In an age when public trust in leaders is eroding, Albania has unveiled a vision that sounds more like a proposal from Stanford’s computer science department than from the halls of Tirana, to become the first country where government ministries are run by artificial intelligence.
Prime Minister Edi Rama suggests, half in jest, but also half in earnest, that portfolios of governance could be entrusted to algorithms, tireless functionaries that require no salary, harbor no ambition, and most importantly, cannot slip envelopes into their jacket pockets.
This vision springs from a very local wound: decades of corruption, nepotism, patronage, and entrenched political networks. If human beings have failed, perhaps machines might succeed. Supporters imagine a sterile, almost antiseptic reality: no favors, no backroom deals, no cousin who must win the tender. The algorithm, unlike the minister, does not seek votes; it seeks formulas that yield results.
What is the source of corruption?
Yet here arises the deeper question: Is corruption merely the sum of individual acts, or is it a whole social system embedded in the political history of a nation? Even if an AI minister acted with perfect efficiency, who would decide the priorities? Who would set the parameters?
After all, behind every line of code stands a human programmer, with interests, with worldviews, with biases. In that sense, the algorithm is not an incorruptible oracle but rather a digital mirror reflecting the mind of its maker.
To grasp the Albanian experiment, one might turn to the ideas of Curtis Yarvin, the controversial political technologist who years ago proposed running a country like a tech firm. For him, a state is not an ideological battleground but an operational system, a CEO with absolute authority, a board of directors for oversight, and citizens as customers expecting quality service. Not a noisy parliament or endless partisan wrangling – just streamlined, corporate efficiency.
The Albanian vision as philosophical experiment
Albania, in some ways, pushes this logic further: not only a “start-up state” but a state where some executives are no longer human at all, just code. An algorithm as deputy minister, or even as acting CEO. It sounds like a leap toward efficiency, but also a leap into uncharted danger. If the state is a company and the executives are machines, then who owns the copyright to the code? Who controls the servers? Who holds the master keys of governance?
One can picture Albania as a bold geopolitical start-up, a small country trying to leapfrog the constraints of history and geography through technological revolution. Yet, as every start-up knows, scaling is perilous. If the algorithm fails, the failure is not personal but systemic, and in a state, systemic failure can be catastrophic.
The Albanian vision is not merely a technological experiment. It is a philosophical one, probing the very nature of governance. Do we truly wish to transfer the levers of power from the human to the post-human? Is this the path to democratic salvation, or the slippery slope toward digital dictatorship, where citizens no longer elect leaders but download the latest version of governance software?
Ultimately, the answer will not be found in the algorithm itself but in the society that chooses how to use it. Perhaps the real question was never who sits in the minister’s chair but how we design institutions so that, regardless of who sits there, they must serve the public.
Albania, it seems, has simply placed this question squarely on the table of the future.
The writer is a global trends analyst specializing in the intersection of economics, geopolitics, and technology.