“God created men, Sam Colt made them equal.” — Old West adage1
The last few centuries have seen an unprecedented scale of improvements to not just the living standards but the status of the average human. In a lot of the wealthiest countries, ordinary people have many more rights and privileges than they used to. This includes everything from freedom of movement/speech/religion to the ability to vote and receive education.
How did this happen? It is hard to know for sure, as there are a few likely explanations that may work together to explain these developments. One involves a sense of “moral progress” where over time humans’ moral intuitions evolve towards including more people they previously wouldn’t have. Another possibility is that wealthier countries can afford to give their average citizens more rights and privileges, as material comfort makes the ruling class more generous.
To me, the strongest explanations are the following two: first, as people become more educated in general, they are able to contribute more to the economy, even if they are free to choose whether or not they go into the most high-paying or “productive” fields. This creates a virtuous cycle where people get more educated, they create more wealth and technology that frees more time from labor, and with the newly freed time people can get even more educated. Countries that allow this to happen generally end up better off than those that don’t, while a byproduct of increasing education is an increased consciousness of one’s place in society as well as thinking about how society might be improved.
Second, in previous historical eras, a small military elite with lifelong training and quality equipment was often much more powerful than massive armies of peasants, allowing them to easily secure their rule. This only changed on a global scale when advanced gunpowder weapons allowed common people to fight almost as well as elites without arduous training. After revolutionary France demonstrated the power of massive levies of commoners with muskets2, other regimes could no longer rely on small professional armies and instead had to motivate their own commoners to fight through the expansion of ideology, wealth, and privileges to include them. Those who didn’t adapt fast enough faced revolution when things got bad, as happened in Imperial Russia during World War 1. Thus, there emerged a real military incentive to grant more rights and equality to citizens, as it would make them more likely to fight for the state.
These twin pillars of the education-wealth feedback loop and popular armies continue to play decisive roles today. While the vast majority of people didn’t finish high school 100 years ago, a college education3 is expected in many industries now, while we are producing record numbers of advanced degrees. Meanwhile, non-elite forces (particularly infantry) and the population’s will to fight still determines wars from Afghanistan to Ukraine.
These two processes may not be true for much longer, in both cases due to the rise of AI. Once machines are able to do the work of intelligent humans, you may still have a slightly wealthier society if more people have advanced skills, but it no longer makes as much of a difference to the prosperity of a society as it once did. More ominously, we can already see drones replacing humans on land, in the air, and at sea. Humans still mostly control these, but it can be surprisingly easy to remove humans from the control loop entirely (as is already occurring). Meanwhile, as ground drones become capable of holding positions on their own, human soldiers have a much harder time staying protected through covering up giveaways like heat signatures.
There is an interesting idea that democracy basically settles disputes peacefully by figuring out which side would have the most warriors. Instead of weakening everyone through fighting, you just see who would win from among those who would have the means to fight for one candidate or the other. Elective monarchy works similarly, with independently powerful vassal rulers voting to determine which claimant would win in a fight. In this sense, the most unequal systems have the fewest peers or citizens because only those few have the means to shape things one way or another. In this view, it was primarily through the economic gains from education and the military strength of firearms that the common people developed enough power to assert their voice. Therefore, if AI not only makes people less reliant on one another but renders average people without elite skills or training unable to fight, there may no longer be the same incentive to develop democratic systems of government. Existing democratic states will probably still have more power than any small group of individuals within them, allowing them to maintain systems of popular representative government from the top down, but the trend towards this form of government we have seen over the last 200 years may weaken as the forcing function behind it erodes.