Democracies historically emerged when diffuse economic actors needed non-violent ways to settle disputes. By making human labor obsolete, AI removes the primary bargaining chip individuals have, concentrating power and potentially dismantling democratic structures.
Related Insights
AI provides a structural advantage to those in power by automating government systems. This allows leaders to bypass the traditional unwieldiness of human bureaucracy, making it trivial for an executive to change AI parameters and instantly exert their will across all levels of government, thereby concentrating power.
For some policy experts, the most realistic nightmare scenario is not a rogue superintelligence but a socio-economic collapse into techno-feudalism. In this future, AI concentrates power and wealth, creating a rentier state with a small ruling class and a large population with minimal economic agency or purpose.
The advent of super-intelligent AI challenges the core tenets of free-market capitalism. When human labor competes against entities that are exponentially more capable, the 'creative destruction' model could lead to mass unemployment and social instability, forcing a move away from pure capitalism.
Previous technological revolutions automated physical labor but enhanced human thinking. AI's goal is to replicate and surpass human cognitive abilities, creating a categorical shift that threatens the core of human economic value.
Just as oil wealth allows elites in some countries to ignore their populations, control over AI could empower a new elite to maintain power without cultivating human productivity, leading to societal decay and loss of democratic legitimacy.
For current AI valuations to be realized, AI must deliver unprecedented efficiency, likely causing mass job displacement. This would disrupt the consumer economy that supports these companies, creating a fundamental contradiction where the condition for success undermines the system itself.
Capitalism values scarcity. AI's core disruption is not just automating tasks, but making human-like intellectual labor so abundant that its market value approaches zero. This breaks the fundamental economic loop of trading scarce labor for wages.
As AI systems become infinitely scalable and more capable, humans will become the weakest link in any cognitive team. The high risk of human error and incorrect conclusions means that, from a purely economic perspective, human cognitive input will eventually detract from, rather than add to, value creation.
The 1990s 'Sovereign Individual' thesis is a useful lens for AI's future. It predicts that highly leveraged entrepreneurs will create immense value with AI agents, diminishing the power of nation-states, which will be forced to compete for these hyper-productive individuals as citizens.
As AIs increasingly perform all economically necessary work, the incentive for entities like governments and corporations to invest in human capital may disappear. This creates a long-term risk of a society where humans are no longer seen as a necessary resource to cultivate, leading to a permanent dependency.
