Over the past few weeks, Elon Musk and his team at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency have upended the U.S. federal government, slashing budgets and proposing mass layoffs. According to news reports, Musk’s team has plans to overhaul the government using artificial intelligence, including employing AI to identify areas for further cost reduction.
Yet artificial intelligence is not a silver bullet for effective governance, warned Henry Farrell, Abraham Newman, and Jeremy Wallace in a 2022 essay. In democracies and autocracies alike, reliance on AI technology can reinforce policymakers’ “ideologies and fantasies at the expense of a finer understanding of the real world.” Should states become trapped in unhealthy informational feedback loops, the authors wrote, they could “find themselves in the throes of an AI-fueled spiral of delusion.”
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