Salvo Issue #67 is now out. It includes many good articles, including an article from Peter Biles, “God’s Good Stuff: A Guide to Overcoming Gnosticism & Living the New Creation,” which reviews the book I published with Ancient Faith earlier this year.
My feature article for this issue continues the ongoing exploration of AI, but this time I have delved into a new aspect, namely the political implications. In the article, I explore how politicians, programmers, lobbyists, think tanks, and various NGOs, are increasingly looking to AI to usher us into a utopia of wealth and happiness. The basic idea is that by handing policy over to bots, we can take the messiness out of decision making, turn politics into an exact science, and thus usher in an age of utopia. But these dreams of heaven on earth come with a price tag, and its cost is a resuscitation of the 20th century technocracy movement, which demands that our political systems be handed over to machines and their handlers.
From my article:
In our current crisis of authority, in which there has been a breakdown in the type of trust required for political legitimacy, it is tempting to look to data science and mechanized decision-making as an attractive alternative…
But whether it comes from the direct rule of politicians or the de facto rulership of corporate elites working in tandem with them, machine-driven governance threatens to undermine the type of legitimacy on which authority depends. Indeed, far from being a solution to the current problems, bot governance will almost certainly perpetuate the crisis of legitimacy by making the rationale behind policy inscrutable.
Read the entire piece at the link below. For the next week it is being made available for non-subscribers to read for free.
“Technotopian Bargain: How Bot-Driven Governance Threatens to Undermine Democracy“