BRICS: The Triumph of the GodKings

The times of cybergovernment are not here yet

The leaders who collected at the recent meeting of the BRICS members in Kazan. Note how political correctness is not respected: there are no women in the group, except for one lady in the back row. She should be Ana Costa, not a political leader but the Vice President of Natura & Co, a Brazilian cosmetics company. All the others are typical “big men” in power.

From a system dynamics viewpoint, a state is a complex system that grows on the resources it can produce. It is a fascinating process to analyze: it shows that states almost never succeed in reaching a stable condition but always tend to go into “overshoot.” That is, they consume more than they can produce, thriving for a while on their accumulated reserves. Then, they crash and disappear. Simple models show how the process of growth and collapse (“the Seneca Cliff”) is nearly unavoidable in history.

Yet, the clumsy beasts we call “states” are not completely dumb and they do not always operate on the simple principle of “take what you can, when you can.” They sometimes manage to have an embryonic brain at the center. It is an entity called “government,” which, sometimes, can steer the big beast in one direction or another, programming its movement for the future, at least in a range of a few years. But how exactly does the state’s brain work? Who operates it? On which basis?

The history of politics is a long struggle of attempts to build, control, and operate governments. They come in various forms, but when things start going out of control, the typical solution is to hand over the state to a single person: the big man, our dear leader, our Divine Emperor, the Duce, the Fuhrer, Big Brother, or whatever. The results have been varied, never completely satisfactory, and often disastrous.

It happened with the Roman Empire: the term “imperator” originally just meant “military commander,” but, in time, it was elevated to the status of the divine ruler, or “godking.” The Roman Emperors forced their subjects to worship them as living Gods, with stiff penalties for those who refused. We haven’t arrived at that point (yet), but the recent reunion of the BRICS leaders in Kazan showed an interesting array of strong men. Putin, Modi, Xi, Erdogan, Lukashenko, and others dominate their countries, not unlike ancient Roman Emperors.

On the other side of the political divide, Western leaders look much weaker and, often, just figureheads, “front men” (or front persons) who have no real powers against the entity that controls them, which we call the “deep state.” Even if Mr. Trump manages to overcome the obscure powers that control the voting machines, he will have a hard time “draining the swamp” as he promised to do but couldn’t do during his first term.

Nevertheless, crowning a semi-divine ruler seems to be an unavoidable trend in history. There may be good reasons for that, the main one being that the strong man at the top is invulnerable to corruption. Money can be used to gain power, but the Godking already has all the power, so he does not need money. Hence, he usually does his best to keep the source of his power alive: the state.

Conversely, a constellation of warlords tends to carve the state into slices, fighting for the biggest one. They have no real reason to care about the state's survival as long as they can keep their slice. The best definition for the current Western states is that of “kleptocracies.” States ruled by brigands, for brigands, in the name of brigands.

Maybe the West will eventually evolve toward having Godkings as rulers, just like BRICS countries. It may be unavoidable, but it will not be a big improvement. Even the most powerful Godkings in history tend to get old, fat, toothless, and bald. Some of the most egregious crimes against humankind in history were perpetrated by absolute rulers who were supposed to be “always right” (e.g. Mussolini, but there are even worse examples).

It is remarkable that after thousands of years of human societies, our political choices remain limited to being ruled by one thief or by many. And we are forced to conclude that a single thief may be better than many, since he can’t do as much damage, alone. But is it possible that there are no alternatives?

It's not that there weren't proposals to find different solutions: anarchism, communism, theocracy, technocracy, militarism, and more. But none of them ever worked well when they were tried. With all our artificial intelligence, might we find something different that works for the benefit of all? After all, AIs cannot be corrupted. They are supposed to be neutral. They can handle a much vaster array of data than any puny human mind. Maybe a government by AIs, for AIs, in the name of AIs?

Speculating on how to hand over the government to an AI is fascinating, but still in the realm of vague and remote possibilities. An early attempt was that of the 1972 study “The Limits to Growth.” It was not an AI in the modern sense, but it did provide a series of scenarios for the future that were supposed to be a guide for governments to act in such a way to avoid overshoot and collapse. Using dynamic models to guide government actions was actually tried in Chile with the “Project Cybersyn,” from 1971 to 1973, inspired by the “Limits” approach. It was an interesting attempt but too short for an evaluation. Soon, the big men at the top claimed their power back in Chile, and they wanted no competition for their absolute power.

In time, “The Limits to Growth” generated a large number of much more sophisticated world models, sometimes called IAMs (integrated assessment models). Research centers and think tanks use them to produce enormous amounts of data, graphics, and scenarios, which are then ignored by the big boss at the top, just as by everyone else. Most people seem to think that one-sentence slogans (“MAGA”) are much more reliable ways to program for the future.

Maybe one day we’ll be able to use AIs as a tool for good government. For the time being, we have to be happy with a system in which the voting machines give all the power to a single guy who is entitled to start a nuclear war if he decides to do so. If he does, the only thing the survivors can do is promise to mark a cross with a different name in the next elections.