> an AI-powered State, with fewer and fewer people at the top in control, or maybe no one really in control, not even the leaders, perpetuating itself against a

> an AI-powered State, with fewer and fewer people at the top in control, or maybe no one really in control, not even the leaders, perpetuating itself against all competing organized thought Yeah, this is a serious risk. I don't quite think you have the right solutions but you've certainly identified the problem. I think the solution to this kind of thing might be found in zero-knowledge technology. A good system doesn't just harvest all the data and basically hand it out to any hacker or alphabet agency. A good system should only hand out aspects of the data that are actually needed. You should not be able to run arbitrary queries, but rather queries like "were any of these 5 suspects within 1km of the crime scene". If the answer is "No", then you don't need to know where those people actually were.