---
type: claim
domain: ai-alignment
description: "AI removes the historical ceiling on authoritarian control — surveillance scales to marginal cost zero, enforcement scales via autonomous systems, and central planning becomes viable if AI can process distributed information at sufficient scale"
confidence: likely
source: "Synthesis of Schmachtenberger two-attractor framework, Bostrom singleton hypothesis, Abdalla manuscript Hayek analysis, Leo attractor-authoritarian-lock-in musing"
created: 2026-04-02
depends_on:
  - "AI accelerates existing Molochian dynamics by removing bottlenecks not creating new misalignment because the competitive equilibrium was always catastrophic and friction was the only thing preventing convergence"
  - "four restraints prevent competitive dynamics from reaching catastrophic equilibrium and AI specifically erodes physical limitations and bounded rationality leaving only coordination as defense"
---

# AI makes authoritarian lock-in dramatically easier by solving the information processing constraint that historically caused centralized control to fail

Authoritarian lock-in — Bostrom's "singleton" scenario, Schmachtenberger's dystopian attractor — is the state where one actor achieves sufficient control to prevent coordination, competition, and correction. Historically, three mechanisms caused authoritarian systems to fail: military defeat from outside, economic collapse from internal inefficiency, and gradual institutional decay. AI may close all three exit paths simultaneously.

**The information-processing constraint as historical ceiling:**

The manuscript's analysis of the Soviet Union identifies the core failure mode of centralized control: Hayek's dispersed knowledge problem. Central planning fails not because planners are incompetent but because the information required to coordinate an economy is distributed across millions of actors making context-dependent decisions. No central planner could aggregate and process this information fast enough to match the efficiency of distributed markets. This is why the Soviet economy produced surpluses of goods nobody wanted and shortages of goods everybody needed.

This constraint was structural, not contingent. It applied to every historical case of authoritarian lock-in:
- The Soviet Union lasted 69 years but collapsed when economic inefficiency exceeded the system's capacity to maintain control
- The Ming Dynasty maintained the Haijin maritime ban for centuries but at enormous opportunity cost — the world's most advanced navy abandoned because internal control was prioritized over external exploration
- The Roman Empire's centralization phase was stable for centuries but with declining institutional quality as central decision-making couldn't adapt to distributed local conditions

**How AI removes the constraint:**

Three specific AI capabilities attack the information-processing ceiling:

1. **Surveillance at marginal cost approaching zero.** Historical authoritarian states required massive human intelligence apparatuses. The Stasi employed approximately 1 in 63 East Germans as informants — a labor-intensive model that constrained the depth and breadth of monitoring. AI-powered surveillance (facial recognition, natural language processing of communications, behavioral prediction) reduces the marginal cost of monitoring each additional citizen toward zero while increasing the depth of analysis beyond what human agents could achieve.

2. **Enforcement via autonomous systems.** Historical enforcement required human intermediaries — soldiers, police, bureaucrats — who could defect, resist, or simply fail to execute orders. Autonomous enforcement systems (AI-powered drones, automated content moderation, algorithmic access control) execute without the possibility of individual conscience or collective resistance. The human intermediary was the weak link in every historical authoritarian system; AI removes it.

3. **Central planning viability.** If AI can process distributed information at sufficient scale, Hayek's dispersed knowledge problem may not hold. This doesn't mean central planning becomes optimal — it means the economic collapse that historically ended authoritarian systems may not occur. A sufficiently capable AI-assisted central planner could achieve economic performance competitive with distributed markets, eliminating the primary mechanism through which historical authoritarian systems failed.

**Exit path closure:**

If all three capabilities develop sufficiently:
- **Military defeat** becomes less likely when autonomous defense systems don't require the morale and loyalty of human soldiers
- **Economic collapse** becomes less likely if AI-assisted planning overcomes the information-processing constraint
- **Institutional decay** becomes less likely if AI-powered monitoring detects and corrects degradation in real time

This doesn't mean authoritarian lock-in is inevitable — it means the cost of achieving and maintaining it drops dramatically, making it accessible to actors who previously lacked the institutional capacity for sustained centralized control.

## Challenges

- The claim that AI "solves" Hayek's knowledge problem overstates current and near-term AI capability. Processing distributed information at civilization-scale in real time is far beyond current systems. The claim is about trajectory, not current state.
- Economic performance is not the only determinant of regime stability. Legitimacy, cultural factors, and external geopolitical dynamics also matter. AI surveillance doesn't address legitimacy crises.
- The Stasi comparison anchors the argument in a specific historical case. Modern authoritarian states (China's social credit system, Russia's internet monitoring) are intermediate cases — more capable than the Stasi, less capable than the AI ceiling this claim describes. The progression from historical to current to projected is a gradient, not a binary.
- Autonomous enforcement systems still require human-designed objectives and maintenance. The "no individual conscience" argument assumes the system operates as designed — but failure modes in autonomous systems could create their own instabilities.

---

Relevant Notes:
- [[AI accelerates existing Molochian dynamics by removing bottlenecks not creating new misalignment because the competitive equilibrium was always catastrophic and friction was the only thing preventing convergence]] — authoritarian lock-in is one outcome of accelerated Molochian dynamics
- [[four restraints prevent competitive dynamics from reaching catastrophic equilibrium and AI specifically erodes physical limitations and bounded rationality leaving only coordination as defense]] — lock-in exploits the erosion of restraint #2 (physical limitations on surveillance/enforcement)
- [[three paths to superintelligence exist but only collective superintelligence preserves human agency]] — lock-in via AI superintelligence eliminates human agency by construction

Topics:
- [[_map]]
