Road Not Taken： Why Artificial Intelligence Will Not Re-define Politics

Artificial intelligence is not the only or main force thrown upon politics by current scientific revolution. No man in social sense is not, or more than AI, and rulers in the past has long been mastering the more versatile and volatile Slave Intelligence. As a political community with enough surplus product can easily withstand malgovernance, without necessity or outcry for “Optimal Rule”, artificial intelligence will unlikely outgun or outvote human rulers. Among international competition barbarized by prospect of perpetual world domination through new technology, natural sciences and politics will no longer know ethics. People of nation states, if too little to rule themselves, will ask for a quasi-omnipotent protector, against artificial intelligence and foreign conquerors, at the price of total submission. This protector will be awarded with those very technology for a general artificial intelligence, to become a superhuman utterly integrated with machines, sooner, surer, and quicker than general artificial intelligence, or any other system of production and distribution past or foreign. Yet this will not make it any less human, as such integration is never absent or rare in human history. Through conquest, this superhuman ruler, itself a creation facilitated by international politics, may end international politics altogether, along with nation states. A superhuman ruler born of international politics, technology, and fear, is thus more likely the outcome of current scientific revolution, than scenarios of AI takeover/cataclysm/enthronement. Yet though thinkers of the past has already many foreshadows for such an outcome, actual future is still decided by actions of generations to come.