The biggest barrier to improving our civilisation in the 21st century is that narcissists and psychopaths are highly motivated to attain positions of power over others.
How do we prevent such scumbags from rising to the top:
Aptitude / personality tests in high-school? Perhaps people can become better over time.
Trust our elders / benevolent dictators for life? People can also become worse over time, lose their empathy for others once they are higher up the ladder.
It is a wicked problem to design systems that can resist / repel malign actors.
Full credit to all involved in Wikipedia for fighting the good fight.
How is that different from any other century? It doesn’t seem unique to the 21st century. Bad leaders who value power above virtue is part of the human condition.
Back in the 90s we all thought the internet would be the killer app to solve this problem once and for all, but look how that turned out.
Scale. A 15th century king might have been nominally in charge, but he couldn't exercise much authority without his various ranks of human minions, whose individual power weakened down the chain, and individual pushback increased.
Now a modern "king" has immense power and resources to affect everyone with very few easily replaceable lieutenants to dilute it, and AI is bound to be a magnifier of that power. They also have more insight into the population than a 15th century King could ever do -- they didn't know you existed, but a modern king knows everything from your movements to your shopping habits. From face recognition to tracking your browser's fingerprints that information is stored and logged permanently, to be mined and used whenever the kings want.
You're seriously underestimating what it means to have absolute power and spectacularly overestimating the influence of a bit of browser tracking. To equate the two is ridiculous – it's just not the same thing at all.
How do we prevent such scumbags from rising to the top:
Aptitude / personality tests in high-school? Perhaps people can become better over time.
Trust our elders / benevolent dictators for life? People can also become worse over time, lose their empathy for others once they are higher up the ladder.
It is a wicked problem to design systems that can resist / repel malign actors.
Full credit to all involved in Wikipedia for fighting the good fight.