Be careful now. I'm old enough to have seen how quickly it can be reversed back into dark ages. Big money can silence and oppress even 8 millions, no problem.
The current president (one of only 2) is the son of the first and he isn’t as liberal or as charitable, although his dad did create the country by unifying the region after Great Britain pulled out.
But he isn't too bad, but if he goes away, UAE being an authoritarian dictatorship, it could go both ways.
Inconsistent and unpredictable governance is the death knell of many countries and any organization. That’s why authoritarian governments are never stable long term.
Authoritarian governments counter this issue with hereditary monarchy. The current leader can impart their knowledge and mindset on their next of kin, and having a clear successor removes power struggles and provides predictability. Even if the successor has different views this is often known far in advance, which allows people to take this into consideration.
It's by no means perfect and has lots of opportunities to go wrong, but over the last 1000 years or so hereditary monarchies have a much better track record of stability than democracies.
As it turns out: the problems of monarchies is innate. Hereditary Monarchies lead to a separation into "Noble" vs "Peasant" classes, where Nobles have a genetic line to the throne. The Nobles believe themselves to be superior and start putting themselves into various sections of government, when in actuality many Peasants are actually better than the Nobles.
So when it comes to War (the only time societies can directly compare against each other), the side that has a bigger recruitment pool (ie: Peasant commanders, aka Napoleon's secret sauce), tends to win. This is also true of sciences, research, production, etc. etc. Every part of society, there are likely peasant leaders who are best at the job.
Peasants win not necessarily because Peasants are smarter, but because peasants are at "sometimes" smarter, and this "sometimes" happens in a large enough degree that anyone who cuts off their leadership pool into "Family members of the Monarch only" innately hampers their abilities to lead over time.
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Now colonial rule by far-away foreign powers is clearly a bad situation as well (as Britain's control over its former colonies can likely attest). But that's not "Democracy" either.
Hereditary monarchy may be an improvement over UAE's position (ie: better than foreign colonialism), but lets not get ahead of ourselves. The world gave up on monarchies over a century ago for a good damn reason.
Still, I think it's important to acknowledge that authoritarian governments have seen a lot of refinement over thousands of years, while democracies are historically the exception and only became popular 300 years ago. Expecting authoritarian governments to just implode without external influence seems unfounded.
The UAE is actually pretty predictable.
All in all, I wouldn't call UAE a dictatorship.
Compared to other Muslim countries, it's pretty relaxed. Foreigners can buy alcohol, eat pork, and pre and extra-marital relationships are tolerated among foreigners as long as it's behind closed doors.
Locals of course get favoured for positions of power within companies, but most of them are pretty well educated, so that isn't so bad.
You don't want to piss them off, as you don't know what connections they might have. But that's no different from the elite class in any other country, such as the UK or Italy - it's just there are a higher percentage of them, and it's not hidden away.
Many of the locals feel repressed at home, which is why London is a popular travel destination for them. You see women in burka with their eyes covered get on in Dubai, and by the time they've landed in London, they have changed into jeans and a fashionable top and are showing off their hair. If anything changes, that's probably going to be the catalyst. But most likely the UAE will just become more liberal rather than a big shift in power.
However, the mega-fatal flaw is that it is not reliably sustainable.
Ultimately, every dictatorship becomes malevolent.
Then, the need to protect the malevolent leadership from the subjects forces closed, loyalty-based structures, and plants the seeds of the dictatorship's demise as mistrust and inefficiency rot the structure and the society. Meanwhile, millions rot and die.
It seems the nature of hereditary monarchies helps moderate the despotism, as there is an incentive to maintain the balance for the future of the monarchic family. If they get too despotic, they will get overthrown, and that's the end of the gravy train for not only them but also all their descendants; and they have the ability to train in these constraints from birth. So my conjecture is that this contributes to the longevity of the hereditary monarchies.