How is that different from any other century? It doesn’t seem unique to the 21st century. Bad leaders who value power above virtue is part of the human condition.

Back in the 90s we all thought the internet would be the killer app to solve this problem once and for all, but look how that turned out.

Scale. A 15th century king might have been nominally in charge, but he couldn't exercise much authority without his various ranks of human minions, whose individual power weakened down the chain, and individual pushback increased.

Now a modern "king" has immense power and resources to affect everyone with very few easily replaceable lieutenants to dilute it, and AI is bound to be a magnifier of that power. They also have more insight into the population than a 15th century King could ever do -- they didn't know you existed, but a modern king knows everything from your movements to your shopping habits. From face recognition to tracking your browser's fingerprints that information is stored and logged permanently, to be mined and used whenever the kings want.

You're seriously underestimating what it means to have absolute power and spectacularly overestimating the influence of a bit of browser tracking. To equate the two is ridiculous – it's just not the same thing at all.

Other centuries didn't have realtime worldwide psychopathic narcissist amplifiers like Twitter.

It's the other way round. We abuse narcissists' and psychopaths' desire for power to make them hold positions of power.

It's the 50 cent thing, most people are not willing to pay the price to be the boss.

If regular people were willing to lead, everybody else could follow them and narcissists and psychopaths had time to heal their souls.