of inequality and dependence

·       Surveillance capabilities that could either strengthen or delegitimize state power

·       Automation potentially reducing the state's need for broad-based consent

·       New forms of information manipulation affecting democratic deliberation

·       Questions about human agency in an AI-dominated system

Alternative pathways for major change:

1.     "Constitutional Convention" route: Article V allows for constitutional conventions called by state legislatures. This could theoretically enable fundamental restructuring without violence.

2.     Gradual devolution: Federal power could gradually devolve to states through legislative and judicial processes, effectively creating a much more confederate system.

3.     "Velvet divorce" secession: Like Czechoslovakia's peaceful split, though the legal/constitutional hurdles in the US are much higher.

4.     Crisis-driven fragmentation: A major crisis (economic collapse, climate disasters, AI-driven social disruption) could create conditions where central authority simply becomes ineffective and local/regional authorities fill the vacuum.

5.     Technological sovereignty: Regions or states might develop parallel technological and economic systems that gradually reduce dependence on federal structures.

The Vermont example: Vermont's secession movement is interesting because it's rooted in scale arguments - that democratic participation becomes impossible in units too large and distant. AI might actually strengthen such arguments if it further centralizes power and reduces human agency.

What specific pressures from AI development do you see as most likely to stress current institutions?