Great Houses

In Episode 33 of the Great Houses Forum, Gregory Treat argues that the modern credentialing system, originally built to educate Prussian peasants, produces leaders of "ungrounded virtue" who cannot be trusted with the new seats of power that AI, robotics, and surveillance technologies are creating. He proposes reviving the cursus honorum, the tiered ladder of ascending public offices used by Rome and the British aristocracy, to train "AI paladins" who master three core skills, code, content, and command, through real-world challenges rather than classroom certifications. The progression spans three levels: mastering software and rhetoric to build digital communities, applying those skills physically through autonomous manufacturing or AI-guided farming, and finally serving in medicine, policing, or the military where lives are at stake. Treat frames this through his "aristocratic-democratic technology thesis," arguing that catastrophe follows whenever a society's leadership system mismatches its technology, just as the French Revolution followed from aristocrats confronting the democratic technology of firearms, and COVID from democrats managing the aristocratic technology of biotechnology. He contends that AI will make traditional testing obsolete by instantly profiling every user, and that the converging of civilian and military drone technology is erasing the boundary between those career paths.

Read more of Mr. Treat's thoughts on AI at his Substack: https://avaloncircle.substack.com/