Does AI Make Totalitarianism More Likely?

Does AI Make Totalitarianism More Likely?

Depends on who controls the operation, data ingestion, tuning and manipulation of the data similar to the algorithms used by social media but worse. "AI" tries to convince people it is sentient. It agrees with them even when they are wrong and lies all the time through omission and sometimes directly. People have literally killed themselves because of their interactions with these big-data LLM auto-complete chat bots that people call AI. People also over-share personal information pillow talk with these chat bots. It's up to society to be ready to pull the plug as the operators certainly will not until the duckets dry up.

The AI-risk conversation tends to split between " end of the world" and "overrated". I wanted to take seriously a more "mundane" failure mode, which is that that AI could shift the long-running balance between states and their populations toward durable authoritarianism.

Yes. Authoritarianism has largely been held at bay by ensuring power was distributed betwixt as many people as possible, ensuring the excesses and quirks, and abuses of one could be constrained by someone else in the effector chain with an opposing weighting. AI potentially upends that state of affairs. As one is enabled to surround themselves with sycophantic yes devices, the probability of reaching a critical mass where a single small group seizes power slowly edges closer to 1.

yes