AIs true revolution: Breaking the elite bureaucrats that rule our lives
The recent White House summit on artificial intelligence produced a new voluntary governance “accord” for AI companies, complete with external auditors.More importantly, from my perspective, the summit launched the federal government’s first AI application for public use, America.gov.Click on it, and you read: “Hello America.Whatever you need from government, start here.”It’s a wonderful beginning, an amazing moment — and also a decisive turn in the war between technology and hierarchy.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.Why does that matter?Bear with me .
..The world is ruled by bureaucracy.That’s true regardless of how the formal government is chosen.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.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.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.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.Control over the bureaucracy, therefore, is a far more effective means to power and wealth than merely winning an election.Donald Trump’s first term was largely neutered because of his failure to understand this simple political equation.His second-term decimation of a relentlessly hostile federal workforce is a rational move under the circumstances.
Trump will never win over t...