After a while to reflect, I realized that PAN was basically a self canceling mistake. In a full true democracy, a cybernetic society would naturally lean, sooner or later, to giving over their franchise to bots. Which leads to the creation of PAN. Which then leads to the downfall of PAN, as he then participates in his own demise. If Stanuel hadn't pushed the button, someone was bound to soon, as PAN leads more and more rebels to him for the purpose.
Thanks for posting this - it helped crystalize one of the problems I'm having with this story.
I feel that this story is trying to push a set of assumptions on political behavior that are entirely unmotivated. I just can't see why Pan would be a self-correcting mistake.
Pan was supposed to represent the democratic will of the community - most of them really didn't want to live in a democracy, so they didn't. But, the twist was that this was still democratic because it's really what they wanted. But, because not everyone wanted it, there had to be a way out.
But, that's not how democracy works. Democracy works by enforcing the will of the majority while protecting the rights of the minorities. In this story, it was clear that:
1 - Pan didn't protect the rights of anyone. It made things work, but it did so by instituting curfews, severly limiting people's freedom of movement. It was implied that it closed the museums and theaters. People may really harbor a secret desire that some nice leader to take decisions away from them, but an even more basic aspect of human psychology is that they don't want to be inconvenienced.
2 - Pan didn't enforce the will of the majority. It created a situation where the will of the minority (Stanuel) was enforced onto the majority. We know that Stanuel was a minority, since if he represented a majority, Pan would never have come into play.
So, we don't have a democracy here. We have a society that apparently is based on pleasing
everyone at once. That's already stupid. But I agree that this society would become disfunctional and probably end up as a self-destructive dictatorship sooner or later.
What really drove PANs suicidal intent home was the timeline. It had been five days since he had taken over.
Which again made no sense. Five days is not enough time for a Stanuel to rise out of a population. Pan is an AI, maybe it calculates things quickly, but it takes longer to move people from apathy to political activism, let alone political exteremism.
So yeah, I don't buy it. And I also don't buy - though unlike in the things I list above, in this case I don't think the story is being stupid, just wrong - the premise that democracy is powerful enough to be self-correcting, that abberations like Pan will eliminate themselves. That's a dangerous, dangerous message. Democracy has shown itself through the years to be a fragile thing, one that must be maintained with care. Teaching people that if they allow themselves to lose their ability to choose, it's ok, because someone will come and give it back to them in five days - that's a really bad lesson to teach.
