The recent White House summit on artificial intelligence produced a new voluntary governance “accord” for AI companies, complete with external auditors.
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summit → produce → auditors
More importantly, from my perspective, the summit launched the federal government’s first AI application for public use, America.gov.
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summit → launch → use
Click on it, and you read: “Hello America.
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you → click → it
Whatever you need from government, start here.”
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you → need → government
It’s a wonderful beginning, an amazing moment — and also a decisive turn in the war between technology and hierarchy.
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It → ’ → technology
If we work things right, AI will soon enable us to request and obtain any number of government services directly, with little in the way of human mediation.
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AI → work → mediation
Why does that matter?
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that → matter → ?
Bear with me . . .
The world is ruled by bureaucracy.
That’s true regardless of how the formal government is chosen.
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government → bear → bureaucracy
The United States hold elections for president and Congress, but it’s actually run by a vast army of bureaucrats and regulators who the politicians need to fulfill their ambitions.
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politicians → hold → ambitions
In the same way, the Communist Party holds absolute, unquestioned power in China, but in that country too hordes of bureaucratic mandarins get to decide everything from the interest rate to the pills allowed in a pharmacy.
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hordes → hold → pharmacy
The corruption inherent to this system should be obvious to all but is seldom talked about.
If bureaucrats at an agency are accountable only to an internal chain of command, that agency will be managed to the profit of the chain of command and its friends and allies.
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agency → talk → command
You may say you are procuring military equipment or funding infrastructure, but in reality you’re building a clientele and a nest egg for yourself.
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you → say → yourself
Control over the bureaucracy, therefore, is a far more effective means to power and wealth than merely winning an election.
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Control → win → election
Donald Trump’s first term was largely neutered because of his failure to understand this simple political equation.
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term → neuter → equation
Trump will never win over the bureaucrats, so he must terrify them into submission.
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he → win → submission
Because a powerful and unaccountable hierarchy can’t be squared with the principles of democracy, bureaucrats tend to justify themselves by claiming superior knowledge and technical expertise.
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bureaucrats → square → knowledge
The modern world, they tell us, is too complex for amateurs.
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they → tell → amateurs
We wouldn’t want Joe Sixpack to fly us to Los Angeles — or to manage the details of a treaty with China.
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Sixpack → want → China
As Walter Lippmann maintained, any democracy that depended on the “omnicompetent citizen” would be doomed, because no such person existed.
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person → maintain → citizen
The average citizen, wrote Lippmann, was incompetent and distracted, and should be firmly nudged out of the way to let “specially trained” people take care of business.
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people → write → business
Beyond the fact that most bureaucrats adhere to routine as mindlessly as trained seals, this argument on behalf of the rule of experts is a tangle of fallacies and false assumptions.
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argument → adhere → fallacies
Let me touch on two of them.
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me → let → them
One — contemporary crises are so massively random, so interconnected with a huge range of factors, that no one could possibly be “specially trained” for them.
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one → train → them
Dealing with these crises is nothing like piloting a plane.
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Dealing → deal → plane
It’s more like stumbling at speed through a house of mirrors, where the worst damage will be suffered by those who believe that they know where they are going.
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they → ’ → those
I’ll just note the farcical performance of our health bureaucracy during the COVID pandemic and let it go at that.
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it → note → that
Two — if it’s true that bureaucracies are in business for themselves, the only crises they will perceive are those that affect their clientele.
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that → ’ → clientele
For the bureaucrat, on the other hand, it’s an opportunity to get more funding and acquire a new class of dependents.
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it → ’ → dependents
Bureaucracies hide behind the pretense of immutability, but if we look to history we’ll find occasions in which they were substantially transformed.
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they → hide → which
The French Revolution’s most permanent achievement, Alexis de Tocqueville observed, had nothing to do with liberty or equality — it was the establishment of a republican administrative state that outlasted the return of the monarchy, the rise of Napoleon and empire, and five iterations of parliamentary democracy.
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that → observe → democracy
The revolutionary fire thus endured in the cold hearts of French functionaries.
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fire → endure → functionaries
Political revolutions have gone out of style, and we should be thankful for that — more people died in France during the one year of the Terror than in the four centuries of the Spanish Inquisition.
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people → go → Inquisition
But today we confront a revolution of a far more thorough-going kind, driven by digital and AI technologies.
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we → confront → technologies
The web connects us all.
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web → connect → us
AI connects all human knowledge.
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AI → connect → knowledge
The combination is explosive and threatens to blow away the old hierarchies that benefited from parochialism and information monopolies.
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that → threaten → parochialism
The laptop class — the experts and the bureaucrats — can see the edge of the abyss from where they stand, and are in a panic.
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they → see → panic
They hate the untamed internet and have tried to domesticate it through censorship and the criminalization of speech.
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They → hate → speech
The elites who run Europe, for example, having failed to understand the new dispensation since days of web 1.0, now aim their declining energies at attempts to control the information sphere through the brute force of the state.
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who → run → state
Individual rights are sacrificed without qualms — Great Britain, birthplace of the Bill of Rights, has more citizens arrested for online crimes than any country on earth.
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Britain → sacrifice → earth
…and 22 more, not listed.
The Aporia
