Billionaire technologist and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has publicly cautioned against this temptation while acknowledging why it is on the rise. When democracies fail to deliver, he notes, people naturally look for something—anything—that promises competence.

Surveys from 2025 even show that many citizens now trust artificial intelligence (AI) systems to make decisions on their behalf more than their elected representatives. It's a striking shift, but it reveals something more troubling than the technology itself.

The real crisis facing America and the West is not technological; it is moral. Democracies do not weaken because their tools become outdated; they weaken when the people who sustain them lose confidence, clarity, and inner direction.

Even if we built the most advanced AI-driven civic platforms—and even if we used algorithms to scale up deliberation or streamline participation—we would still fail unless we first addressed the deeper problem: a free government cannot survive a morally disoriented public. No algorithm, no matter how sophisticated, can supply virtue where none exists.

Yet the idea of "algocracy" (government by algorithm) continues to seduce a society increasingly overwhelmed by disorder. Algorithms promise what human institutions struggle to offer: speed, consistency, neutrality, freedom from corruption, and relief from the churn of political conflict.

In an era of distrust and institutional decay, those promises feel like rescue. But they are built on a misunderstanding of both human nature and machine logic. An algorithm can optimize efficiency, but efficiency is not wisdom. Optimization is not judgment. And judgment—moral, historical, human judgment—is the core function of democratic life.

When citizens lose their sense of agency or become exhausted by polarization, they begin to look for something outside themselves that can restore order. In previous eras, that "something" was a strongman. Today, it is a statistical system. The impulse is the same: to outsource responsibility to a seemingly neutral power.