I think that's what GP meant when they wrote that "we could end up in a super-stable oppressive regime". Because the oppressive regimes so far weren't oppressive for long.
Oh, also switching dynasties frequently resulted in the entire previous royal family being summarily executed.
For a brief(?) summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynasties_in_Chinese_history
Burning of books and burying of scholars, Qin dynasty, 213 BCE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_books_and_burying_o...
Xianyang Palace Archives
Rome continued to rule the world for a ~15 centuries. There is still a sizable chunk of the global population that obeys Rome, even though they are not ruled by anything like the Roman Empire.
Realising that the military empire wasn't going to work any more, and changing Rome's historically laisse-faire attitude to religion into an effective method of rule... that's genius at work.
The AIs might not need to take over, we might actively hand ourselves over to them.
The Roman Republic learned from Athens’ democracy. Even late Republicans like Sulla and Cicero and Caesar recognised the Republic’s overuse of checks and balances, as well as its lack of a state army. Caesar almost uniquely recognised Rome’s broken voting system. Unfortunately, they were too late.
America’s founders were not. The lessons of the Republic gave us our strong executive and state-funded armed forces. Our Constitutional amendment process is sclerotic, but there is nothing to suggest our Republic is inherently flawed in the way Athens or Rome were.
Analyses abound about [what's wrong with American democracy](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Essay:Problems_with_the_curren...). The nail in the coffin though, will be the first part of your sentence. The American Constitution is notoriously hard to amend, which means that it is just too easy to maintain as it is by those who benefit from the status quo. We can already see this by how the will of the majority is routinely ignored through unequal representation. My opinion is that this is not sustainable and will have to be resolved through unlawful means, exactly because of the unflexibility of the law.
Byzantium (and the rest of the Eastern Roman Empire) disagrees [0]. They lasted until 1453 - incidentally only 50 years before Columbus sailed.
I guess, really, I meant to imply some sort of a modern interpretation of democracy, wherein a single city (or military) voting for the entire empire wouldn't exactly cut it.
Sidenote: incidentally not coincidentally. The closure of the Silk Road and other important East-West land routes as a result of the Ottoman conquest was one of the important spurs that kicked off the Age of Discovery, as everyone scrambled to find new routes.
Look at some cities in Europe. Many have waxed and waned, some even many times. They have been parts of different countries and empires. Many have influenced the world greatly for the better.
And they were overrun by the Sea Peoples, who set up their own dynasty. Overrun by Kush, who set up their own dynasty. Overrun by Persia, who set up their own dynasty. Overrun by Macedonia. Overrun by Rome. Each of those was an end of an established government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_Sejm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Partition_of_Poland