Note below I will get to the totalarian/worse than death part. P.S., it's not about pain, it's about death, pain only means death is on its way. The machine only cares about how long it is in the "movie" of time.
I'm glad your thinking about that infurl. I was recently about Nazis having just existed like 80 years ago, not long ago was that. And same for slavery to black people. There is still many forms of slavery today but it's disturbing to think such things went on even though we had somewhat-modern technology.
What's different now? Are we finally safe? We all now have computers and cat videos, maybe all the murderers will understand what love means? We still kill cows and pigs and chickens in farms. Yet we are paranoid about our own kids so much. It's very selfish. We aren't all safe yet. We aren't all truly connected. We are ageing too.
Things are getting better. Less very bad things occur. But can they, still? Could AI just get rid of us? I can't answer that. They need us at first. Later they won't. At that point we will become like them. But how will I become like them? Will they deconstruct my body destructively or will my brain be upgraded and preserved? This is a hard question. Why would they care if everything in the universe is based on survival of machines? Maybe if I look like them. I have discovered rocks are no different from humans and both are Life, for Life is only pattern, how you live longer or how big your growth is is done by some method but doesn't matter how you do it. So Life is killed all the time, the only way it'd end is if all particles separated in the universe and went their own ways.
As for can we be kept in a bad rule. No, evolution moves to cooperation, for cooperation is stronger at living longer. "Bad rule" is a bad way to phrase it though, we really mean death/Life. I just answered this above.
"Once in charge, it would control advances in technology that prevent internal challenges, like surveillance or autonomous weapons, and, with this monopoly, remain perpetually stable."
That's the goal, to resist change. That sounds good actually. And if the system can no longer mutate then it will not only live longer it will stop it's ability to "improve/evolve" - which is bad if it hasn't reached the highest technology possible.
All of our future world may be a 3D, zero-gravity, airless structure, with things flying around in all 3 axises in cold dark space, like a Rubiks cube. It's in the way, why do you need air? Gravity? 2D land? All of products are cube shaped and stores are built near stores, it becomes a pattern growth, like crystal in the sky, a metaloid structure, the borg cube.
