As for your later question about where this leads when taken to the extreme—while I can’t speak for authoritarian regimes, theoretically, it means fewer and fewer people can make more and more decisions for the entire society. You no longer need to distribute decision-making power to those close to the situation because proximity can be replaced with various monitoring devices. You don’t need on-site journalists or investigative reporters to tell you what’s happening—you can obtain this information through drones or AI. The difference is that when decision-making power is concentrated in very few hands, if they make a wrong decision, the adverse impacts cannot be corrected. Conversely, with distributed decision-making, while most decisions aren’t perfect, they’re unlikely to cause terrible harm to the entire society. This is the power of checks and balances.