The Accountability Problem of the Application of Artificial Intelligence in the Transhumanist Theory of Democracy

Following the exponential development in artificial intelligence technologies in the last two years, public and scholarly discourses have become pre-occupied with its potential impact and expected disruptions in the socio-economic context. One salient and increasingly discussed political aspect of the emergence of artificial intelligence is its impact on democracy. Although doomsaying and pessimism currently dominate expert opinions, there is an influential emerging ideology the advocates of which can be found among those who are leading the AI revolution in Big Tech. The relatively young, pro-science ideology of transhumanism – and particularly its techno-optimistic ideational branch called extropianism - proposes the merge of the human biological existence with technology through which humanity can transcend its biological constraints, greatly improve the human condition and evolve into a posthuman form of existence. But transhumanists also understand that these disruptive changes and the Transhumanist political theorists are outspoken about the fallacies of liberal democracy and put forward novel ideas about how to improve it with the help of artificial intelligence. Transhumanists are interested in how to ameliorate the quality of democratic decision-making and how to better hold accountable those responsible for the implementation of these decisions. They pin their hopes in the use of artificial intelligence to offer a scalable, well-functioning, improved system of governance. The paper will present the main transhumanist proposals regarding the application of AI in the democratic political system based on the works of the most salient transhumanist theorists such as FM Esfendiary, Zoltan Istvan, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, David Wood, and James Hughes. After outlining the main transhumanist ideas, I will argue that the widespread involvement of artificial (general) intelligence in all three levels of policy-making - preparation, decision and supervision - is problematic in several ways, but most notably because it raises numerous accountability issues. I intend to explore these issues from a multidimensional perspective that I draw from Robert Dahl’s polyarchy theory and the recent scholarly literature on accountability. This relatively broad approach is required as the concept of accountability has many definitions and descriptions. I will analyse the issues with the transhumanist proposal for the instalment of AGI into the democratic institutional arrangement from the 1) horizontal and vertical, 2) political and legal, 3) social and 4) diagonal accountability perspectives. Within half a century, transhumanism has developed from a fringe movement of a few sci-fi loving "nerds" into a full-fledged global political movement and a thin ideology whose advocates can be found in key positions of the economy, technology and science, and who exert unprecedented and sometimes less transparent influence on policy decisions in liberal democracies. Therefore it is essential to better understand the political theory of this emerging ideology as it will likely dominate not only the AI-focused techno-scientific disruption, but it may also define the upcoming and inevitable political changes. I hope that my paper will contribute to the scholarly discussion about accountability and the theory of democracy.