For artificial intelligence engineers who have cared to look beyond their computer screens to study social structures and the short history of democracy, the last few months have been increasingly unsettling. Something akin to the atomic bomb on humanity may have been unleashed, but that comparison is limited to a vague sense of the destructive abilities of these technologies. The inability to contemplate all the different types of monsters AI can morph into, will, in the near future, force democratic societies to reimagine socio-political lives at all levels: individual, national and international. The nuclear chain reaction was a theoretically well-understood...