The Fall of the Republic

It’s hard to imagine that;

• flooding the world with billions—>trillions of hardworking AI slaves,

• mostly owned and controlled by a few wealthy people,

• will result in anything other than a grim hellscape.

To fully appreciate this — particularly since most commenters are pitching AI as a novel development whose outcome we can’t predict — we need a concrete historical example to bring it to life. Fortunately, there is one. It’s the structural shift in the Roman Republic after the Second Punic War (the second of Rome’s three wars with a Phoenician colony called Carthage) that led to the Republic’s downfall.

When the Founding Fathers drafted the Constitution;

• They used the Roman Republic as a foundational template — a Senate, a Presidency that mirrored the consuls, and nominal checks and balances like the ‘veto’ (translated as ‘I forbid’).

• However, since every literate man of the time had read Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, they drew on the thinking of Montesquieu (separation of powers), English institutions and traditions (Parliament, Magna Carta, etc.), and Locke (natural rights and consent) to build a more robust set of constraints, checks, and balances to avoid repeating Rome’s fate.

• Unfortunately, as good as these Constitutional protections have been, they are proving insufficient to prevent the real cause of the Roman Republic’s collapse: it became hollow.

Rome’s hard-won victory in the Second Punic War;

• left it with uncontested control of the Mediterranean,

• which provided Rome’s elites with great wealth and an endless flow of slave workers. This sudden influx led to corruption and disloyalty as the wealth and power of these elites became too great for the Republic to contain.

• These disloyal elites then used wealth and slave labor to replace the citizen farmers around the great cities that served as the backbone of the Republic with slave-worked latifundia (slave-worked estates). They even became so powerful that they could aggressively plunder public resources and stifle all efforts at reform; they killed Tiberius and the Gracchi brothers when they pushed for reforms.

To fully understand what this did to Rome, let’s refer to the historians Appian and Plutarch.

The rich absorbed public land and neighbors’ plots, then “came to cultivate vast tracts instead of single estates, using slaves as laborers and herdsmen, lest free laborers should be drawn from agriculture into the army.” He concludes with: “Thus certain powerful men became extremely rich and the race of slaves multiplied throughout the country, while the Italian people dwindled in numbers and strength, being oppressed by penury, taxes, and military service.”

Once these citizen farmers were ejected from their land, they “no longer showed themselves eager for military service, and neglected the bringing up of children, so that soon all Italy was conscious of a dearth of freemen, and was filled with gangs of foreign slaves, by whose aid the rich cultivated their estates, from which they had driven away the free citizens.” Plutarch

Let’s dive into how this impacted military service. Up until this shift,

• Rome enjoyed an advantage over all its adversaries: a seemingly endless supply of manpower it could plug into its military machine.

• The Roman army’s manpower relied on a vast number of free land-owning citizens (capable of purchasing their own equipment and loyal enough to fight well) who farmed the rural areas of central and southern Italy.

• This loyal, self-financing manpower was so great that, even if Rome lost an army, it could rapidly mobilize another (a unique capability in the ancient world).

Less than fifty years after the shift to slavery and concentrated wealth,

• Rome couldn’t conscript armies this way anymore (see Plutarch).

• As a result, Rome instituted reforms (Marius) that professionalized the military and recruited landless men into its ranks.

• This professionalism, in turn, created a military force that was more loyal to wealthy generals than to the Republic, which led to a cycle of civil wars between wealthy generals (Sulla, Caesar, etc.). Eventually, Rome barbarized its military by recruiting from lands it had conquered.

Now, let’s put the Roman Republic’s structural shift into the modern context.