How to Confront the Threat of AI Dictatorship

Is the future something to be calculated and controlled, or something we shape together through democratic struggle? How should we read the convergence of Silicon Valley's "Dark Enlightenment" thinkers with a resurgent authoritarian right, and is Europe truly reckoning with what has shifted in the United States? What is driving the continent's anti-regulatory mood? What counts as "evidence" sufficient to legislate a fast-moving technology, and at what point does the demand for proof become a license for the catastrophe to arrive first?

Justin Hendrix addressed these questions and more with scholar and former European Commission official Paul Nemitz, who is one of the authors of a new book titled The Open Future and its Enemies: How We Can Protect Free Society from AI Dictatorship. The book argues that three decades of under-regulation have produced the concentrations of wealth and power we now confront, and that the survival of democracy in the digital age will depend on citizens, civil society, and a new generation willing to treat their work as carrying responsibility not just for safety, but for fundamental rights and self-government.