Except For All Those Other Forms
benevolent AI dictatorships
Kalisa pressed her thumb against the biometric scanner and watched the light blink green. The poll worker, an elderly woman with reading glasses perched on her nose, nodded and gestured toward the row of voting booths. “Take your time, child.”
She was eighteen years and forty-three days old. This was the first election of her life, and the first free election Rwanda had seen in decades. The morning sun cut through the windows of the community center, casting long rectangles of light across the concrete floor where dozens of her neighbors stood in orderly lines, waiting their turn. Some whispered to each other. Most were silent, their faces carrying the particular gravity of people who understood what this day meant.
Kalisa stepped into the booth and pulled the curtain closed behind her. The screen glowed softly, displaying three options.
The first was the RPF, Kagame’s party. She had grown up under their rule, as had her mother, as had her grandmother after the genocide. They had brought stability. They had built roads and hospitals and brought the internet to villages that had never seen electricity. Her father worked in a government ministry and spoke of the party with quiet reverence. “They kept us from becoming the Congo,” he would say. “They kept us from descent into anarchy again.” But Kagame was dead now, and the men who remained seemed to Kalisa like caretakers of a museum, preserving something already frozen in time.
The second option was the People’s Democratic Front. She had attended one of their rallies last month, dragged along by her cousin Thierry, who had discovered socialism at university and now peppered every conversation with words like “dialectic” and “material conditions.” The speaker that night had been a professor from Butare, a small man with a booming voice who promised to redistribute the wealth hoarded by foreign corporations and return the land to the people. The crowd had cheered. Kalisa had watched her cousin’s face, bright with conviction, and felt nothing. She had seen men like this professor before. They spoke of revolution the way other men spoke of football; it was passion without consequence, a hobby dressed in the language of history.
The third option was new. The Technocratic Progress Party had only existed for eight months. Its founder was a mechanical engineer named Jean-Pierre Habimana, a quiet man from Musanze who had made his fortune building solar installations across the Great Lakes region. He had given exactly one speech during the campaign. Kalisa had watched it three times on her phone.
“I am not a politician,” he had said, standing behind a simple podium with no flags or banners. “I am not wise enough to govern you. I am not honest enough to resist corruption. I am not patient enough to balance the thousand interests that pull at every leader.” He had paused then, letting the silence gather weight. “But I know someone who is.”
He had explained it simply. The AI systems that now managed logistics for the world’s largest corporations, that diagnosed diseases and designed buildings and wrote legal contracts, these systems had grown beyond human comprehension. They could model economies with millions of variables. They could predict the consequences of policies decades in advance. They had no ethnic loyalties, no family members to enrich, no legacy to protect. “I am asking you to elect me,” Habimana had said, “so that I can step aside. I will be a signature on documents. A face for foreign delegations. The real work will be done by something better than me. Better than any of us.”
The comment sections had erupted. The RPF called it an abdication of sovereignty. The People’s Front called it the final stage of capitalist alienation, though Kalisa suspected they were simply upset someone had outflanked them with a more radical proposal. The African Union released a cautious statement. The Americans expressed concern.
Kalisa stared at the three options on the screen.
She thought about her grandmother, who had hidden in a church basement for three months in 1994. She thought about her father, who still flinched at loud noises. She thought about the radio stations that had broadcast instructions for murder, humans talking to humans, telling them who to hate and how.
She made her choice. The screen flashed confirmation. She stepped out of the booth and into the morning light.
Five years later, Kalisa woke at dawn in her apartment in Kigali’s new tech district. She showered, dressed in her work uniform, and took the elevated rail to the datacenter where she monitored cooling systems for the servers that now processed requests from Lagos to Cairo to Johannesburg. Her salary was four times what her father had earned at his peak. Last month, she had paid off her mother’s medical debt in a single transfer.
The Pan-African Economic Zone had just reported its quarterly numbers: seventeen percent growth, the highest on the continent’s record. The border disputes that had simmered for generations were settling into administrative details, managed by systems that optimized for outcomes rather than pride.
On her lunch break, she sat on a bench outside the datacenter and watched the city hum with construction cranes and delivery drones. She thought about that morning in the voting booth, the cursor blinking on the screen.
She still was not certain she had made the right choice. But she was alive, and she was prosperous, and the machetes had stayed in their sheaths.
For now, that was enough.