Mr. Edsall contributes weekly essays from Washington on politics, demographics and inequality.
Sixteen years ago, Peter Thiel, the multibillionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, was strikingly prescient. Speaking at the 2010 Libertopia conference in San Diego, Thiel, who would later go on to bankroll JD Vance's entry into politics, told the gathering:
We could never win an election on getting certain things because we were in such a small minority, but maybe you could actually unilaterally change the world without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people who are never going to agree with you through technological means, and this is where I think technology is this incredible alternative to politics.
Sometime in the not-too-distant future, Thiel and his tech allies may well have no need to win an election to exert control of the United States and other nations.
As artificial intelligence, led by Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI and Anthropic, drives to become the nation's dominant industry, one of the most pressing questions is how technology is affecting -- if not supplanting -- politics, potentially diminishing the centrality of elections.
Even more important: Will A.I. continue to increase the concentration of market, political and cultural power undermining democratic control of the economic and social order? To what degree will A.I. exacerbate inequality?
And will A.I., empowered to operate beyond the reach of public institutions and the electorate, in effect transfer government control and regulatory authority to private corporations, political cadres or both?
These adverse outcomes are not certainties. They depend on decisions made in Congress, state and local governments and corporate boardrooms, as well as how actual humans respond.
While those decisions have not, and may never be, made, the A.I. industry is racing ahead at high speed. A 2025 Federal Reserve report, "The State of AI Competition in Advanced Economies," by Alex Haag, found:
The United States made early, outsized investments in computing, software and databases, with annual real investment in these areas growing over tenfold from 1995 to 2021, far outpacing advanced foreign economy peers, whose growth was two- to fourfold. These early investments provided the computing power, networks and hardware that positioned the United States to lead early in A.I.-related innovation and diffusion.
In a 2023 essay, "Rebalancing AI," Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, economists at M.I.T., argued:
The critical question of the new era of A.I. is whether this technology will primarily accelerate the existing trend of automation without the offsetting force of good job creation -- particularly for noncollege-educated workers -- or whether it will instead enable the introduction of new labor-complementary tasks for workers with diverse skill sets and a wide range of educational backgrounds.
In the three years since Acemoglu and Johnson wrote, it has become apparent that A.I. poses not only a threat to a wide range of jobs but it also has the potential to capture markets and political systems -- especially if given free rein to do so without legislative or regulatory supervision.