Building Political Superintelligence - by Andy Hall

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Building Political Superintelligence<br>Amidst fears of dystopia, a blueprint for how we use AI to reinvent the way we govern ourselves<br>Andy Hall<br>Mar 26, 2026

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“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”<br>–Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776

Right now is a weird time to be a political economist. AI is straining our already brittle political institutions. We might lurch into a dystopia in which we live in the grips of a techno-leviathan, forced by our employers to train our own AI replacements, then kicked to the curb in a society organized to the benefit of a tiny number of people who control the machinery that controls the world.<br>It’s also an electric time to be a political economist. With each new paper my lab puts out, and with each new experimental prototype in self governance we build using tools we couldn’t imagine having even a year ago, I’m starting to believe that AI presents an extraordinary opportunity to rebuild our society so we can keep slouching down the narrow corridor towards utopia.<br>Thanks for reading Free Systems! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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Condorcet was an 18th century political economist and mathematician who, in his “Outlines of an historical view of the progress of the human mind,” traced the enlightenment and the rise of modern democracy straight back to printed books, for “they had opened so many doors to truth, which it was impossible ever to close again.”

What made the printing press so powerful, he explained, was that it “multiplies indefinitely, and at a small expense, copies of any work.” It lowered people’s cost of obtaining information and made information spread far and wide. And they used that knowledge to reshape society to their shared benefit.<br>AI is like the printing press, to a point. Instead of making information cheap and easily available, it makes intelligence cheap and easily available. That is, it not only serves users information, but it can find it for them, analyze it for them, and help them convert it into understanding. If we could transform society by spreading information, then we ought to be able to transform it more dramatically by spreading intelligence.<br>The rolling out of the printing press hadn’t been without its issues, to say the least. Condorcet lamented that “this epoch, more than all the rest, was blotted and disfigured with acts of atrocious cruelty.” Riots and mass slaughter. War. Propaganda. Book burning. The reformation. And it took two centuries, give or take, to work through them.<br>But Condorcet also reminds us that it brought extraordinary new understanding to the world. “The picture of the human race is still too dreary for the philosopher to contemplate it without extreme mortification; but he no longer despairs, since the dawn of brighter hopes is exhibited to his view.” It allowed us to reshape our society and our government, and in so doing, it helped us move beyond the very issues it had helped to stir up. Condorcet saw it, ultimately, as a bulwark against superstition and stupidity.<br>The case for political superintelligence

The more I work with and study AI, the more I believe it can give every human being on the planet access to a sort of political superintelligence, if we shape it right. And that intelligence, in turn, can make governments smarter and more effective, representatives more faithful, and institutions more responsive than anything we’ve built in over 2,000 years of experimenting with democracy. Intelligence, alone, will not solve all our political problems—many of which are rooted in conflicts of values and positions that no amount of intelligence can undo. But, like previous information revolutions, it can certainly help.<br>This time, we probably can’t afford 200 years to work through the disruptions it causes. And AI might be more complicated, because it’s more centralized. The printing press was fairly decentralized—many places eventually had them and could, at least in theory, print what they wanted. AI threatens to be far more centralized, with massive companies commanding enormous amounts of compute to produce AI models that, unlike physical books, exist in the cloud and can be altered on the fly from afar.<br>But this time, we also have a lot of advantages our forebears didn’t have at the time Gutenberg built his press in the 1440s. We know a lot more now. We have hundreds of years of experience with modern government and democracy, we have access to modern scientific techniques, large-scale data, powerful computers, and AI itself. We have tremendous tools we can bring to bear.

How do we use them most effectively to reinvent the way we govern ourselves as quickly and as powerfully as possible? This should be the research agenda for our time.<br>But if you listen to the public conversation around AI, you wouldn’t think any of this was possible. Instead, you’ll hear...