Philosophical reflection on Plato and AI governance without concrete allegations

at the moment Turing warned about, the instant where man and machine confront one another and man has to ask an uneasy political question: “Wow, do really | let this thing gatekeep me?” Who should rule in this new world? You? The New Caste? The machines? 4, The great test of Plato’s life began when he was 60 years old. He’d had an astonishing life until then, of course. He’d been taught by Socrates and, in turn, had sharpened the mind of Aristotle. He’d established his famous Academy in Athens. The puzzles of philosophy and politics that defined his city’s most turbulent era had been the work of his life. And you can see, in the careful lines of his writing, a sublime knowledge he must have had: There would be an echo to his efforts, a philosophic melody that would carry through the centuries and set political harmonies of the world you and IJ, 2500 years later, inhabit. But at 60, after this already remarkable life, he was presented with an unusual invitation. A letter arrived from a favorite former pupil, Dion, who had been placed in charge of the young king of Syracuse, Dionysus II. Dion wrote: The state is in disorder. The boy is interested in philosophy. Here is a chance for you to apply all you've mastered. Plato had argued, after all, that virtuous, philosophically trained men might just manage an enduring and just rule. “I pondered the matter,” Plato wrote. “And was in two minds as to whether | ought to listen to entreaties and go, or how I ought to act. Finally the scale turned in favor of the view that, if ever anyone was to try to carry out in practice my ideas about laws and constitutions, now was the time.” From an early age Plato had been bred - by family position and by temperament - to handle the tools of power. “In my youth | went through the same experience as many other men,” he once wrote. “I fancied that if, early in life, | became my own master, I should at once embark on a political career.” The first taste came unexpectedly. In 404 BC, the Athenian constitution collapsed under the shuddering pressure of Sparta’s victory in the Peloponnesian War. The city-state dipped near chaos and a group of pro-Spartan men welded themselves into a hasty joint dictatorship. Among them were Plato’s relatives and friends of his family. “They at once invited me to share in their doings, as something to which I had a claim,” Plato wrote. He was 20. “The effect on me was not surprising in the case of a young man. | considered that they would, of course, so manage the State as to bring men out ofa bad way of life into a good one. I watched them very closely to see what they would do.” In short order Plato’s friends and family unblinkingly implemented one of the most violent, merciless power mechanisms in Athenian history. They did it with absolute confidence and unrelenting brutality. “In quite a short time,” he wrote many years later, “they had made the former government seem by comparison something precious as gold.” This bitter experience of power was nearly enough to turn Plato from politics, but as you read the story of his life you find he is constantly drawn to the greatest of human experiments - the ordering of our lives. He knew it as the troubling management of politikos and the handling of the boiling pot of what he called 198 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018430