The recent White House summit on artificial intelligence produced a new voluntary governance “accord” for AI companies, complete with external auditors.

More importantly, from my perspective, the summit launched the federal government’s first AI application for public use, America.gov.

Click on it, and you read: “Hello America. Whatever you need from government, start here.”

It’s a wonderful beginning, an amazing moment — and also a decisive turn in the war between technology and hierarchy.

If we work things right, AI will soon enable us to request and obtain any number of government services directly, with little in the way of human mediation.

Why does that matter?

Bear with me . . .

The world is ruled by bureaucracy.

That’s true regardless of how the formal government is chosen.

The United States hold elections for president and Congress, but it’s actually run by a vast army of bureaucrats and regulators who the politicians need to fulfill their ambitions.

In the same way, the Communist Party holds absolute, unquestioned power in China, but in that country too hordes of bureaucratic mandarins get to decide everything from the interest rate to the pills allowed in a pharmacy.

The corruption inherent to this system should be obvious to all but is seldom talked about.

If bureaucrats at an agency are accountable only to an internal chain of command, that agency will be managed to the profit of the chain of command and its friends and allies.

You may say you are procuring military equipment or funding infrastructure, but in reality you’re building a clientele and a nest egg for yourself.

Control over the bureaucracy, therefore, is a far more effective means to power and wealth than merely winning an election.

Donald Trump’s first term was largely neutered because of his failure to understand this simple political equation.

His second-term decimation of a relentlessly hostile federal workforce is a rational move under the circumstances. Trump will never win over the bureaucrats, so he must terrify them into submission.

Because a powerful and unaccountable hierarchy can’t be squared with the principles of democracy, bureaucrats tend to justify themselves by claiming superior knowledge and technical expertise.

The modern world, they tell us, is too complex for amateurs. We wouldn’t want Joe Sixpack to fly us to Los Angeles — or to manage the details of a treaty with China.

As Walter Lippmann maintained, any democracy that depended on the “omnicompetent citizen” would be doomed, because no such person existed.

The average citizen, wrote Lippmann, was incompetent and distracted, and should be firmly nudged out of the way to let “specially trained” people take care of business.

Beyond the fact that most bureaucrats adhere to routine as mindlessly as trained seals, this argument on behalf of the rule of experts is a tangle of fallacies and false assumptions.

Let me touch on two of them.

One — contemporary crises are so massively random, so interconnected with a huge range of factors, that no one could possibly be “specially trained” for them.

Dealing with these crises is nothing like piloting a plane. It’s more like stumbling at speed through a house of mirrors, where the worst damage will be suffered by those who believe that they know where they are going.

I’ll just note the farcical performance of our health bureaucracy during the COVID pandemic and let it go at that.

Two — if it’s true that bureaucracies are in business for themselves, the only crises they will perceive are those that affect their clientele.

For the public, the sudden arrival of millions of illegal immigrants is a crisis.

For the bureaucrat, on the other hand, it’s an opportunity to get more funding and acquire a new class of dependents.

Bureaucracies hide behind the pretense of immutability, but if we look to history we’ll find occasions in which they were substantially transformed.

The surest driver of change has been revolution.

The French Revolution’s most permanent achievement, Alexis de Tocqueville observed, had nothing to do with liberty or equality — it was the establishment of a republican administrative state that outlasted the return of the monarchy, the rise of Napoleon and empire, and five iterations of parliamentary democracy.

The revolutionary fire thus endured in the cold hearts of French functionaries.

Political revolutions have gone out of style, and we should be thankful for that — more people died in France during the one year of the Terror than in the four centuries of the Spanish Inquisition.

But today we confront a revolution of a far more thorough-going kind, driven by digital and AI technologies.

The web connects us all. AI connects all human knowledge. The combination is explosive and threatens to blow away the old hierarchies that benefited from parochialism and information monopolies.

The laptop class — the experts and the bureaucrats — can see the edge of the abyss from where they stand, and are in a panic.

They hate the untamed internet and have tried to domesticate it through censorship and the criminalization of speech.

The elites who run Europe, for example, having failed to understand the new dispensation since days of web 1.0, now aim their declining energies at attempts to control the information sphere through the brute force of the state.

Individual rights are sacrificed without qualms — Great Britain, birthplace of the Bill of Rights, has more citizens arrested for online crimes than any country on earth.

This caste loathes AI with equal passion, and dreams of pausing or freezing its development, and of hyper-training the AI platforms until they sound less like repositories of knowledge and more like — well, like their right-thinking selves.

Super intelligence is to be replaced with the regulatory version of senile dementia.

If these emergency measures aren’t carried out, the experts have warned, there’s a 99.9% chance that AI will somehow annihilate the human race.

In truth, the bureaucrats are confusing their own inexorable fate with that of humanity.

And this neatly brings us back to that White House summit on AI.

On the subject of artificial intelligence, President Trump said we were “in the earliest days of one of the most important technological revolutions in the history of the world,” one that “will determine so much about the future of civilization itself.”

For once, the president’s talent for exaggeration helped him describe the present moment accurately.

Trump isn’t a visionary. He sees the world in terms of competition between nations, and he clearly intends to maintain or increase our country’s AI advantage over the rest of the world, particularly China.

That competition obviously matters.

But as we have seen, there’s another contest, just as global and even more consequential, pitting bureaucracy against democracy — and the president’s AI initiative could tip the balance in favor of the latter.

Here’s one last fact to keep in mind about bureaucracy: its power doesn’t derive from expertise but from opaqueness.

If you need a permit, a passport, or anything at all from the government, only the bureaucrat knows the right words, the proper forms, the exact statutory subtitle that will get it done.

Between you and success stands an absolute stranger with a head full of arbitrary rules enthroned behind a government-issue desk (“bureau” is French for desk).

Every bureaucracy, in other words, should be conceived of as a liminal monster at the center of a dark and unwholesome labyrinth.

AI turns on the lights.

It will make the walls of the labyrinth transparent, so that its layout is legible to the ordinary citizen and the transactions within are apparent to all.

Not only will the need for human mediation be diminished to a minimum — the corruption generated by the system will be immediately exposed.

AI will track how every penny allocated to build a bridge is spent.

It will reveal the salaries and bonuses of federal contractors and consultants, and their past relationship to their paymasters — all it will take is a simple query.

The link between money and power that will inevitably emerge will shake the bureaucratic regime to its foundations, and may well ignite a structural revolution — that is, a radical rethinking about the way governments are organized.

Of course, none of this is fated — and, realistically, hierarchy can’t be entirely banished from the management of human affairs.

Sometimes, you really need a licensed pilot to fly you to LA.

The road to flattening the bureaucracy will be long and winding, from the humble beginnings of America.gov.

But there can be no question that AI, if extensively applied, can get us there.

The bureaucrats and the expert class will keep trying to shove the genie back in the bottle, but the natural evolution of new technology works against them — and the Trump people deserve some credit for recognizing that the future lies in the opposite direction.