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Plato was always cautious of Democracy. If you are interested I would recommend give his "Republic" a read.
by cjjuice 10y ago
Plato was always cautious of Democracy. If you are interested I would recommend give his "Republic" a read.
- chirau 10y agoIn it is suggested a form of government called epistocracy. It has a lot of merit in my opinion. The basic principle is 'rule of the knowers'. We elect knowledgeable people into power and let them make decisions. We don't vote on what medication a sick child should get, why should we vote on what remedy a sick economy needs? Let the knowledgeable that we have chosen make the prescription.
- cjjuice 10y agoPhilosopher Kings. Full of virtue, detached from ego, completely dedicated to the expansion of the common good. If only.
- ionised 10y agoWe already have the knowledgeable in power, the banks. They understand how global economics works better than anyone and they manipulate it to their own ends and to the detriment of all others.
- semi-extrinsic 10y agoYou also have Heinlein's concept from Starship Troopers: only those who have committed a year of their life to serving the common good for no pay (food and accomodation covered) earn the right to vote. If that "public service" was of non military nature (unlike in Starship Troopers), I think it would be an interesting system. On the opposite end of the scale is the concept of Demarchy, found in several SciFis, where there are no elected politicians, and technology enables everyone to vote on everything constantly.
- thomasahle 10y agoWe basically already have this. During the economic crisis, there wasn't a lot of voting on how to save the banks. It's interesting whether brexit and trump will really have that much of an effect, or if we are already mostly living in a technocracy. England also has the house of lords.
- zghst 10y agoWe should just put machines in charge. I don't trust any humans to rule over me anymore. Power corrupts, absolutely
- thomasahle 10y agoCould work (because better decisions were made), or could be terrible (because people stopped feeling responsible). We should try it :-)
- zghst 10y agoMath is already in charge of society. More math would be good for all of us
- WorldMaker 10y agoTime to assemble all the evidence in both directions from sci-fi (such as most of Star Trek: TOS, some of Futurama, etc), feed it into a deep learning algorithm and see if it models a better machine society or a worse one. I trust this is a useful first case to test this hypothesis. :)
- zghst 10y agoThis algorithm needs to be very crafty to avoid manipulation. We'll have to constantly re-adjust the weights
- urmish 10y agoPlato's Greece doesn't take into account multi ethnic/racial/religious community. The people who are in charge of healing the sick economy would end up trying to build their utopia without realizing how the common man is affected.