Seva Gunitsky | Autocratic Resilience in the Age of AI

The Moynihan Institute’s Study of Global Politics series presents Seva Gunitsky from the University of Toronto.

Autocracies operate in self-imposed darkness: the same repression that keeps dictators in power insulates them from accurate assessments of what their people want or what their subordinates are doing. This has been the central dilemma of autocratic rule for centuries. Artificial intelligence, however, threatens to alter this calculus by giving rulers new ways to overcome informational blindness and principal-agent problems without loosening control.

This paper presents three AI governance strategies – panopticism, discourse management, and agency alignment – and links them to old institutional tradeoffs (namely, the Dictator’s Dilemma and the Coercive Dilemma) in closed regimes. Together, these strategies may allow autocracies to replicate the institutional advantages of liberal governance without ceding centralized control.

Seva Gunitsky is an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto. His work examines how international forces like war and globalization shape democracy and domestic reforms. He is the author of Aftershocks: Great Powers and Domestic Reforms in the Twentieth Century (Princeton University Press), selected by Foreign Affairs as one of the best books of 2017. Some of his work has appeared in International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, International Theory, and Perspectives on Politics, as well as popular outlets like Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, The New Republic, and others.