Quote from: custard7 on July 30, 2018, 07:30:15 PM

Many people have commented that it's impossible to eliminate politicians because a leadership-follower dynamic emerges within any society, citing the history of tribal warfare up to modern day liberal democracies. While this seems true, it falls victim to the is-ought fallacy. Even if we take it as granted that this is true, that doesn't mean that it ought to be true. Sure, corruption has existed in all societies with leaders who have the capacity to abuse their power, but that doesn't demonstrate how that must necessarily be the case.

For a thought experiment, let's envisage a world without politicians and what that would take. Many other users have supported the idea that 'experts' / 'intellectuals' / 'elites' / people-with-phds should be in charge of the world, presumably because they have access to higher knowledge which allows them to understand the sophisticated dynamics of a complex society and fix them. First, higher intelligence individuals might actually allow people to more efficiently extract rents / exploit / manipulate their subjects, might not have the emotional depth of 'less smart' individuals, or possess the moral fibers necessary for creating a 'just society,' whatever that actually means. Replacing one set of corrupted politicians (which, many people noted, seems to be the natural result of putting people in positions of power, regardless of who they are..) with another set of hyper-intelligent politicians, vulnerable to the same tendencies of evil, seems like a poor choice. --But, all is not lost. The underlying attractiveness to the idea of elite-rule (reminiscent of Plato in his Republic) seems to be in the discrepancy between the 'objective facts' of the world and the 'subjective reality' of a voting populace. Simply, people vote for populist leaders who are so far detached from the objective facts of the scientific world that it boggles the mind -- thus, putting technocrats in charge will fix the problem; they already have solved the problems, the solutions just need to be implemented. Putting aside the question of whether or not that is true -- that technocrats have ready-to-apply solutions to the world's hardest problems -- the real attraction to experts as leaders is that they could, seemingly, create a fair and intelligent society which takes everyone's preferences into account within the context of a concrete - rather than fictional - reality, unswayed by the pleas of the 'reactionary, ignorant' masses. But that doesn't necessarily require people to implement. In fact, in the spirit of this post, people might be in the way. If we could aggregate everyone's preferences in a secure way -- say, their every action was recorded by their phone, laptop, etc and then weighed and crunched alongside everyone else's preference (instead of voting, we 'synched' on a global level), smart contracts and AI could merely implement the required changes to our world to align with global preferences. Perhaps there could be a digital, institutional constitution which prevented egregious abuse / the aggregation of despicable preferences. I'm interested in what people think about this type of approach to replacing politicians? Does it sound appealing?

I've never thought of anything like this. It almost sounds like it could be a Black Mirror episode. You're basically proposing using big data to make political decisions? Computers would just track out actions and correspondence to identify what we would prefer in any given situation and implement it? It seems like it would create this strange feeling that you can't really control anything. It doesn't even give you the illusion of voting. How could this system protect from hacking? How would people doing things like watching pornography affect the system? We have to keep in mind that so much of what people do and think is influenced by media. The media could sway the system.