Derek Thompson

One train is the extraordinary concentration of power in the executive branch that we've seen surely under the Trump administration, no elaboration necessary, but that we've also seen in the last few administrations, the growth of executive orders.

The book, The Imperial Presidency, was written by Arthur Schlesinger.

60 years ago.

So the idea that the executive branch is growing in its power and that the legislative branch, Congress, is becoming more and more of a sort of shriveled, do-nothing rump of American democracy, that's something that has certainly been accentuated by the last 14 months, but is a theme that preexisted Trump's election.

That's the first train that's coming toward us, the extraordinary monarchical power of the executive branch that's emerging.

Trend number two is that artificial intelligence is simply going to be able to give to certain executive authorities powers that they've never had before.

One of the big worries that the Biden administration folks have of AI being sold into China is that China would build a surveillance state that would make 1984 look like kindergarten.

They would be able to use all the technologies that exist on the bodies of

of Chinese people and along the streets of China in order to surveil people such that they create a kind of 21st century panopticon that eliminates any sense of personal or private freedoms.

It's not crazy to think that an incredibly powerful artificial intelligence could do the same in the US in a way that would allow an executive branch of the future

to use all sorts of private data to eliminate freedoms that we somewhat come to expect.

That, for example, if you want

to use my computer and search data in order to make some kind of case against me if you're an administration and I'm a critic.

It's a little bit labor intensive to ask a bunch of different people at NSA or some other agency to track down all this information and put it together into some kind of cache that builds this case against me.

But what if you have a team of AI agents

that can pull together extraordinarily personal information about Americans, the drop of a hat.

Well, now what you've essentially done is transformed the microeconomics of government surveillance.

And so if you think about these two trains coming down the track, the rise of monarchical powers in the executive branch and the incredible falling price of mass surveillance and the things that autonomous AI agents could do with it,

That's a frightening picture.

And so that's part of, I think, what he's worried about when it comes to what does American democracy really look like if we have this super empowered executive branch that's also making use of a technology that's more facile in getting into our lives and combing across data than anything we've had before.