Democracy blindsides Silicon Valley’s power players looking to transform the world with AI

‘The push against datacenters speaks to the frustration of people who don’t feel they are making the choices in their lives’

The Stanford ethicist Rob Reich was once invited to a dinner organized by a Silicon Valley mogul to discuss what a state designed to maximize science and tech powered by commercial models might look like. The gathered technologists were drawn to the idea of building a small nation-state dedicated to the endeavor, Reich recalls in “System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot it”.

When Reich asked whether this state would be a democracy, he got a cool no. “Democracy is too slow, and it holds science back,” he was told. “To optimize for science, we need a beneficent technocrat in charge.”