(I don't claim to have any magic ideas about how to make that straightforward in software; it's hard work, really hard - and that is in fact why those same legacy systems move so slowly: they account for the details. a truly visionary, egalitarian approach to technological governance must account for them too, or it may be a false carrot)

https://medium.com/metacurrency-project/the-future-of-govern...

"Reform" is a big, fuzzy word. A lot more brittleness and complexity has been added under that rubric. Systems of governance eventually get "over learned", that is, people adapt to the system and use it in more ways than it was intended. The ability of hundreds of millions of people to adapt is much greater than any amount of complexity that we can create. Yet we persist in the idea that by continuing to "tweak" the system, somehow magic will come from it. To me this is where humility comes in. We can never create a perfect government. The best we can do is have one that balances stability and refactoring.

Election cycles and constitutional amendment processes were supposed to do this. What we've found, though, is that legal precedent, statutory code, and an expansion of pure democracy and the role of career politicians, given enough time, puts us exactly where we didn't want to go.

Interesting side note: overly complex and brittle systems that people execute actually give dictatorial powers to those responsible for executing them. That is, in a computer system, the complexity creates program crashes and dysfunction, because the computer has to treat each instruction cycle and piece of data the same. In a system executed by people, a subtle social goal takes over: things still appear to happen. The system still superficially looks like it is working somewhat -- those in authority just selectively apply and bend the rules depending on whatever their whims are. If you've ever worked in a large organization with too much process, you've easily observed this: most struggle under burdensome rules, never being able to get anything done. A few, however, work completely outside the system, given special permission. These folks are usually kept off the radar so as not to upset the troops. Complex people systems don't ever stop working, they just make things miserable on most everybody and give a few permission to do whatever they want.

You'd think that modern tyrannies would look like old Libya: one guy in a funny hat ruling totally. But that's not the way it works any more. It's not one guy, it's a distributed oligarchy, and it's not out in the open, it's obfuscated.

That's a nice idea, and it might work in special cases where everyone has equal smarts, equal access to information and to economic- and self-defense power, along with a generous helping of fellow-feeling.

But in the general case, that idea doesn't comport with millennia of human experience: Too many self-interested people are happy to lie, cheat, and steal to the greatest extent they think they can get away with it. Their seeming motto is often, "hooray for me and [forget] you."

EDIT: Also, overall costs are increased for everyone when each person has to be perpetually on guard for possible rule-breaking by everyone else. Better to achieve economies of scale by outsourcing some of that function to a commonly-empowered and -regulated agency.

And that's just fancy name for "government," of course. This is true even when the "government" is based on Hobbesian brute force: Even brute-force governments have to deliver a modicum of security and order at a minimum, lest they risk being overthrown by challengers.

(Think of gang leaders in failed states: They have to keep not just their "soldiers" but their "citizens" from becoming too dissatisfied — otherwise, they risk losing their power and, sometimes, their lives.)

So much of what government does (aside from the bombings etc.) is really about providing and enforcing a framework for people to work together. And in this era that needs to be a high tech framework.

Actually, it needs to not only be very high tech, but also very cutting edge, decentralized, sufficiently holistic but also flexible enough to evolve.

Which is incredibly hard, and we probably will not get due to greed, stupidity and politics, and that may be the actual reason that human civilization is superceded by AI civilization.

The thing is that it just needs to mess up less than humans to be worth sticking with it or have the political inertia to be 'preferable' to humans bureaucracies making the decisions even if it is sub-optimal. Zero Tolerance in schools is a godawful policy but because it lets them cover their asses even when it results in them getting sued and losing due to wrongdoing by trying to avoid frivolous lawsuits which they would win it is unfortunately sticking around.

The whole reason bureaucracies proved useful over just fiefdoms is that constraining to rules worked better than leaving everything to the discretion. Even the infamous 'flower poetry' Chinese exams were a leap forward because it meant that anyone who could prove sufficient literacy could get government jobs instead of just those connected and offered a floor. Not a great one mind you but literacy is a pretty good baseline for 'capable of handling paperwork and worth giving a decent paying indoor job'.