Welcome to another Q&A., and this month we’re talking about benevolent dictators and digitally simulated Charlie Kirks.
Full disclosure: that headline was the subject line of an email sent to me by Martin Rollo, the reader asking our second question today, but I thought it was too good to languish in obscurity in my inbox so there it is. Thank you, Martin.
Remember: if you have any questions for next month’s Q&A, pop them into the comments below, or send them to me at tomeaton@substack.com.
Years ago my then English teacher, Willem van der Walt, posited that the best form of government was a benign autocracy. Putting aside the seeming contradiction in the term, is such a government even remotely possible? And could it be a way forward in today’s chaotic world? – Norman Davies
It doesn’t entirely surprise me that your Mr Van Der Walt said this: good teachers are, after all, the supreme leader of a small, benign autocracy in Room 7B next to the tuckshop, broadcasting an unchallengeable but ultimately uplifting dogma even if Davies in the back row keeps nodding off.
But of course Mr Van Der Walt is not alone: I’ve also sometimes yearned for some humane, infallible figure to step in and sort out the world’s problems, and I’m sure that there are many who feel the same. In a recent column I speculate about whether democracy is still as popular as we’re told, but I suspect that even ardent democrats sometimes allow their thoughts to wander towards happy autocracy.
The devil, however, is in the details, or, in this case, in the foibles of human nature, illustrated by two leaders thousands of years apart.
In 2019 Barack Obama told a management summit that one of the reasons being president is so hard is that you are where the wicked problems end up.
‘By definition,’ said Obama ‘if it was an easily solvable problem, or even a modestly difficult but solvable problem, it would not reach me, because, by definition, somebody else would have solved it. So the only decisions that came were the ones that were horrible and that didn’t have a good solution. They said, “Let’s send this to Obama, I don’t know what to do.”’
He was having a good-natured moan about the stress of the job, but it’s also a reminder that a great many problems are ‘horrible’ in that whatever choice a leader makes people are going to be upset – or possibly harmed – by it.
The Old Testament would have us believe that Solomon demonstrated supreme wisdom when he threatened to cut a disputed baby in half, but of course you could argue that that baby was low-hanging fruit and that Solomon demonstrated nothing but fairly solid emotional blackmail, relying entirely on the child’s real mother not being a psychopath.
What the chroniclers didn’t record, however, was how he handled the next supplicant, and the next, and the next: the farmers fighting over stock theft or disputed wells; the merchants arguing over whether a contract had been broken; the factions of priests each claiming that their sect was being persecuted by the other.
If they had chronicled those visits to the throne room, however, I think we would have seen Solomon solve them not with showy even-handedness but with old world, zero-sum firmness, ruling that one party was a winner and other a loser, and that, if the loser felt like complaining about it, they needed to think very carefully about how much they wanted their head to remain connected to their body.
In other words, human nature being what it is, even the most benevolent dictator must inevitably leave one party feeling aggrieved.
We know that those grievances can fester in even the wealthiest and most stable democracies, but I can imagine that in an autocracy, even a benign one, being on the losing side of close decisions must feel much, much worse since the loser has none of the recourse available in a democracy.
You can’t appeal, or appeal the decision of the appeal, or, as a last resort, vote against the monarch who ruled against you. All you can do is suck it up.
And if enough people are sitting on legitimate, festering resentments, you have a society in which even most benevolent autocrat might need to start getting a bit less benevolent, at least towards those malcontents and agitators who are threatening the peace and stability of the state…
The next question stems from a post on my Facebook page, but you don’t need to descend into that particular drain to understand the query below.
I have just read some of the comments under your Facebook post about Ernst Roets' tweet. The comments from one person – with whom you had a chat – sounded to me like he'd used AI to write them. That leads me to my question.
Is this the quintessence of irony – when an AI 'humanizer' takes text written entirely by a human, which an AI detector has flagged as mostly AI-generated, and 'converts it into a more human-like version' to remove all hint of AI input? (Not only humanizes it but makes it more 'humane' - what one might call reader-friendly, I guess.)
And how much longer can we bear to stay online in a world where people ostensibly conversing with one another could simply be functioning as channels for two chatbots to have a conversation with one another? – Martin Rollo
Before I try to answer these faintly nightmarish questions I need to admit that I’m not yet rational on the topic of AI. I’m still too incensed by the injustice of it all; this vast theft of all human endeavour, so much of it produced through passion and love and introspection and contemplation of the sublime or the mysterious; our humanity freeze-dried, vacuum-packed, stripped of authorship and then leased back to so that billionaires can have yet more billions they won’t be able to spend in their lifetimes.
When somebody warned me a few months ago that I might be arguing with an AI-powered bot on Facebook, my response was therefore not to interrogate the whole phenomenon but rather just to think Well of course that’s happening, because why wouldn’t these emotionally and spiritually broken manboys spend all that time, money and water identifying and then eagerly plotting the absolute worst path for humanity to take?
(I must also admit that I’d forgotten about that warning until your question, perhaps because AI-produced arguments on Facebook are brain-balm after some of the ‘YOUR A LIBTARD BETA CUCK’ stuff I sometimes get.)
So yes: the irony is immense but I can see it only through a red mist.
As for how long we stay online as the targets of this growing and supremely cynical bot infestation will, I think, depend on the extent to which each of us has revealed ourself to be psychologically vulnerable to the dark arts of the new AI overlords.
I think Twitter/X already provides a blueprint.
After a very brief honeymoon period, in which people shared their thoughts or reactions in good faith, Twitter became a famously stupid, shouty, performative place. Still, many users shrugged off the chaos (and the nastier elements creeping in) because it still offered them something.
After the Musk takeover, however, with its injection of unapologetic toxicity, the function of X as a form of psychometric test became much clearer. Those who were vulnerable to right-wing talking points, or who were inexorably drawn to a certain brand of victimhood, or who thought that aggressive opinions are the same as facts reported by experts, all clustered to it like bees in a hive. Those who still privilege expertise and reason over the feverish obsessions of the Medieval town square drifted away.
I suspect the same thing will happen as both bot-aided human interaction and bot-on-bot sludge grows more prevalent. The latter, especially, will almost certainly appeal to the same groups that now dominate X, probably rolling out tens of millions of bot allies that offer users endless validation for their opinions, while at the same time also creating thousands of simulated liberal strawmen to fight and, importantly, defeat.
For example, I can easily imagine a very near future in which hundreds of millions of people spend many hours a day following endless ‘debates’ between a digital Charlie Kirk-type ‘public intellectual’ and a series of equally non-existent blue-haired trans activists (or whatever the most triggering cliché is at the time) who keep breaking down in tears as the right-wing bot lands zinger after zinger for an avalanche of clicks and likes and shares.
Needless to say, not all of us will want to spend time in those particular hellscapes, and if they become the norm I think many will drift away, perhaps going offline entirely, if for no other reason that the whole thing has, in the words of the children, given them the ick.
This whole move to "Agentic AI" keeps reminding me of that famous line from the play Axël:
"Vivre? les serviteurs feront cela pour nous"
("Living? Our servants will do that for us").
"so much if"
Although I like your borrowed mail subject very much, you could've also used your own mistake, from question 2, paragraph 1.
Hi Tom.