Well, it’s here.
2020.
The year I predicted that we’d attain peace on earth.
Damn I hate being wrong. Why hasn’t peace manifested itself yet?
Well, for one, the year isn’t over yet. And thanks to technology, society is advancing far quicker than ever before, so what used to take decades to happen can now happen in just months. Anything is possible, including global revolutions that vastly redistribute wealth and power into the hands of the many.
And really, it was just a guess. Many years ago I said world peace could happen within 100 years. Then, after wrapping my head around the notion of the accelerating rate of technological progress, I tried to extrapolate what that would mean for the evolution of humankind into a globally interconnected species, and I came up with the year 2020, which even back then seemed like a moon shot.
But this hasn’t got me down, Farmer Brown. I’m actually more optimistic than ever before. There has never been a better time than now for world peace (i.e. the dismantling of the military industrial complex) to become a reality.
Why now? What’s different now? Many key factors that I’ve talked about before – a unifying human race (thanks to smart phones connected to internet), the eradication of global poverty (it’s happening!), and an increased awareness of the military industrial complex (and how they manufacture most wars today), are all reaching the tipping point.
On top of this, we now have technologies never before seen, like AI, neural networks, and machine learning, which can do amazing feats, vastly outperforming any human alive in many tasks, like diagnosing cancer or playing video games.
Imagine if we made an AI that could develop a better form of governance for us to use around the world. I’ve long talked about a Global Voting System, now called GVS for lack of a better name, which would be the backbone of an open-source digital democratic system. I’ve said development of such a complex system would need a team of people for it to be successful, but maybe it’s better suited for some finely crafted algorithms to figure out.
Whether or not AI helps design the GVS, it most certainly can help us run it. Sure, it can be scary to think there’s some super-powerful computer program dictating how we live our lives. But the power that AI is bringing is inevitable, and if we don’t leverage this tremendous gift into something that benefits us all, tyrants will seize the opportunity to use AI against us.
So what would this GVS look like? Imagine a benevolent super powerful AI millions of times smarter than any human, operating with clear expectations (like maximizing the quality of every human’s life). Then you give it access to the global surveillance state, (whose tendrils have burrowed into nearly all facets of modern life) so this GVS super AI knows how everyone feels, what we all want, and acts accordingly to create a system of governance that does its best to make it happen.
Don’t go thinking I’m delusional. I don’t expect a GVS as advanced as this to be an option for many years. But that doesn’t mean we can’t start now, working on some kind of protoGVS, trialed on smaller scales. Maybe start with a small city or group, then work up to states and small countries before going big around the world.
To roll out a GVS, we’d need to make a new political party called the Digicrats. The Digicratic Party can operate in a similar way as the crowd-managed pro-sports team called Project Fanchise. In the Fanchise system, paying fans can vote on all kinds of decisions made by a pro football team, like selecting which players to trade to or choosing which plays to make.
The Digicratic party would run alongside existing political parties, but their platform would be decided via the protoGVS by the people who pledge to vote for them. People would vote for a Digicratic candidate because that person, once elected, would be held accountable by the people who got them into power.
In the The Digicratic party platform, transparency and accountability can be baked right into the core. Instead of having politicians who cater mostly to wealthy people and big businesses, we could have elected leaders that are beholdent to the people. And this system would need to be mechanisms to oust and replace anyone in government that didn’t serve their party and people.
All we have to do is figure out a protoGVS model that works somewhat well and form a Digicratic party platform that isn’t too crazy. Then, refine it so it can be replicated anywhere on earth, no matter the language, culture or religious of the people there. Once that happens, there will be nothing stopping us from making it happen.
And it’s not just for those of us living in the lap of luxury in a developed, democratic nation.
All of these oppressed countries living under the thumb of dictatorships… when their collective courage swells and they rise up in revolutions, instead of having a new tyrant take over the power vacuum, instead the new leaders could be Digicrats, swearing to uphold the will of the people and being held to it by a platform the likes of which has never been seen before.
Man, that’s a lot to think about. At this rate, by the time I finish trying to explain myself, 2020 will be freakin over! That’s it! We better get some AI working on this problem, ASAP!
