Election Entertainment

Lead, follow, or get AI'd . . . Consider, for a moment, an old and unglamorous fact about our species. Long before we built parliaments, wrote constitutions, or even carved the first law into stone, we were primates arranging ourselves into troops. And every troop, from the baboons on the savanna to the earliest human bands crouched around a fire, discovered the same problem: someone had to decide when to move, when to fight, when to share the kill, and when to hoard it. Leadership never was an invention of civilization. It is older than civilization, older than language itself, written into the nervous systems of social animals a hundred million years before anyone thought to ask whether power corrupts. And yet we go on being surprised by it. Every human hierarchy, given enough time, seems to drift toward the same failure. Power collects at the top, and the top grows heavy. The people making decisions become, by slow and almost imperceptible degrees, insulated from the people livi...