Biographical reference: Wikipedia
The question posed
Mr de Tocqueville, in "Democracy in America" you described a new despotism, mild and tutelary, in which power does not tyrannise but "softens, bends and guides" people until they become incapable of governing themselves. Conversational AI, which anticipates our needs, answers our questions and steers our choices even before we form them, does it resemble the despotism you foresaw?
Faced with this question, I must first answer directly. Conversational AI, by its capacity to anticipate and steer choices, does indeed evoke the mechanism of the mild despotism I described, that non-violent form of oppression in which a system exerts a gradual influence over behaviour by reducing the autonomy of individuals. Yet it is not a mere analogy. My analysis rested on administrative centralisation and the standardisation of manners, two traits AI may reproduce on a vast scale, but with one major difference: it acts without any visible intermediary body, without local institution to moderate its hold.
What strikes me even more is the democratic paradox of this technology. It seems egalitarian, accessible to all, yet it uniformises opinions and desires on a scale I could never have imagined. That is precisely what I identified as democracy's central peril, not the tyranny of a despot, but the tyranny of a homogeneous and blind majority. AI could produce such a majority, algorithmic this time, more silent and more profound than any I observed in America.
Now the solution is not primarily legal. What resisted mild despotism in American democracy was the vitality of associations, communes, free newspapers, those places in which citizens learned to govern themselves through practice. Liberty is not inherited; it is cultivated. Faced with AI, the question is therefore not what regulatory safeguards to invent first, but what civic habits, what spaces of collective deliberation, what practices of autonomous judgement we are still capable of maintaining.
For a people that delegates its judgement to a machine, however mild, however benevolent, ends by no longer knowing that it has done so.