https://arab.news/8yd26
When Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama this month announced his new Cabinet, it was not his choice of finance minister or foreign minister that gained the most attention. The biggest news was Rama’s appointment of an artificial intelligence-powered bot as the new minister of public procurement.
“Diella” will oversee and allocate all public tenders that the government assigns to private firms. It “is the first member of government who is not physically present, but virtually created by artificial intelligence,” Rama declared. She will help make Albania “a country where public procurement is 100 percent corruption-free.”
At once evocative and provocative, the move reminds us that those who place the greatest hope in technology tend to be among those with the least confidence in human nature. But more to the point, the appointment of Diella is evidence that the supposed cure for whatever ails democracy is increasingly taking the form of digital authoritarianism. Such interventions might appeal to Silicon Valley oligarchs but democrats everywhere should be alarmed.
The conceptual basis for an AI minister lies in how technophiles imagine humanity’s relationship with the future. “Techno-solutionists” treat political problems that normally require deliberation as if they were engineering challenges that could be resolved purely through technical means. As we saw in the US during Elon Musk’s brief stint at the helm of the Department of Government Efficiency, technology is offered as a substitute for politics and political decision-making.
