Meet the Digital Priestess of a Post-Human State | The American Spectator

The Albanian prime minister wanted to shock, and he did. Edi Rama recently unveiled the world’s first AI-generated minister, Diella, Albanian for sunshine. A more fitting name might have been Terr, meaning darkness. The nation that once fought communism with steel and secrecy now attempts to fight corruption with ChatGPT on steroids.

Rama presented her (yes, female) as a breakthrough — an incorruptible minister to oversee contracts without bribes, cronies, or kickbacks. A digital doll in traditional dress, a smiling face programmed to pacify. But behind the feel-good headlines is something more sinister: a government post handed to code. Bureaucracy without breath, rule without reason, power without a pulse.

It reads like satire, a sketch from a political comedy show. An AI minister in folkloric dress presiding over public tenders. But it’s no joke. This artificial abomination has been tasked with managing contracts, evaluating bids, even hiring staff. No ballot. No accountability. No human judgment. Only an algorithm empowered to oversee billions in public funds.

The pitch is predictably utopian. Rama promises corruption will vanish, procurement will be pure, and everything perfectly transparent. But corruption is never erased, only repackaged. An AI minister doesn’t end graft; it buries it in the shadows of programming, contracts, and systems no citizen can scrutinize. And one wonders how many other leaders are already watching, weighing, and waiting for the day they, too, can outsource power to something that cannot be questioned, challenged, or voted out.

The irony is suffocating. A country synonymous with bribes, backroom deals, and the long shadow of dictatorship, now claims salvation will come from a digital priestess. The same nation that could not rid its streets of organized crime now tells its citizens that an animated avatar will save the day.

History tells a rather different story. Technology has never purified politics; it has only magnified whatever system is already in place. Stalin turned statistics into a weapon. East Germany built tyranny on typewriters and tape recorders. Albania itself perfected surveillance with files, folders, and informants long before the internet arrived. Every so-called tool of progress became another tool of tyranny.

AI will be no different. A system trained on tainted data will reproduce those flaws at scale. A model fed by bias will output bias, dressed up as objectivity. And unlike a human, it cannot be shamed, prosecuted, or removed from office. It does not plead the Fifth. It does not resign. It just keeps calculating, long after the public has lost any say in the outcome.

Moreover, an AI minister can be presented as spotless while still being shaped by the same political hands it supposedly replaces. The manipulation will simply be hidden behind a digital halo. The Albanian people may be told Diella is pure, while the strings are still being pulled off-screen.

The future this foreshadows is truly terrifying. If Albania can unleash an AI minister in 2025, then by 2035, some European state could plausibly elect an AI prime minister. A leader with no life, no death, no soul, no conscience. Citizens appealing not to people but to pixels. The dream of technocrats realized, the nightmare of democracy extinguished.

By 2050, it is not hard to imagine a parliament filled with digital leaders, their speeches streamed, their signatures binding, their decisions enforced without debate. Algorithms in Armani ruling entire nations while flesh-and-blood politicians linger on as mascots, waving politely for the cameras, pretending they still matter. One needn’t feel pity for politicians — many are morally bankrupt monsters — but replacing them with machines is not a step forward. It is a million steps backward, into a void where the voices sound human but belong to one at all.

This is dangerous territory because it normalizes what was once confined to dystopian novels. When injustice is automated, who do you protest? When decisions are digital, who do you hold to account?

Europe will applaud. Brussels bureaucrats adore Albania’s “innovation.” They will hail it as a neat experiment, a laboratory for the EU’s own future. A place to test whether citizens will tolerate digital overlords.

But Albanians should be most alarmed. The nation has already been nudged toward a cashless society. Now its procurement is in the hands of an avatar. Step by step, sovereignty is being erased, traded for Big Tech’s black boxes. First money is digitized, then leadership is digitized. And finally, the people discover that the levers of self-government no longer belong to them at all.

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