Comments for entry "The Software Form of Government" at Dilbert.com Blog

Comment from kfdiceman

WedPMCSTE_Rthth

Idea for next election: Have IBM build a version of WATSON that is present at the debates to fact check in real time. Just having WATSON there might scare the heck out of those folks...

Comment from 99er

MonPMCSTE_Rthth

What if serving in congress was like jury duty. You serve for $12 a day plus expenses covering your normal monthly bills. All Senators and House members would be housed in a barracks style hotel. No election campigns. No contributions to law makers allowed. No congressional pensions.

Comment from woodsci

SunPMCSTE_Rthth

Sounds good in theory, and eventually. In the mean time - those most "skilled" at internet etc. are the hackers and trouble makers - and generally those with the most to hide (hinding as they are in Mom's basement). Thise would be the kind of people who would develop such a system - and make sure that they maintain thier own backdoors - to get around being exposed.

Comment from gpseymour

SatPMCDTE_Rrdrd

In theory (as you'd intended it), there are several good points to this, and some ideas that could actually be implemented either in this or a less techno-centric form. Here are a few comments/observations: 1) As others have noted, there's an intrinsic bias in testing. You'd have to have a panel to determine proper testing for a given subject. Mind you, as technology advances, it may be possible to have a program discern the elements the experts for any given topic agree upon (perhaps within 90% of unanimity) and test only upon those elements. I disagree that this would be a barrier to voting, assuming information is available to those who cannot read (perhaps in a voice-to-text conversion), as well as testing. 2) There would have to be some sort of built-in controls to protect minorities from the oppression of the majority (as one other commenter cited from the Federalist Papers). I believe a restructuring of the idea to handle this is possible. 3) The concern over groups being able to override this system (hacking, helping friends get high scores, using physical force in the absence of an actual government to overthrow) are real. 4) There would have to be some sort of buffer to control against foolish emotional decisions. Imagine what might have happened following 9-11. Even with our republic, we passed some laws that would never have had a chance three weeks earlier, and probably wouldn't make it through now. If the reactionaries had had the opportunity to pass laws while much of the public was distracted (or simply not focused on politics), what might have happened? Who might we have attacked? What might we have outlawed?

Comment from megamagicpower

SatAMCDTE_Rrdrd

The problem is that often the most educated people on a given topic will have the most objections to the most basic established "facts" of a subject, especially when it comes to policy which is not as purely scientific as some of the areas where there is still disagreement. Also, they can sometimes have the worst ideas for policy, since intelligent people tend to be blinded by innovation and the potential for a greater future vs. practical considerations. So I think all a test would accomplish would be drowning out the votes of the poor and working class who are generally poorly educated. However, I do not believe that fundamentally someone with a poor understanding of a topic has a completely invalid opinion on that topic, especially when it comes to matters that concern the poor and working class.

Comment from JimfrDE

FriPMCDTE_Rndnd

Surely we still need a constitution, courts to enforce it, and elected officials who pledge to uphold it. Otherwise, what happens if 51% of the country votes to reinstitute slavery?

Comment from hankfu

ThuPMCDTE_Rstst

In the Federalist Papers #10, Hamilton argues that the will of the masses ("major factions" as he calls them) is oppressive in nature. Individuals and minorities (factions) would not be protected from the majority (e.g. slavery and women voters). He offers this as one of the key reasonings behind the representative democracy we have today. Unfortunately even that system has been corrupted with a large number of non-voting population and special interest groups essentially buying influence in DC (unions, AARP, corporations, etc.).

Comment from veti

WedPMCDTE_Rstst

I thought that was going well, until we got to the 'everyone has guns' part. That raises two spectres. One, the lone loony. I'm sure I don't have to remind you that one person with a gun *who's not afraid of the consequences* can do a great deal of damage before all the other armed people take him (it's pretty much always a 'him') down. Two, the warlord. Why should I care that my credit cards have been cancelled, if I have a trained army of flunkies who will simply take what I need from less well organised people and bring it to me? You're forgetting that no matter how much exists online, there's still a real world that is independent of it, and we need goods and services *in that real world* in order to survive.

Comment from Halopul

WedPMCDTE_Rstst

Scott, check out the German Pirate Party (it's a real thing) and their use of the 'Liquid Feedback' tool for virtually debating, amending, and voting on policy proposals in real-time. Each party member carries one vote and the software invigorates a spirit and dynamic of citizenry within party ranks. The Pirates hope to replicate this approach on the national stage into a sort of open-source politics.

Comment from Spitemaster

WedPMCDTE_Rstst

I actually have wrestled with a similar idea. Instead of giving each person a test to determine the weight of their vote, give each person a single vote. Then, to avoid people just voting for whatever without knowledge (and to prevent people having to spend all their time researching in order for the government to run), they may assign their vote to another person, and may no longer vote unless they choose to take their vote back. We'll call this person a 'Politician'. The weight of each Politician's vote is 1 (the number of people who passed their vote to the Politician). Politicians who control a certain percent of the vote (>1% or something) also get a salary in order to allow them to research issues properly. Because there's still the issue of the media blowing votable matters out of proportion and having everyone taking back their vote temporarily in order to vote how the media say they should, people can't vote on anything that was already in motion before they changed the possessor of their vote. Another possible issue is that Politicians would vote in a way they don't really feel in order to keep the media from causing them to lose all their votes. Therefore, only a random (and small) selection of the votes would be public, and those would only be determined /after/ the vote has been taken. This ensures that they'd be forced to tell the truth to some extent, yet would be unafraid of the media, and turmoil would be kept to a minimum.

Comment from Goodlife

WedAMCDTE_Rstst

Just one thing: "The right to high speed internet." A right like this essentially gives you a right to a certain amount of slaves. Someone has to provide the high speed internet. That person does not have the "right to refuse you service." You own a portion of their life. This is why it's difficult to grant a right that someone else must provide for you. You must first deny that person the right to toil for their own benefit.

Comment from uhmdown

WedAMCDTE_Rstst

Releasing demand for privacy has to go both ways. That means that not only can others see data about me, but I can also see who's looking at my data, why, and what they intend to do with it. Making the access traceable would help prevent abuse. Here's the problem with this: it fundamentally challenges the concept of being human. If humans are nothing but exchangeable and searchable data, then what are we other than just living databases? Part of what makes us human is the process of sharing information with each other at a pace that both are comfortable with. The more you get to know the person, the more sensitive stuff you may open up about. How would that part of us remain intact?

Comment from dilbertSpawn

WedAMCDTE_Rstst

3 things you'd need for it to work (among others): 1. You correctly state everyone would need the right to internet access. I would go further and say they need to actually have internet access (the right doesn't do you any good without the implementation). It's worth noting it would have to be secure, reliable and sufficiently fast to be usable. 2. There would need to be an unbiased method for creating tests on any given topic. 3. All citizens would have to have sufficient access to (unbiased) education to be able to learn about an issue. I can actually see technology overcoming 2, at least in a theoretical sort of way, assuming it has some basis to draw on, and it can be reliably programmed and tested. I think with sufficient public oversight, it could happen. Security, reliability and usability of the internet access are similarly technological challenges I think we can overcome. 1 is hard without a physical government. I know die-hard libertarians will say the free market will take care of it, but since you need EVERYONE to be able to access the internet, it would be hard for them to make a profit, since they can't deny anyone service; with the right laws, the rich could be required to fund internet access for the poor, but you'd need to get those laws "passed" before the voting system really goes into effect. It's hard, but workable. As for 3, it's not hard to get information available to everyone once they have internet access. The harder question is how to actually get people to learn the amount of information they need in order to make informed decisions. Given that there are hundreds (probably) of topics relevant to one year of law making, it would take a vast amount of time to learn about all of them. In a good system, and this time takes away from people producing anything. I see this going one of two ways; everyone learns a lot about a few topics and decisions are made by experts, or a small number of people learn enough about enough issues to control how the country is headed, to a sufficient degree to form an oligarchy. This might just be a function of weighing the votes and writing the tests correctly, or it might be a result of the much harder task of passing the right laws early on. There are also some objections about courts, jails, and whether your faith in the free market and volunteers is justified, but I thought the above was more interesting. It's also worth noting you need someone to run the servers.

Comment from Patrick71

WedAMCDTE_Rstst

Scott your homework for this week is to read then write a book report on the novel 1984 by George Orwell and relate it to your ideas above.

Comment from whtllnew

TuePMCDTE_Rthth

@crogers23 ...And your answer to all the other problems folks had with the test weighting idea?

Comment from crogers23

TuePMCDTE_Rthth

Okay, the obvious flaw here is, who defines what law is "new" and what law is a "change" to an existing law? But I love your idea about weighting votes based on a test. But I suspect a lot of people would call that racist.

Comment from RavenBlack

TuePMCDTE_Rthth

I'm not sure why you think that software-government necessarily has no employees. If 70% of people voted for "let's have teachers that are funded by taxation" then that would happen in your system, right? And that would be government employees, effectively. Or do you have a constitution that says "you can vote for laws provided they don't involve paying anyone from taxes"? What does a law even mean, at that point? If nobody is enforcing the law, it's meaningless. If nobody is being paid to enforce the law, then nobody is enforcing it. And if law enforcement is through people paying a private company, how are they incentivized to enforce the laws people voted for, rather than the laws the private company CEO thinks are better, or the laws that say "actually everyone gives us twice as much money and does what we say or else"?

Comment from Phantom II

TuePMCDTE_Rthth

It's the assumptions about the things that have to happen first that concern me the most. The big one is, and I'm paraphrasing, "All you have to do is give up all rights to privacy." That's like the famous recipe for Bear Stew: "First, shoot a bear." The real first thing you'd have to do is eliminate the Constitution. You'd then have to change our form of government from a republic to a democracy. Gee, that would be easy. Not! The founders made us a republic for a reason: to protect us from the whims of the moment; from emotional responses to situations that cry out for reason, and which could lead us off the cliff. Take a look at the Peloponnesian War if you want to get an idea of where rule by plebiscite can lead. The founders also created a Constitution to limit the powers of government and ensure basic rights could not be abridged. While largely ignored today by our federal government, it's still comforting to know it's there. In your scenario, people would have to no longer desire power over their fellows. Think THAT'S going to happen? So we'd go from rule by a handful of idiots who think they're demi-gods to rule by the people who program the governmental software. Aided by the people who write the tests we'd have to take before we can vote. Gee, that sounds great. I'd posit that a far better plan is to slowly but surely reduce the power of the federal government. Start by removing laws rather than passing new ones. Cut the bureaucracy and return power to the states and to private enterprise. Have the federal government live within the boundaries of its constitutionally-enumerated powers. Stop micromanaging our lives, and let us get back to that now-foreign concept of freedom. It amazes me how foreign the concepts of freedom and self-responsibility have become. It's like people want to be perpetual children, with daddy government handing them goodies and making all their decisions for them. "Can I use an incandescent light bulb, daddy?" "No, little child, that's not good for the earth." "OK, daddy, can I have mercury in my thermometer?" "No, little child, mercury is poisonous. Daddy wants you to be safe!" "OK, daddy, then why do I have to have mercury in my light bulbs?" "Little child, you're just not smart enough to understand. Just do as you're told, and daddy will give you a great big check from all those nice communists in China." It's nice that Scott likes to play mind games about fanciful recreations of reality. But the rest of us have a real world that we have to contend with, and that's more worthy of our thought processes than creating an imaginary software government.

Comment from kkinnett

TuePMCDTE_Rthth

I hate to say it Scott (because of Godwin's law) but it almost sounds like a 21st century form of Fascism. The 'voluntary' rescinding of privacy for the purpose of elimination crime is one of the things that lead to the police states in 1930's Europe. Citizens spying on other citizens for the public good... sounds very familiar. Why do you need privacy? In case your government enacts and unjust law. Fifty years ago it was illegal to practice homosexuality in this country, and yet people did. Why? Because, they did have a right to privacy. Similarly, what are they going to say about *us* 100 years from now? Its hard to say. I cannot help but think that the system you describe would not descend into tyranny, or if you are not indeed describing exactly the tyranny of the majority that our county was set up against. Though I do see the weighted vote system, and everyone being armed as being checks and balances against it I do really like the weighted vote system aspect by the way. We could incorporate that into the voting system right now.

Comment from fcecin

TuePMCDTE_Rthth

Hi Scott, Instead of having a mechanism that creates a central repository of "laws," you can have each person mantain their own "assertions" repository, where they describe not only the laws they wish existed, but principles they adhere to and the degree of tolerance, leeway, or willingness to adapt to dissenting opinions or "laws" on other topics. I belive this can be potentially more usable than repeated polling. With polling, people have no profiles of any kind and they have to be probed with trivia quizzes every time a decision has to be made by society at large. With every person being responsible for declaring their views, once, any "polls" can be resolved automatically: if a decision needs to be made, it suffices to match it against a person's (formally) declared views. Of course, you can have an "If , Ask Me" declared in your profile, if issue is important for you and you want to personally think about e.g. the context and implications of issue at the time the collective needs to poll your opinion. Actually, "If Anything, Ask Me" could be the default declaration for everyone, i.e., at its default state, the system polls everyone about everything. Or, going even further, if people don't even have a profile, if they refuse to interact with technology, it's everyone else's responsibility to manually poll, to interface with these people somehow. Also, you could have assertions or declaration which pertain to the democratic system itself. Let's say your (50%/67%/weighted voting) system is so popular in 2050 that 80% of people put it in their profiles, so it is the meta-law that's in effect, buy by 2100, it gets less popular and drops below 50% acceptance, whereas the idea that voters don't have to be tested for knowledge of issues rises above 50%. At that moment, automatically, the system itself starts to function in a different way. At a base level, the system has to be about equality, of one person, one "vote" (or one voice, one expression, one profile). You can have a system based on equality having content, or rules, pertaining to e.g. testing for issues, so your modeling is valid. But I wouldn't have it be "the system," but content of it. I haven't given up on having absolute equality as a base, and lots of folks haven't too. It is much easier to have a system that's based on absolute equality and that allows upper layers of customization that distort that equality, than have a system based on unequality and that later attempts to create a sense of equality. And, of course, systems that force equality or inequality across the board also suck. Other advantages of this kind of system are that you have, as an exercise in citizenship, to be able to describe your assumptions, and that you can come back to them later and be reminded of your own assumptions. This makes it much harder for people to be inadvertently hypocritical by sheer lack of self-knowledge. I hope this makes some sense.