Then widespread use of gunpowder weapons swung the balance back towards mass manpower;
This is the opposite of the story I've heard. Democracy/individualism/liberty don't arise when militaries are composed of easily-interchangeable untrained peasants, they arise then the most effective military unit is a well-trained yeoman class that is large enough that a vote is necessary to determine how to please it and wealthy/educated/agentic enough that it can organize to demand that society be shaped to its desires. Athens lived and died by its elite heavy infantry, who composed its voting public. Meanwhile, when the charioteer was the military unit of note, a small, concentrated elite could hold power because nobody else could build chariots.
In the context of the modern age, quality of life will be determined by whether a young, middle-class engineer with an FPV drone or an AI executive with a multibillion dollar frontier AI model is the dominant military unit.
Two wars that are very useful in figuring out which future we get are going on as we speak.
Athens actually had a key military technology as well: the trireme. This was the most maneuverable warship of its time, and allowed Athens to create a naval empire (or thalassocracy). But the effectiveness of the trireme depended on having a crew of skilled rowers, who were generally middle or lower class men. So plausibly Athenian democracy was due to the importance of recruiting and engaging citizens from the lower classes to man their triremes.
I don't think this analysis works, because if we imagine that democracies exist because of the distribution of military power, the binding constraint on the destruction of states for profit is at this point not the ability to win an actual war, but the ability to win the occupation afterwards, which modern guerilla tactics have made excessively costly even in an ideal case.
For civil wars, you are even more hard stuck in that just because you know who opposes you does not make it profitable to kill them. That is to say, this analysis overestimates how good drones and robots are at occupations, because fundamentally the hard part of an occupation is to convince the conquered of the legitimacy of the government. Without that, you basically cannot draw any sort of power from modern economies, so why do the occupation. If you already are in control, and the civil war breaks legitimacy, you are still hard stuck.
That is to say, for the rifleman to be displaced the displacer would have to be able to win civil wars and occupations, currently the only successful strategy is truly dense occupation with riflemen and police, and I don't see the argument that robots are any better at convincing people to go along.
The key point of the post is that the legitimacy of the population becomes less necessary than you think, because goals will shift towards less ideological goals and more resource goals, and this is driven by people becoming less necessary to the economy and politics than raw materials and robots.
You don't need to convince a population of the legitimacy of your government, so long as you have robots that can secure the mines/resources necessary to build more robots and goods, and the decoupling of legitimacy/popularity from military/economic effectiveness is the key transition that AI and robotics allows.
I think that there is no amount of robots that can secure the mines against a truly hostile population, unless you are basically willing to kill them all. So you still need legitimacy, and there is not a way to separate legitimacy from access to resources against a popular and violent veto. Basically, I think that if there is a local population, legitimacy is a necessary condition for the security of resources and robots, that there is no practical number of AI overseers and robot enforcers that can guarantee this so long as you are not willing to do mass killing/displacement.
If you have resource based goals, there is basically no reason to invade anywhere unless you can generate legitimacy or are willing to actually kill or displace all the current inhabitants. Unless you do that, or something just as obviously unpopular or severe, there is no amount of robots that can solve the fundamental challenge of insurgency without reliance on legitimacy. Those insurgents can basically deny you access to most of the resources of the area.
Military effectiveness is not just one thing, and your enemy chooses what part to test. Your enemy can force the coupling of legitimacy and military effectiveness, and so even having resource orientated goals cannot help you unless you use the fact that you value things differently to produce settlements that look like trade.
I think this over-weights the wars of the 00's and 10's, rather than the newer manner of war which is much more similar to a great power conflict. Winning an occupation isn't necessary in these.
In both cases, if the country being invaded had its manufacturing and missile-launching capabilities destroyed, the country initiating the war would be happy with the outcome of their campaign.
In both those cases, if the existing state wins the occupation, they definitely will survive. That requires riflemen and legitimacy, same as before. If Iran keeps their rifles loyal, you don't get a Syria style outcome. You just force the Iranians to build more missiles for a time (or give up on missiles).
That sort of war can limit the ability of states to project power, but it can only acquire territory by fighting an occupation. I think Russia will have a bad 10 years in whatever they keep of the Donbass, unless they have produced mass displacement, fighting an occupation.
In Israel/Iran, the maximal war aim is to force the Iranian to fight an occupation. If they are legitimate enough to not need to do so, there is not much you can do with bombs. (I mean you can destroy bombs so they can't bomb you, and you can make them poor, but that is not useful in itself)
Thus you can destroy power projection, but not create political change.
You also can't dismiss protests. They can force you to fight an occupation whether you want to or not. And occupations still rely on rifles.
I think this analysis is maybe not right. The systems that endure are the systems that survive, so its less relevant in the long term how effective a system is at waging agrresive wars. Its how good it is at fighting defensive ones is the key.
The counter insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan were not existential for the continued survival of the USA. So they were not going to create much (or any) Darwinian pressure to select for or against societies like the USA. (Baring the, potentially important possibility of the USA leaving societies in its own image in these places).
I think you have me on the wrong side. If the existential struggle for a state always takes the form of insurgency on it's home territory, or a diplomatic settlement, then the primary factors that matter for state survival are legitimacy and ability to transfer power. Democracies are great at that. Basically, the argument for the reasons that you don't see democracies in civil wars as often also make them very strong at winning them in home territory, which makes their displacement a remote possibility. Basically, we should not see the end to popular (that is supported by the populace) systems of government ever, because protests can always force you to fight an occupation or lose control of the territory, and the main factor for winning those struggles is always the popular will.
This seems highly dependent on how much that manyfacturing and deployment effort continues to require humans at all, in any numbers.
Then widespread use of gunpowder weapons swung the balance back towards mass manpower
i'm just not convinced by the picture painted here. wikipedia has longbowmen, pikemen, and gunpowder challenging the military dominance of mounted cavalry as early as ~1200, and convincingly by ~1500. so then where was the democracy?
The other thought is if we expect states to care mostly about resource goals, we should expect them to find diplomatic solutions, (in which case democracies credible commitment mechanisms matter). I am very convinced by the crisis bargaining perspective, in which rational states should be expected to find settlements short of war. We see the largest wars over ideological factors, under this model, because they disrupt this bargaining model in various ways. If you just want access to some resource, especially if the defender can destroy it, it very rarely makes sense to go to war for it (since you can almost always simply threaten too, then get what you want at the bargaining table). So we should find resource based goals, even with opportunism, don't lead to war.
The war in Ukraine shows how conflicts between drones and riflemen go; the war in Iran shows how conflicts between the informed and the uninformed go.
I don't think these conflict show what you think they show.
In the former case, drones and riflemen fight together on both sides, with both sides capable of innovating and copying innovations. If anything, the conflict shows that thanks to drones, infantry grunts are as important as ever and expensive armor (although not obsolete and still necessary) is relatively less important than a generation ago.
In the latter case, the "uninformed" demonstrated that they can saturate air defenses of their neighbors with cheap drone technology and even occasionally shoot down ~100M jets with SAMs built with COTS chips (and even occasionally model turbojets). If they retain the HEU and their (illegal) toll booth in the strait after the war, the world will see them as victors regardless of the damage and casualties they suffered.
I believe that in a decade or two the main conclusion historians will derive from thee two wars that nothing but nukes (not expensive weapons, not cheap ones, not small armies, not large ones, and certainly not foreign security guarantees) can defend a country's sovereignty if it's in a geopolitical flashpoint, and even if you don't, a flashpoint might appear from nowhere in a decade on a border with an autocratic state.
Coupled with the constant diminishing of the technological bar to nuclear proliferation due to progress, this seems to imply that the current nonproliferation paradigm is going to eventually break down and future generations will live in a much less safe world with much more numerous nuclear-armed states and much heightened risk of an accidental nuclear war.
I think it's possible that extreme centralization could occur here (not necessarily so), but even if it does happen, it will likely not be long-term maintainable. A few familiar failure modes come to mind. 1.) Highly centralized systems suppress dissent leading to sycophancy and its associated delusional thinking. 2.) They also tend to hollow out the intellectual capital they need for innovation, adaptation, and maintenance. 3.) Maintaining rule requires delegation. The more it delegates to compensate for degraded performance (see 1 and 2) the greater the risk of creating powerful misaligned subordinates. 4.) Even if AI helps extend the life of a central committee, succession remains a problem. If the bus factor of key members is too high, the transition will be brittle and may fail outright. These failure modes are pretty timeless, and I don't see how AI would prevent them still being applicable here. Maybe AI delays these feedback mechanisms to some degree, but my suspicion is that it will accelerate them. So, even if AI weakens the dependence on distributed coercive power, there are other mechanisms that will likely limit the extent and / or duration of centralization.
This isn't to say great atrocities can't occur during the "relatively short" lifetime of a centralized rule. The 20th century has provided a number of examples wherein short-lived authoritarian regimes have caused mass death and suffering. So all reasonable efforts should still be made to prevent the emergence of such a highly centralized regime.
You'd also be interested in reading about the Intelligence Curse. Individual hackers would find themselves powerless against ASI-enabled cybersecurity.
Additionally, imagine a state which is merely protected from external attacks and illegal protest by gods. Without AI, individuals would be able to have leverage over the state and/or capitalists by demanding higher salaries for the individuals' labor. On the other hand, AI would likely destroy this leverage.
You'd also be interested in reading about the Intelligence Curse. Individual hackers would find themselves powerless against ASI-enabled cybersecurity.
It's not obvious to me whether cybersecurity is offense-dominant or defense-dominant, but it wouldn't surprise me too much if it's defense-dominant, to the point that 'cybersecurity' is mostly an issue for civilian infrastructure instead of military infrastructure. But I do mean a generalized version of 'hacking', here, which includes things like tapping physical cables.
Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun -- Mao Zedong
Halfway thru recorded history, Athens became the first state we're sure was a democracy, and inspiration to many later ones. Probably some existed earlier, and certainly some entities smaller than states were democratic, likely long before recorded history began.
The next tenth of history saw the rise of the Roman Republic, which mixed democracy and aristocracy together to form a functional hybrid, and then it transitioned to the Roman Empire, which shifted the mix substantially towards aristocracy. For the next three tenths of recorded history, democracies were at best local governments, minor regional powers, or components of larger, autocratic states.
Few, if any, of these societies would count as "democracies" according to modern watchdog organizations. Only about 10-20% of the residents of Athens were citizens; the rest possessed no real political power. In later eras, residents of towns or cities might vote for their urban officials, but the urbanization rates were also around 10-20%, so the vast majority lived in the non-democratic countryside.
Then for the last tenth of history, democracies rose again to dominate the world stage. One standard story for this has to do with military technology. The Roman Republic expanded because it had the dominant military technology of its time; this may have been in part because of its political system. But eventually the heavily trained armored horseman became the dominant military technology, and was more easily provided by autocracies than democracies. Then widespread use of gunpowder weapons swung the balance back towards mass manpower; the knight in his castle could no longer reliably put down a peasant revolt, or hold back Napoleon and his levée en masse.
Another standard story has to do with increased state resources. Democracies generally support higher tax rates than autocracies do; while this is primarily to support social services, some amount of this is that people are willing to pay more for things that they think 'they' own (rather than their distant overlords).
A third standard story has to do with ease of turnover. Democracies generally don't have to fight civil wars or succession conflicts, because whenever such a movement would have a chance of a military victory, it also has a chance of a bloodless victory. This leads to peaceful turnovers or governments following the preferences of voters enough to not let resentments build up to the point that they boil over.
The major wars of the last two hundred years have not been limited engagements driven by hereditary elites; they have primarily been total struggles between ideologies and peoples, which only managed to become major because they could motivate significant efforts on both sides.
What does the next tenth of history[1] look like? One might think that the invention of larger and more sophisticated weapons means that we swing back towards the knight and aristocracy, but the evidence of the most recent wars suggests otherwise. Kipling's poem Arithmetic on the Frontier, on the costs of pitting Imperial troops against regional resistance, rings nearly as true about America's various wars and special operations in the Middle East. Between great powers, the weapons have become so expensive that only systems which are widely believed in by their inhabitants can afford to supply a competitive number of them.
It's not obvious to me that this continues to be true. I think next-generation military capabilities primarily have to do with 1) operational knowledge and 2) mass-produced smart weaponry. The war in Ukraine shows how conflicts between drones and riflemen go; the war in Iran shows how conflicts between the informed and the uninformed go. States may find their ability to produce weaponry becomes detached from their popularity; they may find robot soldiers are willing to follow orders that human soldiers would balk at; they may find that it is relatively cheap to identify and destroy dissenters.[2]
That is, we may be moving into an era where mass protests are relatively easy to dismiss or ignore, while individual hackers or saboteurs are still able to disrupt large systems. Taxes from a broad labor base may become less relevant than control over automated infrastructure. What political problems will the new sources of power have, and what systems will help them resolve those problems?
I don't expect us to have 500 more sidereal years of history left, but I do think we might manage to cram roughly that much subjective history in before the Singularity / as it takes off.
An old strategy is to recruit your police / imperial enforcers from a different ethnicity than the people that they need to defend against, so there's some baseline level of resentment that will allow brutality which will cow them into submission. Autonomous weapons allow this at scale, and for secret police that are difficult to bribe or corrupt, and widespread surveillance allows for secret police that are always watching and noticing subtle connections.