News Summary

• How Technology Empowers—and Imperils—Dictators.
• China is in the lead when it comes to developing AI systems that can monitor or replace subordinates.
• By automating tasks that once required human discretion, rulers can replace unreliable intermediaries with faithful algorithms that cannot be bribed or manipulated.
• Yet these promises of a self-running state are illusory, because AI is never truly autonomous.
• The ruler who turns to AI to reduce a dependence on unreliable humans may end up relying, more blindly than before, on the few AI specialists who keep the system running.