THE DEVELOPMENT AND TRANSFORMATION OF POST-DEMOCRACY IN THE AGE OF ARTIFICIAL GENERAL INTELLIGENCE

Abstract

The article offers a critical perspective on the alleged novelty of the constituent elements of post-democracy within political practice, highlighting them through a series of concrete historical examples and by emphasising their psychosocial foundations. At the same time, drawing on the most recent achievements in the field of artificial intelligence research and development, the paper arrives at the conclusion that post-democracy will inevitably evolve towards a condition of perfected societal manipulation. This new stage, marked by subtle yet all-encompassing forms of control, is portrayed as a process against which meaningful resistance will become practically impossible. In such a scenario, the emergence of new political systems will be foreclosed, echoing what may be described as a distorted reinterpretation of Francis Fukuyama’s famous thesis concerning the ‘end of history’. The analysis sets out in detail a consistent programme of the accelerated displacement of the real human subject from active participation in the automated processes of production, from involvement in the economic sphere, from the independent taking of political decisions, and from both the creation of information and the possibility of verifying its authenticity. The article further presents a conceptual outline of a likely form of subjugated society, one that operates under an illusion of prosperity and stability while in fact being subjected to the governance of artificial intelligence. Such control is imagined to be carried out through the large-scale fabrication and distortion of information, the hyper-realisation and theatricalisation of political processes, and the immediate elimination of all potential threats to the ruling regime at their earliest stage, with full consideration of both the general features of human behaviour and its individual specificities. The research leads towards the formulation of a broader theoretical concept concerning the inevitability of the described socio-informational transformations. This inevitability is grounded in the logic of the evolutionist approach to world history, which provides a framework for interpreting such changes not as isolated anomalies but as part of a continuous and foreseeable trajectory. Consequently, the study is organically connected to both the author’s earlier explorations and anticipated further investigations within this domain. The work concludes with the hypothesis that post-democratic human society, rather than being a permanent condition, will prove to be temporary. It is argued that such a system will ultimately be dissolved or transcended in one way or another by a subjectivised artificial intelligence – a subsequent link in the chain of life’s development, which has arisen as a result of human activity yet is liberated from the deficiencies and limitations of its creator. The article also points out that such reflections are not confined to contemporary Western scientific discourse but resonate strongly with themes present in classical literature and philosophy. This intertextual echo is taken as evidence of the existential significance and profound predictability of the threat posed to humanity itself.