FLORENCE: When Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama recently announced his new cabinet, it was not his choice of finance minister or foreign minister that gained the most attention. The biggest news was Rama’s appointment of an AI-powered bot as the new minister of public procurement.

“Diella” will oversee and allocate all public tenders that the government assigns to private firms. “[It] is the first member of government who is not physically present, but virtually created by artificial intelligence,” Rama declared. She will help make Albania “a country where public procurement is 100% corruption-free.”

At once evocative and provocative, the move reminds us that those who place the greatest hope in technology tend to be among those with the least confidence in human nature. But more to the point, the appointment of Diella is evidence that the supposed cure for whatever ails democracy is increasingly taking the form of digital authoritarianism. Such interventions might appeal to Silicon Valley oligarchs, but democrats everywhere should be alarmed.

The conceptual basis for an AI minister lies in how technophiles imagine humanity’s relationship with the future. “Techno-solutionists” treat political problems that normally require deliberation as if they were engineering challenges that could be resolved purely through technical means. As we saw in the United States during Elon Musk’s brief stint at the helm of DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency), technology is offered as a substitute for politics and political decision-making.

The implication of AI-administered governance is that democracy will become redundant. Digital technocracy consists of technology developers claiming the authority to decide on the rules we must abide by and thus the conditions under which we will live. The checks and balances defended by Locke, Montesquieu, and America’s founders become obstacles to efficient decision-making. Why bother with such institutions when we can leverage the power of digital tools and algorithms? Under digital technocracy, debate is a waste of time, regulation is a brake on progress, and popular sovereignty is merely the consecration of incompetence.

To be sure, no sane person can deny that technological innovation has solved many problems. Yet the great promise today’s tech overlords are holding out is not that they will solve problems so much as dissolve them. They deny the very idea of a problematic, uncertain, unpredictable future.

It is no coincidence that Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin were recently caught on a live microphone discussing immortality. To end aging is to save us from the future; it means not only avoiding what is yet to come, but escaping the burden of choice.

Having eliminated the indeterminacy that defines us, we would become beings to whom nothing can really happen. We would inhabit an eternal present, with no source of meaning beyond optimizing our living conditions, untroubled by uncertainty, controversy, or the risks associated with decision-making. We would achieve a humanity without humanity.

It also is no coincidence that Albania’s experiment is directed at public works and corruption. These are the areas that attract scrutiny from the European Union, which is where most Albanians want to be. Since the end of communism 35 years ago, Albania’s desire to join Europe, at least on paper, has led it to embrace the technocratic premise articulated by the German sociologist Max Weber: only an autonomous bureaucracy can be free from political distortions.

Accession to the EU follows strict parameters, neutral conditions, and rigorous criteria against which progress is to be measured. Yet Albania, like all the other Balkan countries waiting in Europe’s antechamber, has learned that technocracy is often little more than a fig leaf covering the EU’s own political reluctance. Even if Albania were to comply with every last requirement dictated by European Commission technocrats, new conditions could be introduced, excuses offered, goalposts moved.

By appointing an AI minister of procurement, Rama is giving Europe a taste of its own medicine. He also is setting the stage for a surreal and dispiriting scenario: senior European officials holding summits with a chatbot to discuss Albania’s membership application. Diella will hold up a mirror – merciless and unavoidable – to the hollowing out of democracy that we are inflicting upon ourselves.