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So today there was an assassination attempt on prime minister of my country of Slovakia - Robert Fico. It happened during his tradition of government meetings across the country, in small coal town of Handlová. He went to greet his supporters when a 71 years old man shot him several times, he was then carried away and sent to hospital in critical condition, he undertook complicated surgery and his fate is still not known.
All the leaders sent their condolences from Putin to Macron, Biden and Ursula von der Leyen, all condemning the violence. The same for Slovak political leaders. Of course, Slovak reddit as a bastion of more progressive people could not hold their glee, most upvoted comments for one of the threads were of the like of "JFK from Wish" or "this is what you get from hate". I mention it just as a litmus test of how more progressive people think in Slovakia and to be frank I find it disgusting. As you can gather, Fico is viewed as a populist and Slovak Orban and pro Putin and all that, despite major differences that may take too long to explain. But he definitely is described as archenemy by the strongest opposition party literally called "Progressive Slovakia" here. You probably get the picture.
As for the assassin, to me he seems like an unhinged man that was supporting a lot of fringe movements from right-wing movements to talking against the current government as leaked by one policeman who released a video of the perpetration in custody, where the assassin ranted something about recent law regarding the state broadcasting and overall disagreement with the government.
At this point all I have to say is that I am in shock. Something like that never happened in 40 years history of my country. I see already a lot of spin including Guardian and other foreign press as well as very strong proclamations from parties in government about "political warfare". One thing is apparent, the politics in my country changed and not for the better. I think there will be some ripples also elsewhere, ranging from "stochastic terrorism" by having somebody radicalized by media to just politicians being more alerted to this kind of thing happening. There is also EU parliament elections in couple of weeks and this is something that may have more impact there.
That is all for now, I am not sure if this will be deleted as it is not probably quite a topic for some extra thread, but also not your cookie cutter idea thrown here for discussion. But it is widely relevant on so many levels even outside of Slovak politics so I think there may be some good discussion bellow. I may add some edit and I am willing to anybody else to update bellow if let's say Fico's condition changes in the upcoming hours when I am asleep.
The next decade will be quite "interesting" if political assassinations became as common as they were in 19th century. Japan, Slovakia, who's next..
TBH I wouldn't mind an AI leader as long as it was aligned with my political beliefs. Added benefit is that you can't assassinate an AI (backups exist everywhere) so people will stop trying. Imagine a system where people elect parliment and then the parliment chooses an AI leader for the country from a set of models. What the AI says the country should do happens unless parliment overrules it with a supermajority, in which case they can elect a new model to be the leader.
Alternatively a tyranny like the thirty tyrants period of Athens is also a decent model as long as the tyrants genuinely wish to help the country instead of enriching themselves or exacting vengeance on the populace (as the real life tyrants did). Again this reduces the incentives to kill a tyrant because killing a single person doesn't change much and another tyrant can be elected very soon after. This is doubly so if the Tyrants form a pact saying they'll vote in favour of the policies of any of their fellow tyrants who was killed for politically motivated reasons (which they have an incentive to form as none of them wants to be assassinated).
An AI leader anything like our current models would just be a figurehead controlled by whoever writes the prompts and other input data. It would be extremely vulnerable to prompt manipulation, hacking, straight-up lying from those in power (who handles the AI, ensures its model hasn't been changed, and reports its output?), etc. Even were it not vulnerable to those things, it would have to get far more powerful to be a capable leader.
What are the benefits? Well it might be more consistent, allowing people to know exactly what their leader's plans are and act accordingly, but that's also a downside. An enemy actor can simulate their opposition and act with near-certainty. Terrorism becomes far more effective.
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