Essay by Malloy Owen: “The tension between mass and elite agency is one of the oldest themes in political history and philosophy and a special preoccupation in such authors as Thucydides, Livy, and Machiavelli. Yet the last of these authors hit on something profound when he argued that “the disunion of the plebs and the Roman Senate made that republic free and powerful,” to quote the title of a chapter in his Discourses. In that chapter, Machiavelli, a paragon of elite humanist learning and a notorious admirer of princely virtue, argues that the Roman people’s continual assertion of its “ambition” against the designs of the oligarchic senatorial class was the cause of “good laws” that gave rise to “good education,” which in turn generated the heroic “examples of virtue,” bold and vital acts of refounding and renewal, to which his theory of republics affords such an important role. The very chafing of popular agency against elite agency was a stimulus to excellence for the masses and the oligarchs alike.
The coming AI regime promises to end such productive tumult by ending agency—just as liberal technocracy did, only more thoroughly. Cars will drive themselves, the laws will be administered in an orderly and rational manner, and no one will be asked to exercise responsibility or to undergo the long suffering required to bring a new idea into the world. But this is no way for human beings to live. If we accept Machiavelli’s political anthropology, it is not even a good way for political orders to survive. If you don’t allow the people to “vent their ambition” from time to time, he says, you cannot call on them to help you do something great.
In other words, a threat to mass agency is a threat to elite agency, at least in its noblest, most public-spirited, and most truly ambitious forms. A passive and enervated public will not produce brilliant minds and masterful personalities; a disintegrated political society will offer no scope for the exercise of the virtues.
At this point, it seems beyond doubt that machines will acquire the ability to do most of the work human beings do in the coming years, if not the coming decades. The question that remains open is the political one: What kind of life will we live together when most forms of our labor have been rendered obsolete? Silicon Valley shares the rest of the country’s fear that the rise of the machines will entail the collapse of human possibility. Unlike the rest of us, however, the tech elite stands a chance of escaping the end of generative natality and becoming the last human agents, the masters of the machines. In a moment of universal anxiety, as the walls seem to be closing in on all of us, they are understandably tempted to make this their aim…(More)”.
