Re-imagining democracy for today’s technological era without the trappings of the 18th century
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Imagine we’ve all – all of us, all of society – landed on some alien planet, and we have to form a government: clean slate.
We don’t have any legacy systems from the US or any other country. We don’t have any special or unique interests to perturb our thinking. How would we govern ourselves?
It’s unlikely we would use the systems we have today. The modern representative democracy was the best form of government that mid-18thcentury technology could conceive of. The 21st century is a different place scientifically, technically and socially.
For example, the mid-18thcentury democracies were designed under the assumption that both travel and communications were hard.
Does it still make sense for all of us living in the same place to organise every few years and choose one of us to go to a big room far away and create laws in our name?
Representative districts are organised around geography, because that’s the only way that made sense 200-plus years ago.
But we don’t have to do it that way. We can organise representation by age, for instance.
US citizens elect people for terms ranging from two to six years. Is 10 years better? Again, we have more technology and therefore more options.
As a technologist who studies complex systems and their security, I believe the very idea of representative government is a hack to get around the technological limitations of the past.
Voting at scale is easier now than it was 200 years ago.
We don’t want to all have to vote on every amendment to every bill, but what’s the optimal balance between votes made in our name and ballot measures that we all vote on?
In December 2022, I organised a workshop to discuss these and other questions. I brought together 50 people from around the world: political scientists, economists, law professors, AI experts, activists, government officials, historians, science fiction writers and more. We spent two days talking about these ideas.
Several themes emerged from the event. Misinformation and propaganda were themes, of course – and the inability to engage in rational policy discussions when people can’t agree on the facts.
Another theme was the harms of creating a political system whose primary goals are economic. Given the ability to start over, would anyone create a system of government that optimises the near-term financial interest of the wealthiest few? Or whose laws
benefit corporations at the expense of people?
Another theme was capitalism, and how it is or isn’t intertwined with democracy.
And while the modern market economy made a lot of sense in the industrial age, it’s starting to fray in the information age. What comes after capitalism, and how does it affect how we govern ourselves?
Many participants examined the effects of technology, especially artificial intelligence.
We looked at whether – and when – we might be comfortable ceding power to an AI. I’m happy for an AI to figure out the optimal timing of traffic lights . . . [but] when will we be able to say the same thing about setting interest rates? Or designing tax policies?
. . . As to other forms of democracy, we discussed one from history and another made possible by today’s technology.
Sortition is a system of choosing political officials randomly to deliberate on a particular issue. We use it today when we pick juries . . . Today, several countries – largely in Europe – are using sortition for some policy decisions. We might randomly choose a few hundred people, representative of the population, to spend a few weeks being briefed by experts and debating the issue – and then decide on a budget or environmental regulations.
Liquid democracy does away with elections altogether. Everyone has a vote, and they can keep the power to cast it themselves or assign it to another person as a proxy.
Perhaps proxies could specialise: one set of people focused on economic issues, another group on health and a third bunch on national defense.
Then regular people could assign their votes to whichever of the proxies most closely matched their views on each individual matter . . .
. . . Who gets to participate? Early democracies . . . limited participation by gender, race and land ownership.
Should everyone get the same voice? In the US, the outsize effect of money in politics gives the wealthy disproportionate influence.
Those questions lead to ones about the limits of democracy. We all have rights: the things that cannot be taken away from us. We cannot vote to put someone in jail, for example.
While true innovation in politics is a lot harder than innovation in technology, especially without a violent revolution forcing change, it’s something that we as a species are going to have to get good at – one way or another.