EVs are poised to age like smartphones. For most of its short life, my Tesla Model 3 has aged beautifully. Since I bought the car, in 2019, it has received a number of new features simply by updating its software. My navigation system no longer just directs me to EV chargers along my route--it also shows me, in real time, how many plugs are free. With the push of a button, I can activate "Car Wash Mode," and the Tesla will put itself in neutral and disable the windshield wipers.

To walk into the lion's den once might be considered foolhardy. To do so again after being mauled by the lion? Six years ago I gave a talk at Ted, the world's leading technology and ideas conference. It led to a gruelling lawsuit and a series of consequences that reverberate through my life to this day. And last week I returned. To give another talk that would incorporate some of my experience: a Ted Talk about being sued for giving a Ted Talk, and how the lessons I'd learned from surviving all that were a model for surviving "broligarchy" – a concept I first wrote about in the Observer in July last year: the alignment of Silicon Valley and autocracy, and a kind of power the world has never seen before.

Russia's savage, imperialistic and childish war on Ukraine has been said by democracies to be a battle between democracies and autocracies, the free world and the the unfree. And it is the opening of the battle to come between two very different sets of values. The other, more subtle, nefarious, insidious and perhaps deadlier in some ways, war is that of Artificial Intelligence. The abuse of AI has the capability to destroy human agency, take away any sense of free will, devastate human rights, divide societies and turn people under its thumb into automatons to serve the elites of corrupt, autocratic and dictatorial countries. To see how autocracies will use AI to subjugate and destroy any sense of human agency in their populations, we only have to look at how they've done so with social media.

Generative AI is poised to be the free world's next great gift to authoritarians. The viral launch of ChatGPT -- a system with eerily human-like capabilities in composing essays, poetry and computer code -- has awakened the world's dictators to the transformative power of generative AI to create unique, compelling content at scale. But the fierce debate that has ensued among Western industry leaders on the risks of releasing advanced generative AI tools has largely missed where their effects are likely to be most pernicious: within autocracies. AI companies and the U.S. government alike must institute stricter norms for the development of tools like ChatGPT in full view of their game-changing potential for the world's authoritarians -- before it is too late. So far, concerns around generative AI and autocrats have mostly focused on how these systems can turbocharge Chinese and Russian propaganda efforts in the United States.

If the key resource is data, then China, with its billion-plus citizens and lax protections against state surveillance, seems destined to win. Kai-Fu Lee, a famous computer scientist, has claimed that data is the new oil, and China the new OPEC. If superior technology is what provides the edge, however, then the United States, with its world class university system and talented workforce, still has a chance to come out ahead. For either country, pundits assume that superiority in AI will lead naturally to broader economic and military superiority. But thinking about AI in terms of a race for dominance misses the more fundamental ways in which AI is transforming global politics.

As Ben Buchanan and Andrew Imbrie note in their recent book, "AI's [artificial intelligence's] new capabilities are both marvels and distractions." The marvel versus distraction dichotomy is an interesting one: due to the two possible natures of AI, the question of whether advances in AI will favor autocracies or democracies has come to the forefront of the tech and global power debate. On the one hand, AI has the potential to tackle some of the world's most challenging social problems, such as issues related to healthcare, the environment, and crisis response, leading some to believe that democracies will wield AI to create a future for human good. On the other hand, some fear AI-enabled surveillance, information campaigns, and cyber operations will empower existing tyrants and produce new ones, leading to a future where autocracies thrive and democracies struggle. By examining how advances in AI capabilities in the near future could benefit autocracies and democracies, as well as how these advances could benefit both, I believe that AI is likely to favor autocracies in the near term, but under one necessary condition: that democracies are negligent in their response to autocracies' destructive use of AI.

The Reviewer -- James Voorhees is a cyber analyst with General Dynamics Information Technology. He has extensive experience as an analyst and engineer working on cybersecurity, mostly for federal agencies. He holds a PhD from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and is the author of Dialogue Sustained: The Multilevel Peace Process and the Dartmouth Conference. BOOK REVIEW -- Artificial intelligence (AI) is all the rage these days. For some, it is a technology that promises transformative progress.

After clearing the institute's security, I was told to wait in a lobby monitored by cameras. On its walls were posters of China's most consequential postwar leaders. He looked serene, as though satisfied with having freed China from the Western yoke. Next to him was a fuzzy black-and-white shot of Deng Xiaoping visiting the institute in his later years, after his economic reforms had set China on a course to reclaim its traditional global role as a great power. The lobby's most prominent poster depicted Xi Jinping in a crisp black suit.

The first tactic in the digital authoritarian toolkit is to establish information walls through fear, friction, or flooding. While employing traditional methods of repression and punishment to censor through fear, digital authoritarians also make it more difficult for citizens to access information through internet shutdowns, firewalls, and paywalls. In addition, digital dictators target traditional democratic values and freedoms by flooding the internet and other outlets for speech, press, and assembly. Inauthentic accounts ("bots"), deepfakes, and new tools of digital propaganda help states amplify narratives, build polarization, and increase "us versus them" divisions. With information walls, regimes can shape public opinion in newly-sophisticated ways by establishing state control over the messages their population can access--and the information they do not.