Government vNext
I imagine a world. A world by the people for the people. A world where people listen, discuss, agree, disagree and ultimately can choose. Both individually and as a group. The society that lives in that world is progressive and open. The government that backs that society is adaptible. It's made to evolve freely. However is right in the current moment, facing yet unknown challenges. The rules this society makes up aren't set in stone either. They can morph with the original problems and ideas for which they got created. The existence of physical borders which are free to dynamically change is common sense, if that is what's right during that time. That world is what I am dreaming of for so long and what I am thriving for for the rest of my life.
Governments doesn't have anything. So when they promise something they have to take it from someone else. Governments doesn't produce, they just redistribute what people produce¹. There is, however, a thing that the government and the government only creates. A long-therm investment oppurtunity where a project doesn't have to show any return on investment for decades or event centuries since it's not constrained to the life time of any investors or share holders. Especially from those long therm projects society will ultimately benefit the most. A few examples would be the 1950s and 1960s space race between the USSR and US where ultimately the whole space industry was born from and supplied us with satellite imagery or offshore communications. Another example is war in general, many thechnologies sourced from it. So to takle the big problems, to go for the next frontier, the structure of companies aren't doing it anymore or we need a government which is able to discuss possible projects and investments (of money, labour, time) in the open. Especially with the society that is government by it.
How do you when paying taxes? Probably a mix of feelings along the lines of "it has to be", annoyed or maybe even anger. But shouldn't paying taxes be more an act of honor? I mean the very idea of a tax is (benath others) to fund the country you are living in. To fund healthcare, education, infrastructure, trash removal, courts, you name it. However, that's not how most people see it. Is see two reasons for this: For once, there is no way to see for what ones funds specifically ended up to get used for. Secondly, as a tax payer, there are no options to choose from how your tax money should be used. And thirdly, I rarely come accross someone who enjoys filling out the yearly RSA form, if it's not for the money you got taxed too much.
There are some possible solutions to this. The subway added a countdown to show how long until the train arrives. With this alone, the wait doesn't get any shorter. But it does remove the uncertanty and improves the information available about ones concerns. The same thing should exist for taxes. A chart, either personally or nation-wide, showing the amount of tax money spent in any given time interval, and on what we spent it. Just as with the subway, we doesn't improve anything about how we spent tax money, but we do improve the available information about our convern.
Secondly, let tax payers vote on how to spend a budget. Or let them spend it themself. [...]
And for the paperwork I can say to get technology for the rescue. When most tax-systems got created, available infrastrucutre and the act of pulling it off in daile life was a big consideration. Maybe even putting together a nation-wide chart. Nowadays this shouldn't be a major roadblock anymore. Paying your taxes should be automatically done with every transaction you or a company does, according to what ever rules the society aggreed on. Putting together a chart should be as simple as pressing a button. And then, we can even cryptographically proof that the correct chart is shown and no one tampered with it.
With all of this, I don't want to jump to an optimal system right away and stay there. You may have even better solutions to the proposed problems, or have different problems and concerns all together I either don't see or don't affect me. Let alone the fact that any optimal system which stays fairly constant will unevitably turn into a legacy system which isn't that optimal anymore in a few decades or even years to come. I rather want a system which is adaptable to whatever situation and is able to address any persons concerns, however few people may have it.
The gods within governments
A couple hundred years ago, we had limited understanding about the weather, so we used the concepts of higher forces to explain our observations of thunderstorms, rain, or the lack of it. Today, we have thought about enough concepts that the role of god gets less relevant within the domain of weather. We call it science and facts.
In governments, however, this kind of thinking is still present. It just isn't called god, but conspiracy theory instead. And it's not wheather patterns that are too complex to understand yet, but behavioral economics. That is, the pattern we got thrown into without us choosing to. Who made it and why is burried in history. Weather scientists are economists in this analogy.
This is not a situation set in stone, but rather a point in time thing. Just as we got better in modelling weather, we'll get better at modelling behaviour to put systems in place that resonate more with humanity.
Measuring governments
Today, the single most important figure to measure the performance of a nation is GDP (Gross domestic product). It's an okay measure, but using that measure alone to rate a nations performance is crap. Let me explain. (Todo)
Copyright and capitalism as harmful environment for innovation
When current copyright laws get mixed with capitalism the (extreme) result is a society where executed creativity does not exist. In advent of the ever increasing connectiveness and the rapid development automated flagging systems undergo, our society converges with that extreme.
What is required now more than ever is a new mix of copyright, fair use, public domain and patents. This, however, cannot be a pure technical method. Inspiration for the own work spans for wider that what we consiously remix, going through our subconsciousness. Thus, I can not immagine a way to automatically catch all sources of inspiration of a piece without ending in dystopia.
The good thing is, we don't need it. The only thing we really should be worries about is the pure copying of a piece from another author and claiming it is theirs. Luckly, such systems we already have in place. YouTube with it's content ID system is the most prominent one.
Open question: Should ever be a company the owner of an artisitc piece, or rather always the authors of it?
Politics vs Capitalism
Who makes the rules to live by in a given nations? It's the political system currently active in that nations. In modern, democratic nations this usually is laid out in a way to split the power between many people who ultimately decide what rules and laws are best fit for a given problem or situation.
Now, who makes the rules of capitalism? Or to put it in another way: Who rules the global economy? There really is no ruler. Capitalism is just an abstract concept that everyone uses to make decisions based on their best interest. And due to the way this concept is laid out, it magically steers the whole world into one direction. Mostly that is innovation due to competition, or exchanging work in a transaction.
Todo: Include the original idea of capital in capitalism
It seems to me that there are two system at play in our current society. The national politics as we know and see it, and the global concept of economics where value is transacted. They kind of are at play with each other. Central banks can use money supply and interest rates to influence the economy, which is mostly decided based on political concerns. Also, laws can use the economy to incentivice them with fines for example.
So in the big picture there is the global economy steering all trading countries into one direction, and many local political systems whose create the public daily life in a locality.
A point here is that due to the interconectedness of all countries taking part in global trade, and therefore the global economy, we cant contain certain types of problems within single nations. The US housing market send economic shockwaves arround the world. So in a sense, we are under global leadership already. Interrestingly, that global leadership really is controlled by nobody alone. It's the captialistic concept that holds everything together.
Self regulating systems
I used to think a global empire is a bad idea. I used the reasoning that when the leader of this empire does or declares something against your interest, you have nowhere else to go. In a world with multiple nations, you at least have a chance to begine a live under a regime that more suits your needs.
However, I don't like this reasonging anymore. We are under global leadership already. And the key property of that leadership is that nobidy really leady it. It's just he idea of value transactions that makes everything tick.
With that in mind, the logical next step is to ask ourselfes how we can influence a system that everyone takes part in but no one controls. Where do we want to go as a society and what ideas can we put in place to archieve that?
The idea here is to load much stuff from the carefully manually made politics to a global system where everyone takes part in. This has to be abstract enought to work everywhere, but practical enough for everyone to understand and use.
It should self regulate itself like the open market does and should steer our society into the direction we want to go without the need to actively get pushed it into that direction. Think about how the pyramid where build. Each slave had to aggressivley be convinced that they "want" to build the pyramids. Now think about how the egyption regime back then could have used an incentive structure that makes the slaves want to work on the pyramids by themselfs, just like we build our modern skyscrapers nowadays.
Programmable money
What we need is a system that converts the self interrest of all participants into the interrest of the whole society. It has to have the property of just beeing a set of ideas that make sense for people to follow and believe in.
Capitalism has this interresting property of beeing a set of ideas that make sense together. So the easierst way to create such a system is to build on capitalsim. Luckily, we have broad access to computers and computer networks nowadays. This is a technology most political system underutilize. When applied right, it can be tremendously useful to steer a society.
Todo: Elaborate more on why people believe in a set of ideas in a case study of capitalism. Todo: Elaborate on digital capitalism as explored by Michael Seemann.
One major use case is the existence of programmable money. DLTs (distributed ledger technology) are arround for more than a decade by now and are getting ever more mature. Using a DLT (i.e. a special kind of data structures and algorithms) we can create currencies that reach for beyond of what our paper money or current giro money can do.
Todo: Elaborate more on DLTs and why they can be useful.
Maybe you want to disincentivize the natural formation of monopolies. That is, the concentration of power into very few actors. Maybe logaritmic money can help? Program you money to not double in value when beeing doubled in quantity. This is hard to do with current money as they all tend to be linear, but quite easy when dealing with digital-only money.
Maybe the system needs to collect micro taxes? Easy, just reroute fractions of all applicable transactions to a common pool of tax money. Then the system can decide further down the road what to do with it, just as we programmed it to do.
How about having multiple units of currency? One that buys you only food and shelter that get's generated for every one equally, and another one that can buy you anything you want, but can only be obtained by trade? Just describe it as a computer program.
Just because something is programmed it doesn't mean there is no human involved in that decision. It merely is just a way to guarantee that something we agreed on - the way our money works - will continue to work even though nobody actively enforces it. The computer networks will do it for us. When a given way our money does not apply anymore, the society can still get together and change the implementation of our money.
Polymorphic politics
This really is the vision I pursue. It's not about the perfect political system to live in. It's about the framework and infrastructure that let's us adjust the political systems to the current situation.
The idea is to create the necessary infrastructure for that, create an initial base line system, and then let it evolve freely on it's own from there on.
Simulation aided political decision making
Reaching an agreement about how legislation should be laid out can be cumbersome in today politics. Discussions are full of disagreable people. But for a good reason, every one believes his solution to a problem is the best. There is a need for a better method to do political decision making.
Bring it to an objective level
Everyone who presents his thoughts and oppinions on a political topic has a representation of the matter in his head, trying to communicate her vision as preceisely as possible in order for the others to replicate that. Differences in assumptions and in goals are usually the reason for that being inefficient.
A better way would to describe the relevant system in an ontology language like OWL 2 (Web Ontology Language). That way different ideas can be conceptually represented and the consumers of the idea have a chance to point out exactly what, in their oppinion, misconceptions the author had or where they just disagree.
Furthermore is the autor really required to think through his concept. It would be immediately obvious if an author would present us a half baked solution.
Make it constructuve
It's also now possible to iterate on the idea in the public, and with others.
To really drive collaboration a list of goals and non-goals for each political work item whould be crafted. This also should be provided via the ontology language to make it possible to compare and rank different ideas of different authros (parties) against each other.
By doing so we can objectively determine the best idea. By defining multiple goals and realizing that no idea can do everything perfect one can start to mix and match ideas together with the goal of taking the best from every thing in order to improve the ultimately best concept even more.
Here to goal shouldn't be that the own personal idea should be declared as the best and ultimately used in legislation, but instead it should turn into an collaborative team effort where the goal of all parties is to create the best possible solution.
So really the political debate would be redirected on crafting the list of goals and non-goals, i.e. what is the thung we actually want to archive. Interrestingly though is that for such a question a good source wouldn't be the representatives in the government, but more the actual people in the society.
Open it up to the masses
There are many brains in the world. It would be a shame to dismiss the many good ideas without addressing them. With a system like the one described above in place it is easy to open up the ranking of ideas and concepts to the public. That way anyone with a better idea can define it in an ontology language and rank it agains all other ideas.
It also possible for everyone to learn from existing, working concepts and improve on them. In fact, it should be actively encuraged. For that it is important that there shouldn't be any incentive that would make ownership of an idea important as it would bring the team collaboration to a halt.
Making law interactive
Current law books are written in a ultra precise language. Unfortionately that makes them really hard to understand without huge effort. This is a major problem for people who ultimately need to live in the constraints given by such laws. Without really understanding them it is risky and leads to wring behavior without the subject even wanting it.
A digital twin of our society which can be used as a playground as described above can also fulfil another use case. Such a digital twin would encapsulate all laws in existence anyways, and all reactions that are followed by such a law, including behavior that results in the defined consequences in form of a punishment or whatever.
With that defined, it is easy for people to look up situations they are interrested in, and just seing a list of possibilitys that can happen according to law. So the question of whether something is legal can be answered in a way that is actually understandable by practically all people.
Furthermore the question of legelity can be objectively solved by a computer by matching some realy situation with the abstract representation of that situation in the digital twin, and then solving for what the law defines should happen. Most importantly shifts the question in court from what the actual consequences are to the question of what actually happened. Once it is precisely defined what happened, to the best knowledge of everyone involved, but not in more detail, the consequences can be decided by a computer based on how the law is defined.
This reduces subjectivity in court. The only wiggle room is the determination of what actually happened. If it would be useful or recommended to use data collection and surveilance to determine what actually happend with a greater accuracy is an open question. In most situations it would probably possible to prove something in court without revealing private information when cryptography is used in some engenious ways.