You should read up on cybernetics for what I mean regarding mass collection of data leading to undemocratic outcomes, my guess is you haven’t ran into it. But, large area of research.
I've often observed the same thing with a different machine. It's a great metaphor for many things.
There is something about cybernetics and control theory, that, if applied to governance would be of enormous value, but I've never seen a real world application. I wonder if we'll get to see such a thing in our lifetimes.
In the cyberpunk Pyscho-Pass there exists a nice fictional account of such a system.
> You probably just need both.
Yes, today. My complaint is that this is a very crude algorithm! There has got to be a better way that represents people's true interests. My own hypothesis is that in the year 20XX there will exist a <country> with a combination of intelligence agency with a vastly expanded remit and a computer system which produces most central governance.
Did you believe/think/feel X today? Your inputs have been factored and there are Y resolution proposals! The resolution you have chosen shall be weighted against counterproposals and if selected shall be converted into contracts for activities that a new arm of the State shall spring into existence to deal with. Government functions can scale backwards and forwards in an orderly and consistent fashion with the desires/knowledge of the citizenry.
I think it can only work by illustrating trade-offs in order to keep stakeholders in the loop. As long as the system is comprehensible it should work. Pray we never fork.
We should try experiments like these on a Seastead first before we kill everybody.
Yes I have. I don't know much about it though. In my imagination I see crates of Cybersyn machines being shuttled away for good measure like the Ark of the Covenant into that warehouse. I can see them thinking, "ah, let's revisit this in, say, a century or two".
It is high time these kinds of projects were revisited, not as an attempt to provide a new economic system per se as some envisioned in the past, but to change central government.
As you probably already know many governments in the West are approaching half of the real economy. Things are starting to get weird, which is normal when the territory has evolved beyond the map. I think there shall be a phase change sooner rather than later in how government is managed. I mean a deep structural change in how administration works and not an ideological one.
The question is not so much how and why, since there are lots of productive lines of inquiry and the value proposition is endless, but what must be done to accomplish political decision making moving from a network of men to one partly/wholly composed of machines making autonomous decisions?
My guess is that governance does not require an AGI. It is already a slow moving narrow AI that lives partly in the legal realm and partly in the human realm. I suspect the technology to do this existed decades ago and the real reason the idea has not been developed is inertia. That and it's slightly scary. It is like fiddling with the boot sector! Better recreate a backup...
Sadly, governments are almost always procrustean in their nature because they are bureaucratic. That doesn't have to be the case; the superior alterative being cybernetic governance, but we just don't see that and I don't suspect we ever will.
We always seem to live in a world where it takes front page news like this to put into effect genuine reform, reform that slams the door in the face of entrenched interests.
This seems to be just one of those things, but it reminds me of (most/all) companies I have worked at, where action across the company is really only determined by the next pressing crisis - actual plans are laughed at as everyone know how things really are.
But it does not have to be like this. I think the concept of technocracy is most relevant when it delivers things that should be done based on scientific analysis - even if those are not the latest crisis yet.
imagine an election where we voted in the order of the governments backlog - fix these things in this order.
it's important to note, (western) government decisions already are algorithmic. We simply aren't privy to many of the steps involved, and our ability to influence outcomes is limited by the elitism of representative democracy and the stifling regressive nature of bureaucracy.
Edit: that isn't "regressive" as leftists confusingly redefine it, it's the dictionary definition. Might be important to note in a political comment.
Not completely pertinent to where I suspect your line of questioning is going, but Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is an interesting take on computer aided government.
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri "Cybernetic" government type?
Not a particularly useful line of inquiry unless you're willing to get full political and legal realist with a dash of Mao, and ask: how is the cybernetic government kept in power? Who's pulling its strings?
The wider aspect to this, is that this is occurring as part of the new governance system that is currently revealed. That is technocracy. Everything will be measured, and the system will self-manage and re-allocate resources as it sees fit.
Isn't it funny how most governments become less brutal as the technology and knowledge to influence and manipulate people becomes available to said governments. Not to sound too bleak, the flipside to this is that technology also enables people to coordinate and inform eachother of the actions of governments.
Gov 2.0 is making progress improving and modernizing specific processes within governments, but who is experimenting with new forms of government? Behavioral psychology and game theory have transformed things like voting systems, but what about division of powers?
It's a field I've dabbled in, broadly speaking, but I haven't found the (probably academic) networks I've been expecting.
One thing I've been thinking about recently is what would happen if government was automated. We now have better automation and computational capabilities so creating a government with programmed agents instead of politicians is a legitimate possibility.
Turns out Soviet mathematicians had similar ideas
> Economic reform became a pressing need in the mid ’50s, after Stalin’s rule had
left the country in shambles, the chain of supply and the agricultural sector nearing
collapse and a serious risk of another major famine looming. Amidst a very rapid
expansion of the techno-scientific sector, from the early successes of the Soviet space
program to the first large developments of computer systems and automation, several
competing proposals for economic reforms were presented that promoted the idea of
a “computational solution” to the severe mismanagements of the planned economy.
> The original plan of the cybernetics approach was to implement a decentralized
computational system, capable of processing feedbacks in real time and handle the
simulation of complex dynamics. In terms of providing a scalable computational
model, they mostly focused on Kantorovich’s linear programming, which seemed the
most promising mathematical tool at the time. As we mentioned, the scalability
of Kantorovich’s valuations is subtle, and we will discuss a possible more modern
approach to scalability in the next section of this paper. However, the most important
aspect of this proposal was the main idea of a cybernetic computational network and
its role at implementing a decentralized autonomous computational mechanism for a
communist economic system that would not require any centralized planning.
I suspect that in every relatively developed country nowadays executing systematic requests of the kind you mentioned would get you some kind of personal attention.
That's why they invented it, right? To make sure the political status quo does not change. That includes political systems in the US, UK, China and Russia.
Governmental centralization control has grown steadily since the start of the 20th century. Control and micromanagement of human behavior and thought, especially in big cities, has grown beyond what humans are capable of tolerating
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