Article by Daniel Innerarity and Fabrizio Tassinari: “When Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama recently announced his new cabinet, it was not his choice of finance minister or foreign minister that gained the most attention. The biggest news was Rama’s appointment of an AI-powered bot as the new minister of public procurement.
“Diella” will oversee and allocate all public tenders that the government assigns to private firms. “[It] is the first member of government who is not physically present, but virtually created by artificial intelligence,” Rama declared. She will help make Albania “a country where public procurement is 100% corruption-free.”
At once evocative and provocative, the move reminds us that those who place the greatest hope in technology tend to be among those with the least confidence in human nature. But more to the point, the appointment of Diella is evidence that the supposed cure for whatever ails democracy is increasingly taking the form of digital authoritarianism. Such interventions might appeal to Silicon Valley oligarchs, but democrats everywhere should be alarmed.
The conceptual basis for an AI minister lies in how technophiles imagine humanity’s relationship with the future. “Techno-solutionists” treat political problems that normally require deliberation as if they were engineering challenges that could be resolved purely through technical means. As we saw in the United States during Elon Musk’s brief stint at the helm of DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency), technology is offered as a substitute for politics and political decision-making.
The implication of AI-administered governance is that democracy will become redundant. Digital technocracy consists of technology developers claiming the authority to decide on the rules we must abide by and thus the conditions under which we will live. The checks and balances defended by Locke, Montesquieu, and America’s founders become obstacles to efficient decision-making. Why bother with such institutions when we can leverage the power of digital tools and algorithms? Under digital technocracy, debate is a waste of time, regulation is a brake on progress, and popular sovereignty is merely the consecration of incompetence…(More)”.
