The algorithm has already chosen by Edoardo Moretti

We like our fears about artificial intelligence served in futuristic packaging. Killer robots. Conscious machines. A cold metallic supermind plotting humanity’s irrelevance. These stories are comforting because they postpone responsibility. They suggest the real danger is tomorrow, abstract and distant, something to be handled by future heroes, future laws, future wisdom.

But the real emergency is not waiting for us in the shadows of science fiction. It is already sitting in government offices, police departments, border checkpoints and data centers. It hums quietly. It files reports. It flags faces. It predicts behavior. And it obeys whoever owns the switch.

Artificial intelligence has not arrived as a rogue intelligence. It has arrived as a loyal employee.

Around the world, authoritarian systems have found in AI the perfect partner, tireless, scalable, and morally silent. Where older regimes needed armies of informants, mountains of paperwork and oceans of fear, modern ones need algorithms. Surveillance that once required human labor now unfolds automatically, invisibly, relentlessly. Cameras do not sleep. Databases do not forget. Pattern-recognition software does not hesitate.

This is not about a hypothetical future where machines rule humans. It is about a present where machines help humans rule other humans more efficiently than ever before.

AI turns repression into infrastructure.

A dissident once had to be followed. Now their phone does the work. A protest once had to be infiltrated. Now it is mapped before it forms. A journalist once had to be intimidated after publication. Now their risk profile is calculated in advance. Entire populations are reduced to streams of data points, movement, speech, purchases, associations, quietly assembled into portraits more intimate than any diary.

And because the process is automated, it feels neutral. Technical. Bloodless. That is its most dangerous feature. When repression wears a uniform, people recognize it. When it wears code, it passes as progress.

Authoritarians understand something many democracies still pretend not to, technology does not dilute power; it concentrates it. AI rewards those who already control data, infrastructure, and enforcement. It amplifies asymmetry. The watcher becomes omnipresent. The watched become predictable.

Even worse, AI offers the seductive promise of “objective” governance. Decisions are framed as mathematical outcomes rather than political choices. A citizen is not arrested because they are inconvenient but because an algorithm rated them as “high risk.” A neighborhood is not over-policed due to prejudice but due to “predictive modeling.” Responsibility dissolves into technical jargon. The system did it.

This creates a new kind of authoritarianism, cleaner, quieter, easier to export. You no longer need ideological devotion when you have software licenses. You do not need mass rallies when you have behavioral data. You do not need fear shouted from rooftops when you can insert it silently into daily routines, a delayed loan, a blocked train ticket, a sudden tax inspection, an unexplained travel ban.

Control becomes granular. Personalized. Continuous. And unlike old dictatorships, this one does not always announce itself. It hides behind convenience. Behind efficiency. Behind safety.

Facial recognition to “prevent crime.” Social monitoring to “maintain harmony.” Data collection to “optimize services.” Each step is small. Each justification reasonable. Each loss of freedom framed as a technical upgrade. By the time people notice the cage, they are already living inside it.

The tragedy is that this machinery is not limited to distant regimes with unfamiliar flags. The architecture is being tested everywhere. Democracies flirt with the same tools, the same databases, the same shortcuts, often promising they will be used responsibly, temporarily, exceptionally.