I'm all for replacing our elected officials with small shell scripts. We're automating everything else, why not government?
I could fill out a questionnaire answering hundreds of questions to use as a reference on how I might vote. That data could then be used for voting on subsequent laws.
Why have a representative government when the human doesn't actually represent you. A small algorithm would be a much better representation of you.
Tyranny of the majority much? Elected officials don't exist to simply determine what 50%+1 of the voting population wants. They're not supposed to act as a popularity sieve.
You should be voting for people because they generally share your views, yes, but more importantly because they're willing and able to become experts in the things you need to be an expert in in order to be an effective lawmaker.
> You should be voting for people because they generally share your views
I have actually come to disagree with this sentiment. Look at what we have right now in the US: pretty much complete gridlock when it isn't just partisan curb-stomping. No one is willing to compromise, no one wants to discuss things rationally. Everyone goes in with their answer and attempts to beat others into accepting it and it's our fault, as voters, because it's what we ask of them, because we keep being told that we should vote for people who share our opinions.
I think we should vote for people not because they share our views, which are likely based in ignorance, but because they demonstrate the ability to make informed decisions and come to reasonable compromises. Look for the ones who think things through, who are willing to admit they made a mistake, and who will change their opinion in light of new information.
You make a good point but for one wrinkle: How many politicians can admit to a mistake and actually change in response to new information? Add the characteristic of "able to make genuine compromises" into your search and it seems your results would hover around 0 every time.
There is no incentive to vote for a compromiser when the other side won't. All you're doing is sacrificing all your footing for the sake of movement in the wrong direction.
We're at a gridlock because a significant portion of this country is woefully misinformed about just about everything and are puppets to an incredible machine of profit and no-holds-barred capitalism.
And by participating in that system under those terms you are only encouraging it. Change begins when someone decides to do something different, and it's usually a risk, but if no one takes it everything stays the same.
You have no one to blame but yourself if you refuse to even try.
> I think we should vote for people not because they share our views, which are likely based in ignorance, but because they demonstrate the ability to make informed decisions and come to reasonable compromises.
I like this model, but I think the rub is that rubric itself expresses a view that not everyone shares. It pushes the problem back one step, the disagreements become meta.
Any interest group can defect from the prisoner's dilemma where we all vote for tabula rasa rationalists, and instead choose the strategy of electing someone who pledges unwavering support.
They'd likely disagree with you that they don't know their interests and that they would be better off with smart generalists. And once some interest groups are getting unwavering support, then my bet is that strategy cannibalizes the "rationalist" strategy completely before long.
I'm not endorsing that outcome, I just think that's how things fall apart, and it's hard or impossible to create systems that prevent it.
Tyranny of the majority is incredibly tough. It's basically a sheep/goats problem, where you want majoritarian common sense to get through, but majoritarian selfishness to be stopped at the gate.
Federalism seems the best hedge against it so far, though even that seems to vary wildly in effectiveness. (e.g., Sometimes Jackson ignores Marshall.)
It could very well be that you're right, in which case we can chalk democracy up as just another failed model of governance. Way I see it, there are two options: continue to perpetuate the escalating arms race of irrationality, or try to change it.
One way might end badly, but the other certainly will.
Well, it might be the best of several flawed models.
Malcolm X's speech about the ballot and the bullet is worth hearing. Maybe democracy is only partly about rational policymaking, and mostly a pressure valve to prevent violent revolutions.
That's not to dismiss it, avoiding violent revolutions, even partly, is still a massive benefit for humanity that's hard to overrate.
Having watched even a little C-SPAN, I really, really don't understand the 'expert' argument that always gets trotted out. Senators range from well meaning but unable to keep up, to complete blathering idiots. They don't have time to be experts in anything.
>but more importantly because they're willing and able to become experts in the things you need to be an expert in in order to be an effective lawmaker.
Did you not watch the latest Zuckerberg deposition? Most of our officials do not care about becoming experts in anything. They're old, tired, and ignorant and they are mostly concerned with maintaining power, not learning new material.
> A small algorithm would be a much better representation of you.
Nice, nice: and the de facto elected official becomes whoever implemented the algorithm. You've described a rare opportunity for us to become the Engineers Who Installed The Red Button. I'm in.
It's a terrible idea in more ways than one. The biggest being the fact that AI = software = will be hacked.
And that excludes scenarios where country elites will control it from behind the scenes with algorithm changes that favor them, while pretending to improve it.
Maybe all of these issues will be solved in 100 years. But I think it's far too premature to actually hope for this happening soon. It's going to end in disaster if it somehow does happen, because people are tricked into thinking it's a great idea (just like Pentagon officials and politicians are not being tricked by war contractors that autonomous weapons is a good idea with the AI capabilities and software security we have today).
Because of this trickery we're going to see increasingly more bad decisions by governments who allow AI to take their place. Such as this recent one:
Not so much "hacked" as "written from the ground up by people with nobody's interests but their own at heart".
AI isn't naturally occurring. Humans write the code, humans select the training strategies, humans choose the data to train it with and most importantly humans choose what constitutes a "good, well-trained" AI over a "bad" one which needs more training. Humans pick when to stop. In this hypothetical, those humans are now the gatekeepers on all governance. They have no motivation to do anything but serve their own bias. And we know how much ethical training programmers receive.
We can't build a perfect AI because we don't have a perfect AI which could build it for us.
Do you really trust feature extraction from legalese enough to hand your voting power to some AI? Do you have the time to read hundreds of real laws in order to provide it with real training data? Do you trust that your fellow citizens will do the same?
The staus quo appears to be getting laws passed because they have positive sounding names such as “The PATRIOT Act” and that the people suggesting the laws made the correct choice of teams red or blue.
I didn’t want to learn psychology because I didn’t want to lose the magic of not knowing how my mind works. Now I’m learning it to stop people — myself and others — from deluding me. I’m a neural network too, just an organic one rather than a silicon one.
PATRIOT ACT passed because the authoritarians in government liked it giving them power. The name was just butter to make it easier to force down Americans' throats.
That’s who wrote it. The people who passed it could neither like nor dislike it, because they are on record saying they don’t read bills as that would “slow down the legislative process”.
I could fill out a questionnaire answering hundreds of questions to use as a reference on how I might vote. That data could then be used for voting on subsequent laws.
Why have a representative government when the human doesn't actually represent you. A small algorithm would be a much better representation of you.