Why do so many technophiles dislike the idea of world government?

I rarely see the concept of "world government", or governance, or a world court or any such thing, spoken of positively by anyone. That includes technophiles and futurists who are fully cognizant of and believe in the concept of a technological singularity that needs to be controlled, "aligned", made safe etc.

Solutions to AI safety usually focus on how the AI should be coded, and it seems to me that the idea of "cancelling war/ merely human economics" -- in a sense, dropping our tools wherever humanity is not focused entirely on making a safe FAI -- is a little neglected.

Of course, some of the people who focus on the mathematical/logical/code aspects of safe AI are doing a great job, and I don't mean to disparage their work. But I am nonetheless posing this question.

I also do not (necessarily) mean to conflate world government with a communist system that ignores Hayek's fatal conceit and therefore renders humanity less capable of building AIs, computers etc. Just some type of governance singleton that means all nukes are in safe hands, etc.

Personally I don't think democracy scales well. It works at the "small nation state" level to the extent that it's better than anything else we've come up with, and there's a limit to what a small nation state can do while still being traded with by other countries etc.

I don't actually think democracy works well even at the scale of the USA - witness the group of old white men who have a tenacious grip on power despite being out of touch with those they "govern". Scaling it even further up makes it less and less likely to be useful, IMHO.

Democracy requires accountability to keep its leaders in line, and once the number of people a "representative" is responsible for gets past a nominal number, that representation becomes meaningless, the accountability drops, and the control over unconscionable excess recedes.

People will disagree, and that's fine - that's democracy :)

According to The Economist Democracy Index, 8% of the world's population lived in full democracies in 2022, vs 36.9% in autocracies and the rest somewhere in between [1]. You can pick other democracy indices and measures of freedom, but you will always find that those at liberty to even just publicly contemplate a change of government are a tiny minority.

If today's world were to somehow end up having a single government, what would it be most like, those of the WEIRD [2] minority or those of the vast majority?

And even if a miracle happened and the whole world embraced freedom, how long would that last - and where would you seek refuge after the inevitable rise of the next charismatic demagogue?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#WEIRD_bias

"...governance singleton that means all nukes are in safe hands"

Why would a single government need nukes at all? Who would they use them against other than their own citizens?

Reasons the idea doesn't catch on may be that there is no clear articulated advantage to doing so. Or to do so would disempower a lot of currently powerful people. Many people don't want or like democracies (think Taliban or Theocracy).

The tyranny of the majority [1] has destroyed many democracies and something the US Constitution is in place to supposedly prevent. One might think that it has gone a little too far since a mere 8 people are powerful enough to jam up the entire US Government. We should likely get our own house in order before selling this thing to the world.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority#:~:tex....

Representative democracy might not scale well, but that was designed when it was an 8 day horse ride back to the districts. You really wanted someone with "boots on the ground" at the seat of power to represent you.

But we don't know what "real" democracy would look like.

I see it as everyone who wants can join in the documented conversations about the nuts and bolts of governance (forums, rfp's, rfc's), and everyone who wanted could join in voting for those with a button click. With full transparency of the tools, the process, and the results.