political leaders on Earth will slowly come to realize… that intelligent machines having superhuman thinking ability can be built. The construction of such machines, even taking into account all the latest developments in computer technology, would call for a major national effort. It is only to be expected that any nation which did put forth the financial and physical effort needed to build and programme such a machine, would also attempt to utilize it to its maximum capacity, which implies that it would be used to make major decisions of national policy. Here is where the awful dilemma arises. Any restriction to the range of data supplied to the machine would limit its ability to make effective political and economic decisions, yet if no such restrictions are placed upon the machine’s command of information, then the entire control of the nation would virtually be surrendered to the judgment of the robot.
On the other hand, any major nation which was led by a superior, unemotional intelligence of any kind, would quickly rise to a position of world domination. This by itself is sufficient to guarantee that, sooner or later, the effort to build such an intelligence will be made — if not in the Western world, then elsewhere, where people are more accustomed to iron dictatorships.
...It seems that, in the forseeable future, the major nations of the world will have to face the alternative of surrendering national control to mechanical ministers, or being dominated by other nations which have already done this. Such a process will eventually lead to the domination of the whole Earth by a dictatorship of an unparalleled type — a single supreme central authority.
...the transition from biological evolution to mechanical evolution… could be rapid if some nation takes the plunge and goes in for government by computer, or very much slower if the dangers in this step are recognized, and man merely mechanized himself, by a gradual replacement of defective or inadequate biological components.
...There is little point in pursuing this line of thought any further, since a world of machines, governed by machines, for machines… will be as incomprehensible to us as would be the engines of a trawler to the ship’s cat.
Cade, Other Worlds Than Ours (1966), pp. 214-219