Global Oligarchy

 Josh Marshall has been running a series of posts on what he's calling the global oligarchy or the Authoritarian International. Here and here. 

Normally, I would dismiss this as somewhat conspiratorial, but at the same time, I do think he's on to something. He ties it, interestingly, to the various petrostates of the Middle East rather than Russia, though Russia is also emblematic of its politics. Basically, the new Axis of Evil is the oil states of the Gulf, Silicon Valley anti-democrats and hedge fund billionaires. 

The basic thread holding them together is the desire to escape democratic accountability, which is at the heart of democracy: the powerful must answer to the people. 

There have been a host of articles this week about the coming apocalypse in white collar jobs from AI. Some of these are coming from people working in AI who are seeing how efficient and fast it is becoming, especially at coding. There is a school of thought that this is all hype to elevate their stock price, but if it's even a little true, I think we need to see AI as part of this Authoritarian International (yes, also AI). The purpose of AI might be to change the world, but the practical impact will be to divorce knowledge skills from scarcity and therefore disempower the broad swath of middle and upper middle class workers. 

If you own a company, why not employ an AI bot rather than three humans? Why not maximize your profits this way? Why answer to the bothersome people that work for you, when you can have a compliant digital workforce? 

Democracies will, at some point, have to address AI and its potential deprivation of livelihoods among important constituencies. If you can destroy democracy, you can prevent that from happening.