AI will be the consummation of bureaucracy as regime-type. The official, Weberian appeal of bureaucracy is that it takes discretion out of the hands of individuals, who may abuse it, and subjects decisions to procedures that will be fair and neutral. It depends on having a comprehensive representation of the field to be governed, so one can subject its various parts to a rational calculus. But the conceit that one has such a representation in hand is almost always a fiction, nicely illustrated by the effectiveness of “work to rule” strikes. […]
Bureaucracies build their legitimacy on the idea that they have rendered the field of forces perfectly legible, and can therefore exert a perfect mastery over them. It ain’t so.