AIArtificial Intelligence Is a Totalitarian’s Dream – Here’s How to Take Power Back
Individualistic Western societies are built on the idea that no one knows our thoughts, desires or joys better than we do. And so we put ourselves, rather than the government, in charge of our lives. We tend to agree with the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s claim that no one has the right to force their idea of the good life on us. Artificial intelligence (AI) will change this.
Individualistic Western societies are built on the idea that no one knows our thoughts, desires or joys better than we do. And so we put ourselves, rather than the government, in charge of our lives. We tend to agree with the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s claim that no one has the right to force their idea of the good life on us.
Artificial intelligence (AI) will change this. It will know us better than we know ourselves. A government armed with AI could claim to know what its people truly want and what will really make them happy. At best it will use this to justify paternalism, at worst, totalitarianism.
Every hell starts with a promise of heaven. AI-led totalitarianism will be no different. Freedom will become obedience to the state. Only the irrational, spiteful, or subversive could wish to chose their own path.
To prevent such a dystopia, we must not allow others to know more about ourselves than we do. We cannot allow a self-knowledge gap.
The All-Seeing AI
In 2019, the billionaire investor Peter Thiel claimed that AI was “literally communist”. He pointed out that AI allows a centralizing power to monitor citizens and know more about them than they know about themselves. China, Thiel noted, has eagerly embraced AI.
We already know AI’s potential to support totalitarianism by providing an Orwellian system of surveillance and control. But AI also gives totalitarians a philosophical weapon. As long as we knew ourselves better than the government did, liberalism could keep aspiring totalitarians at bay.
But AI has changed the game. Big tech companies collect vast amounts of data on our behavior. Machine-learning algorithms use this data to calculate not just what we will do, but who we are.
Today, AI can predict what films we will like, what news we will want to read, and who we will want to friend on Facebook. It can predict whether couples will stay together and if we will attempt suicide. From our Facebook likes, AI can predict our religious and political views, personality, intelligence, drug use and happiness.
The accuracy of AI’s predictions will only improve. In the not-too-distant future, as the writer Yuval Noah Harari has suggested, AI may tell us who we are before we ourselves know.
These developments have seismic political implications. If governments can know us better than we can, a new justification opens up for intervening in our lives. They will tyrannize us in the name of our own good.
