SynthBee Founder Warns AI Is Drifting From Democracy to Autocracy

SynthBee's founder says humanity faces a binary choice: computing systems built on the ideals of liberal democracy, or centralized AI platforms ruled by what he calls techno-monarchs.

Rony Abovitz laid out the argument in a public essay this week, framing the race toward artificial general intelligence as a contest between "computational democracy" and "computational autocracy." He didn't mince words about the stakes. "Choose well. Our world and future depend upon it," he wrote.

Where did computational democracy come from?

Abovitz traces the idea to philosophical conversations he began more than a decade ago with Julio Frenk, then president of the University of Miami and now chancellor of UCLA. The two fused computing, political systems, philosophy, economics and governance into a single thesis they named "computational democracy."

The thinking produced two concrete projects:

• Project Alexandria, launched in 2018
• A Knight Foundation Grant in 2022, funding "Conversations on the Future of Democracy, Social Media, and Artificial Intelligence in the Americas"

Abovitz planned to pursue a PhD in Philosophy on the thesis. A philosophy professor at one of the schools where he applied talked him out of it. "Go build it, don't be a philosopher; this is too important," Abovitz recalled the professor saying. He took the advice and founded SynthBee instead, describing the company as "the rebel alliance, the Jedi (not the Sith) and a north star in the ideals of computational democracy."

What does the philosophy actually mean?

At its core, computational democracy is architecture and system design, not just theory. Abovitz says he and Frenk conceived systems manifested from the idea of personal freedoms, reflecting the checks and balances of a well-run democracy.

He draws the intellectual lineage back to the Bay Area of the late 1960s and 1970s. Stewart Brand's DIY Whole Earth Catalog, which influenced the internet and the web, the Homebrew Computer Club, and the birth of personal computing with the Apple I all fused freedom, democracy and computing. The Grateful Dead played their part too, he argues, by encouraging audience participation and the birth of open sharing.

Today, the philosophy rests on several pillars, per Abovitz:

• Distribution of power and decentralization
• Strong protection of users, their IP and their data
• Systems safe and trustworthy by design, "not by hopes and wishes"
• Empathy for humanity, with people placed at the center

How does robotics prove the point?

Abovitz points to his own track record. At Mako Surgical, he helped define the field of collaborative robotics — Cobots — now deployed in operating rooms around the world. He sees the principles of computational democracy emerging in those systems' behavior and their connection to surgical teams and patients.

He invokes the poet Richard Brautigan, whose verse imagined humans "all watched over by machines of loving grace." Abovitz argues Brautigan would have seen "a machine in true loving grace" in the symbiosis between surgeons, the Mako robot and the patients they treat. He adds a footnote: the Mako robot was deeply influenced by R2-D2.

What is the alternative?

Abovitz defines computational autocracy as massive, centrally controlled computing platforms run by a few techno-oligarchs seeking to amass the world's computing power, data, intelligence and IP. The scaling and financial performance of these companies, he writes, has created techno-monarchs — and actual monarchs, dictators and autocrats have immersed themselves in these systems as tools to govern, control and suppress their populations.

"The cozy interplay between technology dictators and actual dictators has blurred the line between technology and government," Abovitz wrote, "with both sides fusing and enriching themselves."

He aims squarely at the AGI race. The ideals of absolute control, central power and asymmetrical economics are "deeply embedded" in a large number of companies chasing artificial general intelligence, which he likens to a techno-deity from a Marvel or DC villain comic. Ordinary users, in his telling, become serfs on the manor lords' land, harvested as data, IP and labor.

AGI, he writes, "is a very hungry ghost" — one that demands nuclear power plants, endless computing power, a lack of ethics and blindness to chaos, hallucinations, untestability and catastrophic risk.

What choice does Abovitz say we face?

The essay closes on a crossroads, the Robert Johnson kind. Humanity can surrender thousands of years of struggle against oppressive kings and dictators, or it can pursue what Abovitz calls a neohumanist renaissance — computing systems that reflect personal liberty, safety, trust and the sovereignty of individual data and invention. For SynthBee, the pitch doubles as a founding thesis: the company is betting that trust and decentralization can compete with concentrated compute.