Artificial Intelligence, Authoritarianism and the Future of Political Systems

In February 2017 Scientific American featured a special issue, which revolved around the question: ‘will democracy survive big data and artificial intelligence.’ According to the issue, humanity is undergoing a profound technological transformation, and the advent of large-scale social and behavioural automation would change how human societies will be organized and managed. Later in August 2017, Vyacheslav Polonski, a researcher at Oxford University asserted in a World Economic Forum article, that artificial intelligence ‘silently took over democracy,’ citing the impact of A.I.-powered digital advertisements, social media platform power and mass communication spoilers (bots and trolls) on political processes. Societies online and offline, mostly against their will and awareness, are increasingly experiencing the effects of large-scale automation. Political systems, elections, decision-making, and citizenship too, are increasingly being driven by aspects or by-products of automation and algorithmic systems at different systemic levels. These systems range from targeted political advertisements to facial recognition, from automated interactions that intensify polarization to Internet-based mass-participation opinion polls that can easily be skewed by factors of automation.