Yesterday, I suggested democracy is a mediocre theatre production where the audience gets to choose which mediocre understudy performs. Some readers thought I was being harsh. I wasn’t.
A mate recently argued that humans will always be superior to AI because of emergence, the miraculous process by which complexity gives rise to intelligence, creativity, and emotion. Lovely sentiment. But here’s the rub: emergence is also how we got this political system, the one no one really controls anymore.
Like the human body being mostly non-human microbes, our so-called participatory government is mostly non-participatory components: lobbyists, donors, bureaucrats, corporate media, careerists, opportunists, the ecosystem that is the actual organism. We built it, but it now has its own metabolism. And thanks to the law of large numbers, multiplied by the sheer number of political, economic, and social dimensions in play, even the human element is diluted into statistical irrelevance. At any rate, what remains of it has lost control – like the sorcerer’s apprentice.
People like to imagine they can “tame” this beast, the way a lucid dreamer thinks they can bend the dream to their will. But you’re still dreaming. The narrative still runs on the dream’s logic, not yours. The best you can do is nudge it; a policy tweak here, a symbolic vote there, before the system digests your effort and excretes more of itself.
a bad system beats a good person every time
W Edwards Deming
This is why Deming’s line hits so hard: a bad system beats a good person every time. Even if you could somehow elect the Platonic ideal of leadership, the organism would absorb them, neutralise them, or spit them out. It’s not personal; it’s structural.
And yet we fear AI “taking over,” as if that would be a radical departure from the status quo. Newsflash: you’ve already been living under an autonomous system for generations. AI would just be a remodel of the control room, new paint, same prison.
So yes, emergence makes humans “special.” It also makes them the architects of their own inescapable political microbiome. Congratulations, you’ve evolved the ability to build a machine that can’t be turned off.
Philosophics 