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Late last year, I complained to Richard Socher, chief scientist at Salesforce and head of its AI projects, about the term "artificial intelligence" and that we should use more accurate terms such as machine learning or smart machine systems, because "AI" creates unreasonably high expectations when the vast majority of applications are essentially extremely specialized machine learning systems that do specific tasks -- such as image analysis -- very well but do nothing else.

Socher said that when he was a post-graduate it rankled him also, and he preferred other descriptions such as statistical machine learning. He agrees that the "AI" systems that we talk about today are very limited in scope and misidentified, but these days he thinks of AI as being "Aspirational Intelligence." He likes the potential for the technology even if it isn't true today.

The human layer of corporate action is reduced and obscured; the algorithm would be the agency by which the “group-mind seeks realisation in the external world.” The range of these actions is not necessarily confined to “cyberspace,” either. The company that brought us The DAO was an “Internet of Things” start-up, named after an automated lock. The ultimate aim is not just to automate online transactions, but to enforce Ethereum smart contracts into the physical world.

From the perspective of a disruptive technologist, a DAO lacks human organs, and this obviates the need for corporate governance norms. Viewed from the perspective of legal theory, however, it would seem to entail either that (i) the “actions” of smart contracts are to be attributed to humans, in which case the smart contracts are merely muddying the waters, or (ii) that some actions by smart contracts will be acts-in-the-law (and/or acts with legal consequences) in their own right, or (iii) that a DAO has human organs, but they are poorly identified and sub-optimally regulated. All of these options speak to the need for further scrutiny.

The democratic peace — the idea that democracies rarely fight one another — has been called “the closest thing we have to an empirical law in the study of international relations.” Yet, some contend that this relationship is spurious and suggest alternative explanations. Unfortunately, in the absence of randomized experiments, we can never rule out the possible existence of such confounding biases. Rather than commonly used regression-based approaches, we apply a nonparametric sensitivity analysis. We show that overturning the positive association between democracy and peace would require a confounder that is 47 times more prevalent in democratic dyads than in other dyads. To put this number in context, the relationship between democracy and peace is at least five times as robust as that between smoking and lung cancer. To explain away the democratic peace, therefore, scholars must find far more powerful confounders than already those identified in the literature.

While many democratic peace scholars stress the importance of normative in addition to institutional factors (Doyle, 1986; Maoz and Russett, 1993; Mitchell, 2002; RisseKappen, 1995), research on autocratic aggression focuses almost exclusively on institutional constraints (or lack thereof). A sizable body of scholarship maintains that personalist regimes are more hostile because they lack institutional constraints on the executive (Peceny and Beer, 2003; Peceny and Butler, 2004; Reiter and Stam, 2003; Weeks, 2012).2 Peceny and Butler (2004) use Bueno de Mesquita et al.’s (2003) selectorate theory to explain personalist belligerence: since in personalist regimes the winning coalition (regime insiders that state leaders rely upon for their survival) is small relative to the selectorate (individuals involved in selecting the state leaders), there is strong incentive for the winning coalition to remain loyal to the leader irrespective of their behavior in office.3 Other scholars forward similar explanations for autocratic belligerence. Jessica Weeks (2012) attributes personalist belligerence to the regime’s lack of a domestic audience that can punish the leader for their belligerence.4 According to this argument, personalist regimes lack predictable mechanisms for restraining or removing belligerent leaders.

Common to these theories is exclusive focus on the institutional factors leading to conflict. One reason why institutional explanations for personalist belligerence are necessarily incomplete is that lacking institutional constraints cannot account for willingness to initiate conflict. Scholars in this area are acutely aware of the dilemma. Weeks (2012: 329) writes that where “no powerful audience exists, we must focus instead on individual leader’s preferences and perceptions.” We are thus left with heterogenous individual-level causes to explain the leap to conflict when executive constraints are low. An expanding literature explores these individual-level contributors to conflict. One robust finding is that revolutionary leaders are especially belligerent, since revolutions select leader that are risk averse and aggressive on average (Colgan, 2013). Unconstrained executives are most belligerent when leaders are selected for individual personality traits that increase their propensity to start conflict (Colgan and Weeks, 2015). The argument in this article similarly combines institutional factors with another set of individual-level traits: leader commitment to democratic norms regarding the appropriateness of conflict.

Populism is spreading across the globe. In Europe, populist parties have won victories in Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Slovakia, and Switzerland; and they have joined governing coalitions in Finland, Norway, and Lithuania. More broadly, strongmen with populist agendas have become president -- including Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines and Donald Trump in the United States.

Various causes lie behind populist upsurges, ranging from increased economic hardship and inequality to growing frustrations with globalization and immigration. But the consequences are worrisome, because research suggests the very real possibility of democratic backsliding worldwide. Populist takeovers are associated with personalist dictatorships and the dismantling of democratic institutions.

Polanyi recounts how economic and financial crisis led to global calamity. Something similar could happen today. In fact we are already in a steady unpicking of the liberal peace that glowed at the turn of the millennium. Since approximately 2008, the historic decline in the number and lethality of wars appears to have been reversed. Today’s wars are not like World War I, with formal declarations of war, clear war zones, rules of engagement, and definite endings. But they are wars nonetheless.

What does a world in global, generalized war look like? We have an unwinnable “war on terror” that is metastasizing with every escalation, and which has blurred the boundaries between war and everything else. We have deep states—built on a new oligarchy of generals, spies, and private-sector suppliers—that are strangling liberalism. We have emboldened middle powers (such as Saudi Arabia) and revanchist powers (such as Russia) rearming and taking unilateral military action across borders (Ukraine and Syria). We have massive profiteering from conflicts by the arms industry, as well as through the corruption and organized crime that follow in their wake (Afghanistan). We have impoverishment and starvation through economic warfare, the worst case being Yemen. We have “peacekeeping” forces fighting wars (Somalia). We have regional rivals threatening one another, some with nuclear weapons (India and Pakistan) and others with possibilities of acquiring them (Saudi Arabia and Iran).

As the world’s oligarchy gathered last week in Davos, Switzerland, to worry about the troubles of the middle class, the real question on every plutocrat’s mind was whether the populist upheaval that delivered the presidency to the intemperate mogul might mercifully be over.

If it was globalization — or, more precisely, the shock of imports from China — that moved voters to put Mr. Trump in the White House, could politicians get back to supporting the market-oriented order once the China shock played out?

Each of these tools holds tremendous potential to improve lives and help solve the world’s biggest problems. But technological change always produces winners and losers by giving rise to new concentrations of power and novel forms of inequality. For example, a study by the US National Bureau of Economic Research found that between 50 and 70 percent of lost wages in America from 1980 to 2016 stemmed from automation — far more than from aggressive offshoring or the withering of labour unions.

However, automation has brought about new occupations as well, evidenced by the absence of mass joblessness in the United States over the same period. Despite the lost wages, the US unemployment rate from 1993 to 2019 stayed around or below seven percent when excluding a four-year recovery following the exogenous shock of the 2008 financial crisis. Productivity has also increased by nearly 62 percent since 1979. But the wages of American workers have failed to keep pace, rising only 17.5 percent, signalling a deep disconnect in recent history between new technologies being adopted and the average worker being better off as a result.

The economic insecurity caused by task automation of routine-based work is often associated with increased political polarization across Europe and the United States. A large body of evidence now exists showing that a higher risk of automation leads to increased support for populist right-wing parties. Economic uncertainty explains up to one-third of the rise in extremism in Europe, with automation playing a subsidiary role alongside other factors impacting economic livelihoods.

First, how much technology-enabled automation is occurring? And what are its economic effects? Seminal research by scholars such asd David Autor, Claudia Goldin, Lawrence Katz, and David Dorn shows that since the 1980s, the United States has experienced distinct inequalities in the employment distribution, with rising shares of high-wage and low-wage work but a stagnant middle. The effects of digitalization—the diffusion of digital technology in the economy—have played a significant role in this rise of wage inequality in the U.S. Meanwhile, evidence from Kurer and Callego (2019) shows that the decrease in routine-based occupations in the U.K. is attributable to a lower intake of new workers, as most of the routine-based workers in their sample (64.5%) remain in a routine-based profession during the duration of the study, and only 3.4% of them end up unemployed.

Smart Contract Infrastructure: The backbone of any DAO is the smart contracts that automate organizational processes. These contracts handle everything from financial transactions and governance to operational tasks, executing predefined conditions without manual oversight or intervention. This ensures efficiency and transparency and significantly reduces the possibility of human error or manipulation.

Empowered by blockchain technology, DAOs harness decentralization and transparency to operate in an unprecedented manner. In stark contrast to traditional corporations that rely on centralized decision-making hierarchies, DAOs operate through pre-defined rules encoded in smart contracts on the blockchain. This decentralized architecture enhances transparency, security, and automation, rendering them tailor-made for the digital age. The Information Age, where data and information reign supreme, confers manifold advantages upon DAOs. Their capacity to aggregate and analyze colossal volumes of real-time data empowers informed decision-making. The integration of automation diminishes the need for human intervention across myriad processes, thereby augmenting efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Furthermore, the border-agnostic nature of the global economy finds a natural ally in DAOs, which can seamlessly function across geographical boundaries without the necessity of a physical presence.

The defining characteristic of a DAO is its reliance on smart contracts to automate administrative functions and enforce the rules set forth by its members. This automation not only minimizes the need for intermediaries but also ensures that the organization's operations are immutable, transparent, and aligned with the interests of its token holders. DAOs, therefore, redefine organizational management by embedding trust, integrity, and collective intelligence at their core.

Automation and Streamlining: DAOs operate on the principle of automation driven by smart contracts. This automation can drastically reduce the need for middle management and administrative staff, as many decisions and processes that traditionally require human intervention can be automated and executed by smart contracts. This streamlining of operations can lead to significant cost reductions and increases in operational efficiency.

Totalitarian states are incompetent. They are bad at forecasting and dealing with disasters (Caplan, 2008).16 This can be seen most clearly in the great famines of Communist China and the USSR, in which millions died (Applebaum, 2017; Becker, 1996; Dikötter, 2010; Snyder, 2010). In comparison, functioning multiparty democracies rarely, if ever, experience famines (Sen, 2010). “Established autocracies” (or “personal”/“sultanist”) are particularly bad, as there are few checks or restraints on arbitrary rule and the whims and ideology of the single individual, even from other elites (Svolik, 2012). From the inside, the “inner circle” around Mao, Stalin, and Hitler seems incredibly chaotic, with elites strongly incentivized to conceal information and encouraged by the autocrat to squabble and feud—so they are divided (Conquest, 1992; Kershaw, 2008; Zhang & Halliday, 2006). If totalitarian states are worse at addressing social, environmental, and technological problems, then a world dominated by them would likely be worse at responding to risks of collapse and extinction.

A world dominated by totalitarian states is more likely to have major wars. States with near-universal adult suffrage rarely (if ever) go to war with one another (Barnhart et al., 2020), so a world dominated by democracies has fewer wars. Miscalculation might be a particular problem for totalitarian states due to personalization and disincentives for accurate information, leading to well-known strategic disasters such as Hitler and Stalin’s blunders in World War II (Bialer, 1970; Noakes & Pridham, 2001), or at a smaller level, Saddam Hussein’s rejection of diplomacy (Atkinson, 1993). War makes collapse and extinction more likely, by raising the chance of weapons of mass destruction being used.

The appeal of the populists has grown with mounting public discontent over the status quo. In the West, many people feel left behind by technological change, the global economy, and growing inequality. Horrific incidents of terrorism generate apprehension and fear. Some are uneasy with societies that have become more ethnically, religiously and racially diverse. There is an increasing sense that governments and the elite ignore public concerns.

In this cauldron of discontent, certain politicians are flourishing and even gaining power by portraying rights as protecting only the terrorist suspect or the asylum seeker at the expense of the safety, economic welfare, and cultural preferences of the presumed majority. They scapegoat refugees, immigrant communities, and minorities. Truth is a frequent casualty. Nativism, xenophobia, racism, and Islamophobia are on the rise.

From a theoretical perspective, the general idea behind studies linking structural economic transformations to support for populist and radical-right parties is pretty straightforward: Economic processes such as globalization and technological change create aggregate welfare gains, but with winners and losers. Such distributional consequences, through the ensuing perceived economic distress, are then politically consequential. What is not straightforward—and still underdeveloped, according to ref. 7—is the theoretical understanding of the mechanisms through which automation-driven economic distress, in particular, may translate into higher support specifically for radical-right parties. In this respect, we propose several non-mutually-exclusive channels.

First, it is well understood that economic discontent may lead to disaffection with mainstream parties and the political establishment at large. In this context, radical-right forces provide an appealing option for dissatisfied voters, as, in most cases, they can credibly cast themselves as an antiestablishment alternative to mainstream parties (1, 5, 19). Such an antiestablishment advantage can extend to radical-left parties, as we discuss below.

The automation of tasks within a DAO, driven by consensus mechanisms and smart contracts, has significantly changed how organizations operate. In time, with advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), we might see an integration of more sophisticated AI-driven governance models within DAOs, further automating decision-making processes and potentially redefining the nature of digital coordination and operation.

The integration of AI into DAOs has the potential to increase efficiency and scalability while also presenting novel challenges and considerations in terms of ethics, security, and the balance of power between automated systems and human oversight.

All human societies experience recurrent waves of political crisis, such as the one we face today. My research team built a database of hundreds of societies across 10,000 years to try to find out what causes them. We examined dozens of variables, including population numbers, measures of well-being, forms of governance, and the frequency with which rulers are overthrown. We found that the precise mix of events that leads to crisis varies, but two drivers of instability loom large. The first is popular immiseration—when the economic fortunes of broad swaths of a population decline. The second, and more significant, is elite overproduction—when a society produces too many superrich and ultra-educated people, and not enough elite positions to satisfy their ambitions.

These forces have played a key role in our current crisis. In the past 50 years, despite overall economic growth, the quality of life for most Americans has declined. The wealthy have become wealthier, while the incomes and wages of the median American family have stagnated. As a result, our social pyramid has become top-heavy. At the same time, the U.S. began overproducing graduates with advanced degrees. More and more people aspiring to positions of power began fighting over a relatively fixed number of spots. The competition among them has corroded the social norms and institutions that govern society.

Inequality and Oligarchy: Wealth and political inequality can be central drivers of social disintegration, as can oligarchy and centralisation of power among leaders. This not only causes social distress, but handicaps a society’s ability to respond to ecological, social and economic problems.

The field of cliodynamics models how factors such as equality and demography correlate with political violence. Statistical analysis of previous societies suggests that this happens in cycles. As population increases, the supply of labour outstrips demand, workers become cheap and society becomes top-heavy. This inequality undermines collective solidarity and political turbulence follows.

However, uncoordinated decentralization, particularly when combined with a lack of clear rules regarding who is/are the most representative trade unions that should negotiate agreements at company level, may reinforce the worsening of working conditions, increase inequality between (and within) companies by fissuring workplaces (see Weil, 2014), and thereby generate precariousness for workers and individuals alike.