If you’ve been here before, you would have read my thoughts on a Global Voting System and how it could be used to enabled a true form of democracy, everywhere on earth. This system, open source and crowd-developed, would give the world’s people dramatic power, like ending large scale conflicts and eradicating extreme poverty.
The Global Voting System (which needs a catchier shorter name but its GVS for now) would, on the front end, work on smart phones and other devices, and somehow gather consensus from individuals. I used to think it would be like a poll questionnaire type, but theres probably a more refined way to build it.
The point is that people would somehow give their opinions, wants and thoughts on issues that are open for debate… whether its something involved just within your neighbourhood, your city-wide issues, country-wide, and people will even be “polled” on issues impacting the world scale.
The front end of the GVS will also somehow let people hold their elected officials’ feet to the flames. While a lot of the GVS will be automated, there will still need people to be put into positions of power. However these people will be open to scrutiny and privacy invasion, and mechanisms will be in place to ensure that as little corruption and abuse of power persists.
On the backend – the system will need to be extremely secure, but still open sourced so that no back doors or other shenanigans can go on. Also there needs to be a way to always refine and improve the system and we can’t do that if the system is secret.
Some of my newer thoughts on the GVS were that it might take some form of AI to handle the complexity of the task. The thought that AI and computers could hold so much power over us might be frightening, but that future is inevitable. We may as well take control over it instead of being enslaved by it.
Lately I’ve been thinking about the process of making a GVS type project come to life. First, it would take some fundraising – I bet a crowd sourcing platform would be an ideal place for this, as well as to get more people interested in the project.
It will take a team of talent people just to begin building a sort of a proto-GVS, which will be used to gain the worlds ideas and consensus on how best to build the GVS. This team would need to face a similar kind of transparency and scrutiny that we will expect from our elected officials, and if people are shown to be trying to rig the system they can be replaced.
We could use some sort of reddit type voting to get the best ideas up to the top as well as enabling a discourse on the subjects, as long as the moderation of the forums and discourse was open to scrutiny and replacement of key people if necessary.
Let’s say we were able to create this awesome system and it works awesome like we all hope it can. So what? We still have our current, corrupt and ineffective governments in the way. And none of them will just willingly hand over the reigns to some arbitrary “system of the people”. So then how can make the transition from our current, obsolete form of proto-democracy, to a real democracy where people everywhere get their voices heard.
It used to be the only way I could see it happening was to have the system ready for when revolutions happen. When a country finally has enough, and huge percentages of the population come and oust their shitty governments, a GVS system could be there, ready to be put into place, giving those people’s revolution a lasting democracy (instead of simply putting into power their next tyrant).
Now here’s some of my latest thinking… why wait for the revolution? Why wait when we can create an independent political party, use the GVS to elect party leaders, and then run these elected leaders on existing platforms against existing politicians.
Instead of just liberals/conservatives or democrats/republicans, we could have a brand new party that truly channels the will of the people, because a GVS type system is built by the people for the people.
When you consider how so many of the governing bodies of the world – on all levels of government – allow for such corruption, lies, inefficiencys, and ineptitudes, it’s acutally believable that a viable alternative to this would be embraced by enough people to make it a reality.
