One of the Thirty was a student of Socrates, not all thirty, and none of them were philosopher kings. They were a puppet government installed by the Spartans, which is why Socrates was amongst the people who opposed them. The fact that Critias was among the Thirty was used by Socrates' enemies to slander him but he had lots of pupils among the youth of Athens all of whom had different reasons for listening to his lectures.

The slander was justified, in my opinion. Critias was not merely 'among' the Thirty, he led them. And Socrates was not exactly a democrat anyway.

In any case the point is: no hyperintelligent monarch is going to appear to introduce a reign of reason that will save us all.

> This is because there is only one way to ensure human needs are met, and it isn't technocratic anything. It is to ask people and empower them to get what they need directly. I.e. democracy, in as direct and total a form as we can manage efficiently.

Which would work, except that what one person needs or wants does not align with what the other needs or wants. If you'd then purpose to 'weigh' the needs and wants against each other I'll point out that there is no way to do such a thing. Since all human judges of what is ethical are biased by everything they are.

Supposing a AI regime could be established it'd be so powerful as to completely annihilate proponents of values that it considers inferior and thereby creating a 'perfect' society from a certain point of view...

>If you'd then purpose to 'weigh' the needs and wants against each other I'll point out that there is no way to do such a thing.

Sure, we have many tools for achieving this. Compromise, conversation, empathy. We've been using these tools to solve our differences for as long as there have been humans.

> It is to ask people and empower them to get what they need directly. I.e. democracy

You've simply replaced one unproven ideal with another here.

How is democracy an 'unproven ideal'? It has thousands of years of history across many human cultures.

Were any of those cultures successful because of democracy? We don't have controlled experiments on human governance, no ideas have been proven.