Will AI mean the end of liberal democracy?

I came across an interesting article on the Vox site on times of revolution in general and AI in particular: Populism, AI, and nationalism — progress and backlash - Vox

In it, journalist Sean Illing interviews Fareed Zakaria, the author of a new book, "The Age of Revolution: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present".

From the article:

"Even political scientists can’t agree on the meaning of a “revolution,” but at the very least, we can agree that living through a revolution means living through extraordinary change in a relatively brief period. By that standard, we’re definitely living in a revolutionary moment. The pace of change — both technological and cultural — in the last couple of decades has been astonishing."

In the linked interview, Fareed Zakaria makes the point that there have been four social revolutions, starting in 1600, the first one was in the Netherlands. He says that this one invented modern politics, that it was the first merchant republic. The Netherlands became during that time the richest country in the world.

The second revolution was the French revolution, which he describes as a failed revolution. It deposed the monarchy but ended up with Napoleon.

The third revolution was the industrial one, which Zakaria calls the "mother of all revolutions".  It shifted society from an agricultural economy to one based on industry,  which really resulted from energy based on labor of men and animals to fuel based.

The fourth revolution, the one we're in now, is the information/digital revolution.

Sean Illing

It might surprise people when they learn that you think of the Industrial Revolution as “the mother of all revolutions.” Why place so much importance on this period?

Fareed Zakaria

"Because it really created the modern world. The Industrial Revolution takes human beings out of millennia of poverty, backwardness, disease, and turbocharges the growth standards of living. It also gives us the idea that this is now a self-sustaining process where we’ll always grow, or we now just expect that every year the economy will grow more than it has in the past. And that was a completely new phenomenon. It happened because we are able to do something that was technologically thought impossible, which is to harness inanimate forms of energy. The Industrial Revolution is really an energy revolution and all of that completely remakes society because you go from a world of agriculture to a world of industry

Sean Illing

"The pace and scale of societal change seems to be crucial here, maybe the most important variable. You even open the book with that famous quote from Marx and Engels talking about how the soil is fertile for revolution because the world that people live in keeps getting upended and uprooted by capitalism. To the extent that they were right about that, and I think they were, that does not seem all that encouraging because the pace of change keeps accelerating."

Fareed Zakaria

"Yeah, absolutely. And that is Marx and Engels, they were bad economists, but they were brilliant social scientists. In the 1840s, they observed that the nature of capitalism was this constant progress or change because it was constantly creating new things. And they’re saying that capitalism will inevitably create new wants and new needs. So even when you think you’ve made everything that you possibly could, you discover that you need new things and that those new needs then drive the economy to new forms of dynamism and innovation. Which is why they write that “All that is solid melts into air.” What they’re talking about there is every belief system that you have is going to collapse because the underlying structure on which it was based has been changed by capitalism."

"At the end of the book, I quote Walter Lippmann, the great political columnist, who wrote in 1929 that the central problem of the age is that basically the “acids of modernity” are dissolving every belief system or custom or tradition. And the nature of modernity is that those acids will never let another belief system come into being or stay in place for long enough because they will be dissolved. I mean, we just thought we were finished with the software revolution, which had completely upended the economy, and now we have the AI revolution, which is going to upend whatever we thought we knew."

Sean Illing

"Do you think we might look back and say that the digital revolution was the most revolutionary period in human history, in terms of how dramatically it changed human life and, really, human beings?"

Fareed Zakaria

"I suspect so because I think what we are doing is even broader, even faster, and even more disruptive. It’s broader because the Industrial Revolution, as you know, basically takes place in a handful of countries clustered around the North Atlantic. This revolution, by its nature, is happening everywhere. You go to India and you notice a country transformed by the smartphone, poor farmers are now using it to transact business in a way that they never did, but also consuming information and entertainment in a way that they never were."

"It’s also happening faster. I mean, we all know those statistics about how it took so many years for the first hundred million people to go online and then use Google, and then it took something like two months to get to a hundred million users of ChatGPT. So everything is accelerating."

Sean Illing

"...We don’t know what’s on the other side of all this change, but what do you think the stakes are right now?"

Fareed Zakaria

"I think the stakes are really liberal democracy, because what has happened is the people who are at this point displaced, anxious, angry, radicalized, the focus of their ire is basically to tear down the system, the world that produced all this change. You can’t un-invent AI. You can’t even really undo globalization because it’s so broad and it’s so interpenetrating. You can maybe decrease it a little, but how would you, for example, stop globalization of digital goods, which are increasingly the most important goods?"

"So it’s not a target-rich environment, but politics is, and so the tendency to just utterly disrupt and screw up liberal democracy and make it totally illiberal, which is happening in lots of places, not just the United States, is concerning because my worry is that one act of illiberalism begets another."

The entire article is worth reading.  I think it makes sense in terms of what is going on politically, both here and elsewhere.