An essay about massive knowledge processing engine
In the far past, there were Greek city-states, where communities were relatively small, those communities had a big impact and very good contact with it’s politicians. In such small groups (thousands of people) democracy can work well - everybody can participate.
But it starts to be more chaotic when scale comes to the game and a nation is electing politicians they do not have contact with and cannot participate directly in democracy. Politician is someone who can have 1 good idea and 9 bad ideas, so if society has little contact with politician and cannot have direct impact, it works against society.
Can democracy scale?
Many things has changed since ancient times. Knowledge, science and technology upgraded a lot. The thing is they are not used to enhance the core of democracy.
A country is like a huge company. A company can be best described (like maybe everything in nature) as group of logic processes and elements participating in it and managing it. If processes and operators are logic and close to optimal all works good.
Observing nature shows that it is optimal when process is fluent, where there is not many interruptions, chaos and wrongly matched elements.
- Interruptions are when you need to change elements or operators (politicians) and break processes. For example new election comes, some processes will be cut or abandoned.
- Chaos is when bad law or bad decisions are created.
- Wrongly matched elements are politicians (people) on wrong positions.
The extinctions of politicians
What we need is:
- Country managers, officers executing law, who can be easily changed on monthly basis if appears corrupted
- Open Democracy: ongoing law creation by experts from each branch with active masses of society
That requires a big change, constitutional change. Hard to imagine it could happen. But possible to imagine an outline how it could work.
Removing the uneducated law creators
We can imagine law creation could look like something between Wikipedia creation and open source software creation.
Open source software is designed by experts. If not-experts are making it - it will be a crap or will not work. If someone has better idea how to change it - he can improve it and create new version. This way law should be created. Many version, ongoing production, people voting to pick best solution for now.
Society creates experts in educational process (schools, universities) -> experts create law propositions with “pros and cons”, then society votes (only those parts of society vote that the law impacts!)
It should also have something from Wikipedia. It needs hierarchy, it requires people to have some profile, trust rank and proven knowledge to avoid spam.
Tools missing
To move law creation online special tools are needed for massive knowledge processing.
It’s not exactly the same as Wikipedia. It’s more like software production, where
- you start with a ticket (problem to solve), then
- you categorize it with importance and branch of knowledge (e.g. medicine), impact on the system and estimate cost of such change.
- Then it is assigned to a specific team (or many teams in parallel) to work it out (e.g. doctors and professors of medicine).
- Then few propositions may come with different ups and downs. In the end society or part of it can vote to select a solution.
And all of this can be done without politician and elections breaking the whole process. It can be faster (done without elections breaking it), cheaper (less chaotic, no uneducated politicians deciding on medicine) and more optimal (done by experts).
A decent forum engine + ticket engine + voting engine + online profile for personal trust rank are needed. Secure and decentralized. This is still a challenge to have. And totality of it will be a social media platform, where new articles are created through massive knowledge processing engine.
The hardest part
However tools are not yet there is seems hardest would be to change constitution and the overall country workflow.
People creating law would be limited to those well educated in the part they are changing (some may call it unfair, but this is same unfair like expecting person with math education to teach math at school, not geography or language).
People voting could be limited to the part of society that it will only impact (because it only make sense - but still someone wanting more power will call it unfair?).
It’s a matter of question if voting should have some weights, like for example if I pay more taxes if my vote should be more important? OR maybe everyone voting for new country programs (actions or operations) should vote with the paid tax as weight to support his or her favorite programs?
All this sci-fi for today...