AI and the Collapse of State Power | Miles Taylor

In Episode 480 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Miles Taylor, former Chief of Staff at the Department of Homeland Security during the first Trump administration and later head of advanced technology and security strategy at Google, about the existential stakes of AI development, the erosion of centralized state power, and the domestic security threats that may define the years ahead. The first hour establishes the nature and scope of the threat Miles believes AI poses—not merely to individuals and nation states, but to modern civilization itself—arguing that it is an order of magnitude more consequential than anything the national security community has previously confronted, and that the institutions responsible for protecting us are failing to grasp it. From there, the conversation turns to what this means for governance: how the extraordinary empowerment of the individual is eroding the foundations on which centralized states were built, whether democracy as currently constructed can survive that pressure, and whether new, more decentralized modes of organization will emerge in response to the failure of federal institutions to protect and provide for their citizens…