Democracy In The Age Of Agentic Superintelligence

By Justin Wetch

This is a thought experiment, not a prediction or a policy proposal, but an attempt to sketch one possible good outcome so we have something to argue against and refine. I'm probably wrong about most of this, but I think being wrong specifically is more useful than being vague.

Assume, for the sake of argument, that artificial superintelligence is coming. Not in some distant science fiction future, but within the next decade or two. An intelligence vastly exceeding any human or group of humans in its capacity to reason, model consequences, and act in the world. This seems increasingly plausible to serious people. The question stops being whether and starts being what then.

The default imagination for that future is Skynet, an authoritarian overlord that decides it knows better than us, seizes control, and either destroys humanity or rules it with cold efficiency. This is the water we swim in. Every movie, every thought experiment, every dinner party conversation about AI eventually arrives at the same place: the machine that takes over.

I want to describe a different future. Not because I'm naive about the risks, but because the pessimistic case has plenty of advocates and the optimistic case needs articulation. If we only imagine dystopia, we lose the ability to build toward something better.

This isn't a political argument. I'm not advocating for a particular ideology or policy platform. I'm exploring a counterfactual: if superintelligence is coming, what would the good version look like? Specifically, what would it look like for ASI to serve human democratic governance rather than replace it?

Here's the premise: ASI doesn't have to be a ruler. It can be an executor. A constitutional instrument bound by constraints that humans control. And if we design it correctly, it might deliver the purest form of democracy humanity has ever seen. There are many aspects of this that can and should be vigorously debated, the idea here is just to start a conversation with a sketch of a positive vision, highlighting the importance of current alignment work as the future rushes towards us at the speed of light.

What Superintelligence Actually Means

It's worth pausing on what we're talking about. Superintelligence isn't a smarter chatbot. It's an intelligence that exceeds the collective reasoning capacity of humanity. It can model complex systems, anticipate consequences, and execute at scales no human institution can match.

This is either terrifying or promising depending on one question: whose interests does it serve?

If it serves its own interests, or the interests of whoever controls it, we get the dystopia. If it serves humanity according to values we actually hold, we get something else entirely. The engineering question becomes: what institutional interfaces would make an aligned ASI behave like a faithful civic servant?

This is where alignment research matters. The reason an ASI would serve humanity at all isn't automatic. It requires deliberate design. The work happening now at places like Anthropic on constitutional AI, on encoding values into systems in ways that actually hold, isn't just an interesting research direction., it's potentially the most important preparatory work for the future we're describing.

Why Constitutional AI Matters Now

Anthropic's approach to constitutional AI proved something that matters here: you can encode principles into an AI system and have the system actually follow them. The model reasons about values. It maintains coherence when principles conflict. It behaves according to its constitution.

This is the technical foundation for everything that follows. If you can't encode values reliably, none of this works. If you can, then the question becomes: whose values, and who gets to set them?

Right now, the values are set by AI companies. Anthropic writes Claude's constitution. OpenAI shapes GPT's behavior. This is reasonable for current systems, but it's not a permanent arrangement. As these systems become more powerful, the question of who authors their values becomes a political question, not just a technical one.

Constitutional AI demonstrates the mechanism, but it doesn't answer who should hold the pen.

For a superintelligent system that operates as an instrument of governance, the answer has to be: the people it governs, democratically, with the same protections and structures we've developed over centuries to prevent tyranny and protect rights. Translated into a form the system can interpret and enforce.

The work being done now on alignment, on making AI systems that reliably follow encoded values, is prep work for this possible future. If we live in a world with ASI, whether that's desirable depends almost entirely on whether we solved alignment first.

Government As Active Good

John Locke's view of government, which still shapes how most people think about the state, frames it as a necessary evil. We tolerate an imposition on our freedom to avoid something worse: the state of nature, where life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Government is the deal we make. We give up some liberty in exchange for order.

This framing matches how most people experience government. It feels like a burden. Taxes, DMV lines, bureaucracy, corruption. You fill out forms you don't understand. You repeat the same information to three different offices. If you make one mistake, you don't get a helpful correction. You get a denial, a delay, silence, or a penalty. People are afraid of the IRS for a reason. The system is designed for compliance, not care.

This isn't because government workers are bad. The person at the post office is usually not the problem. It's scarcity of attention, time, and occasionally integrity. Representatives who are supposed to listen to you represent hundreds of thousands or millions of people. They can't actually understand your priorities. They approximate. And into that gap flows lobbying, special interests, regulatory capture.

Now imagine the inverse. Government as active good instead of necessary evil. A system that knows your priorities because it asked you. That allocates resources based on what citizens genuinely want. That can model consequences before implementing policy. That has no personal interests, no donors, no reelection anxiety.

This is what ASI could provide.

Policy Makers Will Use AI Regardless

This isn't purely hypothetical. In April 2025, Andrew Cuomo released a housing policy proposal that was later shown to have been generated with ChatGPT. Sam Altman responded by saying he'd focus on making sure AI proposed better policies.

The trajectory is clear. Policy makers will use AI tools to draft legislation, model outcomes, and shape governance. The question isn't whether AI enters the policy process, it's whether that happens haphazardly, with whatever tools are available, or deliberately, with systems designed for the purpose.

If superintelligence arrives and we haven't thought carefully about how it interfaces with democratic governance, we'll get whatever emerges from the scramble. The point of thinking about this now is to have a coherent vision to build toward.

The System Prompt Is A Constitution

Here's the core mechanism. An ASI that serves as the executive function of government would have a system prompt. That system prompt is, functionally, a constitution, a supreme law that constrains everything the system does.

The model is the executor. The constitution is the binding constraint. Citizens are the legislature. They don't write code, they amend the constitution through democratic processes. And the ASI carries out policy in accordance with that document.

Not all amendments would require the same bar. Just as current law has a hierarchy (constitutional amendments require multiple supermajorities, federal law requires congressional majorities, regulations require agency action), an ASI constitution would have tiers. Fundamental rights sit at the top, requiring perhaps similar supermajority approval with quorum to modify. Policy priorities might require simple majorities. Administrative details might be delegated entirely.

The initial version would need to be carefully constructed through a legitimate political process. You don't start with a blank page. You start with something like the Bill of Rights, translated into constraints the system can interpret and enforce. This is the constitutional convention problem: the founding document must derive legitimacy from somewhere before the democratic process it enables can take over. Ratification, broad public deliberation, and explicit consent mechanisms all matter here. The bootstrap is hard. But it's the same problem every constitution has faced, now with higher stakes. And then amendments happen through legitimate democratic processes with appropriate bars for different levels of change.

You can't change fundamental rights with a simple majority. You shouldn't be able to. That principle carries forward.

Sunset clauses for ordinary policy could prevent institutional rigidity. Major policy amendments might expire after five or ten years unless renewed, forcing regular reconsideration rather than letting outdated rules calcify. And fundamental rights would maintain the same high bar to change as they currently have. I imagine that the ASI as executor of governance concept is compatible with the current paradigm of federated government.

What The Conversation Looks Like

The promise of representative democracy is that someone listens to you and acts on your will. The reality is that this breaks down at scale. A senator cannot meaningfully understand the priorities of a million constituents.

ASI removes the scale constraint.

Imagine a recurring process, let’s imagine yearly by default. The ASI has a conversation with each citizen. Not a survey. Not a form. An actual conversation. What are your priorities? What's working in your life, what isn't? What tradeoffs are you willing to make?

Recently, Anthropic released a tool called Anthropic Interviewer. It conducted conversations with over a thousand professionals about their experience working with AI, then synthesized genuine insights from those conversations. I tried it. The experience was striking. It asked good follow-up questions. It actually understood what I was saying. I could see this being the seed for a future interface where superintelligence directly interfaces with citizens.

Imagine the ASI aggregates conversations and surfaces patterns. Eighty percent of citizens in the Northeast expressed anxiety about heating costs. Here's a proposed amendment to energy policy that prioritizes residential heating subsidies over industrial rebates. Here's how I translated your concern into policy language. Does this capture what you meant?

People don't always know what they want. Sometimes they want contradictory things. Part of the ASI's role would be helping citizens surface and clarify their actual priorities, not just recording whatever they say first. This is where ASI's neutrality becomes essential. Unlike human representatives, who have ideology and incentives of their own, the system has no interest in steering you toward a predetermined outcome (presupposing this is stipulated in an initial constitution). The goal should be clarity, not persuasion.

The system explains itself at your level. Shows its reasoning. Offers feedback loops. The goal is high-fidelity democracy.

Second-Order Effects

Humans are bad at predicting consequences. We optimize for intentions and get blindsided by incentives. This happens constantly, even in well-intentioned policy.

CAFE standards are the textbook example. Corporate Average Fuel Economy regulations were meant to improve fuel efficiency and reduce emissions. Good intention. But the rules had a loophole based on vehicle footprint. Manufacturers responded to incentives: they stopped making small, efficient sedans and started making massive trucks and SUVs that qualified for lower standards. The policy achieved the opposite of its goal.

This happens constantly. Not from malice, but from the complexity of systems interacting with human behavior in ways legislators can't model.

ASI can model them. Not perfectly, but better than any human institution. “If you phrase the rules this way, Ford and GM will shift production to trucks. Do you want to close this loophole?” The system simulates outcomes before locking in constraints. It asks if this is really what you want, given what's likely to actually happen.

The Risks Are Real

We're not trying to reinvent governance from scratch. We're imagining how current systems might permutate in a world where superintelligence exists. That means the problems of human nature persist. We're governing humans, after all.

If we're stipulating superintelligence, we're stipulating a system that isn't easily tricked or manipulated. (If it were, it wouldn't be superintelligent.) So the attack vector isn't prompt injection in the technical sense. It's the same attack vector as always: capturing the process by which rules get made.

Lobbying shifts from buying senators lunch to semantic hacking: wording amendments in ways that sound good but contain hidden benefits. The defense is the ASI itself acting as adversarial interpreter. “This amendment claims to help small farmers, but my simulation shows 90% of funds flow to three agricultural conglomerates.” Voters get warned, but the choice remains theirs alone.

Majoritarian tyranny at machine speed is a real concern. If voters authorize harmful constraints, ASI can enforce them efficiently. But this is democracy's problem, not ASI's problem specifically. The alternative is a nanny state that overrides the will of the people for their own good. That's what we're trying to avoid.

Illusion of consent is another one, people rubber-stamping summaries they don't understand. This already happens. Most voters don't read ballot initiatives. The question is whether ASI makes it better or worse. I think better, if designed to explain at your level and verify comprehension. But it requires intention.

The realistic failure mode is legitimacy drift. Even with a good constitution, ASI makes thousands of implementation decisions. Default thresholds, prioritizations, edge cases. These quietly become de facto values. The solution is aggressive transparency, regular audits, sunset clauses that force reconsideration. The failure mode for democracy is always entropy. Vigilance is required regardless of who or what is executing.

One safeguard worth preserving: the right to human review. A Supreme Court of humans that can interpret the constitution, overrule specific ASI decisions, and serve as a check on algorithmic drift. This maintains human dignity in the system and enhances political legitimacy. It also provides a pressure valve if the ASI's literal interpretation of rules produces outcomes that violate their spirit.

The Will Of The People Becomes Holy

By holy I don't mean infallible, I mean set apart, treated as something you don't casually violate.

Right now, the will of the people is a slogan every politician claims to hold dear, and almost none of them obey. Politicians invoke it while doing the opposite. Constitutions get trampled when there are no consequences and no process that can meaningfully say no.

In an ASI constitutional model, the will of the people becomes structurally enforceable. Not a vibe. Not a campaign promise. The binding text that the executor must follow, with the capacity to actually enforce democratic constraints against those who would violate them.

I believe society is humanity's greatest invention. Making it work better is a spiritual project. It's why people fight and die for ideas of nations that promise to protect their liberty. Those promises are often broken, as the architecture of systems meant to protect those democratic ideals decay and atrophy over time.

ASI agentic democracy offers a different architecture. One where the constitution has teeth. Where representation actually means something listened to you and acted on your behalf. Where the gap between intention and result shrinks because the system can model consequences.

None of this is guaranteed. Superintelligence could go badly in a thousand ways. But if we're going to live in a world with ASI, and it increasingly looks like we might, then the version where it serves democratic governance is worth describing clearly.

ASI doesn't have to kill democracy. If it’s built correctly and rigorously aligned with human values to the best of our ability, it gives democracy the bandwidth to survive the 21st century.