How AI Killed the Technocratic Bargain

Article excerpt

Artificial intelligence has fundamentally disrupted what the article calls the "technocratic bargain", the implicit agreement that citizens would defer to specialized experts in exchange for solutions to complex problems. For over a century, technocrats argued that public consent was a useful fiction; ordinary people lacked the knowledge to govern themselves, so experts should decide. But cheap, accessible AI tools are now democratizing expertise. A $20 monthly subscription gives anyone the ability to solve problems once monopolized by credentialed specialists. The disruption forces a reckoning with the founding principle of American democracy: that power derives from the consent of the governed.