Political Machines: Artificial Intelligence and the Remaking of Statecraft

Summary When governments delegate decisions to algorithms, they build political machines: automated systems that mediate how states govern their citizens and how they conduct relations with one another. Drawing on the book Political Automation (Oxford University Press, 2025) and two decades of applied work with the UN, World Bank, and G7 governments, this talk examines how AI is entering the core functions of the state, from welfare administration to diplomacy and crisis management. It focuses on foreign policy and statecraft, where AI now shapes intelligence assessment, negotiation, and the simulation of stakeholder behavior across borders. These tools promise speed and scale, but they also embed particular values and biases into decisions that carry real consequences for citizens and for international order. The lecture asks who controls these systems and what accountability looks like when political judgment is automated. It closes by considering how citizens might govern the machines that increasingly govern on their behalf, and points to one answer in the speaker's work building Dublr, a platform that generates synthetic populations of real stakeholder groups so that the voices of those affected by political machines can inform policy at the same speed and scale at which they govern.