Genuine question. It seems like a topic that isn’t discussed in-depth often anywhere I can find online.
To be clear, I’m talking about technocracy as in policies are driven by those with the relevant skills (instead of popularity, skills in campaigning, etc.).
So no, I don’t necessarily want a mechanical engineer for president. I do want a team of economists to not tank the economy with tariffs, though.
And I do want a social scientist to have a hand in evaluating policy ideas by experts. A psychologist might have novel insights into how to improve educational policy, but the social scientist would help with the execution side so it doesn’t flop or go off the rails.
The more I look at successful organizations like J-PAL, which trains government personnel how to conduct randomized controlled trials on programs (among other things), the more it seems like we should at least have government officials who have some evidence base and sound reasoning for their policies. J-PAL is the reason why several governments scaled back pilots that didn’t work and instead allocated funds to scale programs that did work.
That would be something like an AI technocracy where the AI owns itself and is considered as a living human being for all intents and purposes.
If the AI’s continued existence was predicated on them ruling fairly and maximizing happiness without causing any kind of like asimovian technocratic exterminations, then you might have a chance at something working like that.
The problem is the people who think they are smart enough to pull off such a specific combination of events to make something like that possible are not smart enough to pull it off and will kill us all if given the opportunity.
That would be the ideal, but even without AI, you can still have a society that is more technocratic-leaning than it is now. It’s not like technocracies were historically impossible before AI existed.
I agree about the problem you mentioned. I would not trust someone who is proposing their AI will magically fix all of society’s problems.