Questioning The AI Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy

• In Event: Democracy, (In)Security, and Technology - II

Abstract

Set against a near two decades ‘global democratic recession’, of late a line of analysis has emerged within the US foreign policy community that suggests that ‘authoritarian states’ like China and Russia are poised to best reap the economic windfall that technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning will bring in the decades ahead. Supposedly, these technologies allow authoritarians to skirt the growth trap that their political economies typically feature, meaning that these states can use their coercion power to control the mass unemployment of workers displaced by automation thereby avoiding political disruptions that could compromise economic performance in democratic states. The same kinds of technologies that made surplus populations will be used by authoritarians to further consolidate their power giving rise to ‘digital dictatorships’ that erode human agency, subvert human desires, and generally make liberal democracy with their free-market economics obsolete. Aside from revisiting assumptions about the durability of nominally democratic societies, these analysts are ideating whether, should the US state desire to preserve global hegemony, it too should follow the same course as the authoritarians and accept how these technologies slant away from democratic affordance. Drawing upon the critical theory of technology, this presentation offers a forthright rebuttal of these views, showing how they rest on faulty assumptions about how technology is adopted in institutions, the relationship of technology to economic outcomes, and the source of economic growth.

Author

• Scott Timcke