JUST AS time destroyed Feudalism and Archaic societies, it will destroy ours too. The Nation-State will die, because the technology and economics of the future will no longer be sufficient to support it.
Consider for a moment how Artificial Intelligence (AI) will affect governance and policy. Consider how it will influence or interact with their own governments or how their assumptions about how society will be structured will change when we have become increasingly dependent on AI.
Consider the possibility that an AI will be more reliable than a body of experts or a group of politicians or partisans, and that some people will choose the former to rule over them.
But it won’t end with AI. Other transformative technologies that will emerge may further erode the foundational assumptions of the Nation-State.
Can the Nation-State deal with increasingly more sophisticated forms of cyberwarfare?
Or what about the increasingly destabilizing effects of AI-era internet, which no longer needs human participation?
How do we cope if the global economy will become increasingly automated? Does the old model have an answer?
I don’t know, but I lean on “not likely.” Politics exist on top of a deeper, larger layer of wealth, energy, demographics, resources and organized violence. Change those layers, and you change politics, and AI is doing exactly that.
As we speak, Artificial Intelligence is the source of a lot of geopolitical and ideological friction. That is not likely to slow down to the point that society will be forced to restructure itself.
The only way to avoid all this is to be left behind as the world pushes into the future, and I doubt most Filipinos would want that./PN
