In 1906, Sir Francis Galton observed a crowd at a country fair in Plymouth attempting to guess the weight of an ox. Nearly 800 people participated – from butchers and farmers to busy fishwives. Galton, ever the measurer of men and beasts, gathered the guesses and calculated their average. The result was startling: the crowd’s collective estimate came within one pound of the actual weight.
This elegantly simple experiment is the founding parable of what we term the ‘wisdom of crowds’ – the idea that while individuals may be flawed, the collective judgment of a sufficiently diverse group is compellingly accurate. Galton’s experiment also became one of the great justifications for democracy. Within 20 years of Galton’s ox being weighed and barbecued, much of the West had universal suffrage.
But that Devonian rural fair was over a hundred years ago. The state of play is now very different. Today, crowds are not standing around guessing the mass of livestock. They are rage-posting about vaccines, huddling in social media silos and staring vacantly at TikTok reels – perhaps even losing the ability to do basic mental arithmetic. To put it crudely, they are – it is thought – getting stupider. And this is one of four reasons I believe democracy is doomed.
Such a profound claim requires evidence. Here it is. Firstly, the data on cognitive decline is unambiguous. IQ scores across the developed world have been falling for decades, as shown by studies in Denmark, Norway, the USA and elsewhere. The phenomenon even has a name: the ‘reverse Flynn effect’, named after New Zealand psychometrician James Flynn, who first detected that IQs had been rising throughout the 20th century – and who later observed the trend had gone negative.
What’s more, this decline seems to be accelerating, as recently noted by John Burn-Murdoch in the Financial Times. As he put it, ‘recent results from major international tests show that the average person’s capacity to process information, use reasoning and solve novel problems has been falling since around the mid-2010s.’
The implication is stark, even as the causes are obscure. If democracy depends on the idea that the electorate is, on average, capable of advanced rational thought, what happens if that assumption no longer holds? What happens when ‘Ask the Audience’ is a dumb move?
And it is not only the electorate. Politicians too are getting stupider – or, at best, they are rewarded for appearing stupid by a trivialising media. Look at the entire Labour cabinet, which used to feature genuine intellectuals but now resembles the staff room of a middling comprehensive – with Ed Miliband leading the way by proudly shuttering coal mines, just before the government admits we urgently need them.
Secondly, democracies have largely ceased to work – not least in their primary function of responding to public desires. Take Britain as a sad example. For decades, polls have shown that the fearful public wants immigration drastically reduced. The Brexit vote was a cri de coeur on this exact subject: Take Back Control. Yet government after government has failed – or refused – to act. The fears of the people have therefore come true: we have experienced the greatest migration wave in our history. This has frayed social trust, transformed our cities in ways unwanted and put intense pressure on public services, while per capita GDP has barely budged since 2008.
The failure of democratic British governments to obey the demos on such crucial issues means we now live in a Potemkin democracy. The rituals remain: the ballots, the debates, the manifestos. But power has been deliberately shifted elsewhere – into the hands of unelected judges, activist lawyers, the ECHR.
Look at the entire Labour cabinet, which used to feature genuine intellectuals but now resembles the staff room of a middling comprehensive
Where will this end? One good guess is that desperate voters will understandably elect ever more radical parties – until, perhaps, they are so radical they don’t believe in democracy: one man, one vote, one final election. A glance across the West shows this is happening already, with voters fleeing to the far left and hard right, while the reaction of the democratic establishment is to dubiously remove ‘extreme’ yet legal candidates it doesn’t like – from France’s Le Pen to Romania’s Georgescu. Thus democracy kills itself.
Thirdly, the smartest autocracies are outperforming us. This is not what is meant to happen, of course. We are constantly told that while autocracies might be brutally ruthless, they are brittle and inept. At the same time, we are assured that democracies – for all their messiness – are ultimately more resilient, and better at delivering prosperity.
That was once true, but the scoreboard today is less comforting. Look at post-Tiananmen China, which has lifted more people out of poverty than any society in history. Consider the UAE, which has transformed a desert into a highly functional, cosmopolitan state – attracting hundreds of thousands of Brits. Glance at Singapore, ruled by the same party since independence: it is one of the safest, richest, cleanest places on earth. Yes, they have a flawed human rights records – but that seems less salient when we jail people for tweets and half of Europe has de facto blasphemy laws.
Democracies, meanwhile, cannot protect their citizens, cannot deport foreign criminals, cannot police their own beaches and borders – and sometimes cannot agree on the definition of ‘woman’. It is not pleasant to admit all this – that autocracies are often more effective. But it is the case.
Fourthly, the machines are coming. Let us be optimistic and suppose that democracies can somehow recover – that they can reverse the intelligence decline, reclaim power from unaccountable institutions and start taking difficult decisions again: that in Berlin they finally deal with the terrorists, and that in Birmingham they collect the bins. Even if they do that, they still face one existential, probably unavoidable threat: AI.
The arrival of general artificial intelligence will surely overturn governance. Why, after all, would an electorate entrust its fate to fallible, emotional, greedy, scandal-prone humans, when it could be governed by an entity that draws on an infinite amount of data, thinks like Einstein after 1,000 espressos – and never accidentally tweets pornographic screenshots at 2 a.m.? Once the idea takes hold – that a sober and forensic machine will govern better than a person – traditional democracy will look not noble, but inefficiently quaint, or dangerously ornate. Like those Tudor houses with mad overhanging windows.
If all this sounds depressing, it shouldn’t. Government by AI will likely be superior to what we have now – superior to Starmer, Putin, Trump, Modi, Xi, Macron, anything. If we get it right, AI will be fairer, calmer, cleverer, more far-sighted – and it will out-compete rival systems. We may dress it up with pretendy people fronting the AI – like constitutional monarchs – to give it a human face, but AI will make the decisions. However, it is a sad moment for Francis Galton. If he could time travel to Plymouth today, I suspect he would quietly conclude, like me, that democracy is as doomed as the ox. He’d also get a robot to estimate the weight.
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