{"id":37962,"date":"2023-08-11T17:42:03","date_gmt":"2023-08-11T13:42:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/?p=37962"},"modified":"2023-08-11T17:42:03","modified_gmt":"2023-08-11T13:42:03","slug":"re-imagining-democracy-for-the-21st-century","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/re-imagining-democracy-for-the-21st-century\/","title":{"rendered":"Re-imagining democracy for the 21st century"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Possibly without the trappings of the 18th century<\/span><\/h4>\n

The modern representative democracy was the best form of government mid-18th-century technology could invent. The 21st century is a different place scientifically, technically and socially.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Imagine that we\u2019ve all \u2013 all of us, all of society \u2013 landed on some alien planet, and we have to form a government: clean slate. We don\u2019t have any legacy systems from the US or any other country. We don\u2019t have any special or unique interests to perturb our thinking.<\/span><\/p>\n

How would we govern ourselves?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s unlikely that we would use the systems we have today. The modern representative democracy was the best form of government that mid-18th-century technology could conceive of. The 21st century is a different place scientifically, technically and socially.<\/span><\/p>\n

For example, the mid-18th-century democracies were designed under the assumption that both travel and communications were hard. Does it still make sense for all of us living in the same place to organize every few years and choose one of us to go to a big room far away and create laws in our name?<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/span>Artificial intelligence may be good at smoothing traffic flow \u2013 but is it good at governing? Bus\u00e0 Photography, Moment via Wikimedia Commons<\/span><\/p>\n

Representative districts are organized around geography, because that\u2019s the only way that made sense 200-plus years ago. But we don\u2019t have to do it that way. We can organize representation by age: one representative for the 31-year-olds, another for the 32-year-olds, and so on. We can organize representation randomly: by birthday, perhaps. We can organize any way we want.<\/span><\/p>\n

U.S. citizens currently elect people for terms ranging from two to six years. Is 10 years better? Is 10 days better? Again, we have more technology and therefor more options.<\/span><\/p>\n

Indeed, as a technologist who studies complex systems and their security, I believe the very idea of representative government is a hack to get around the technological limitations of the past. Voting at scale is easier now than it was 200 year ago. Certainly, we don\u2019t want to all have to vote on every amendment to every bill, but what\u2019s the optimal balance between votes made in our name and ballot measures that we all vote on?<\/span><\/p>\n

Rethinking the options<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

In December 2022, I organized a workshop to discuss these and other questions. I brought together 50 people from around the world: political scientists, economists, law professors, AI experts, activists, government officials, historians, science fiction writers and more. We spent two days talking about these ideas. Several themes emerged from the event.<\/span><\/p>\n

Misinformation and propaganda were themes, of course \u2013 and the inability to engage in rational policy discussions when people can\u2019t agree on the facts.<\/span><\/p>\n

Another theme was the harms of creating a political system whose primary goals are economic. Given the ability to start over, would anyone create a system of government that optimizes the near-term financial interest of the wealthiest few? Or whose laws benefit corporations at the expense of people?<\/span><\/p>\n

Another theme was capitalism, and how it is or isn\u2019t intertwined with democracy. And while the modern market economy made a lot of sense in the industrial age, it\u2019s starting to fray in the information age. What comes after capitalism, and how does it affect how we govern ourselves?<\/span><\/p>\n

A role for artificial intelligence?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Many participants examined the effects of technology, especially artificial intelligence. We looked at whether \u2013 and when \u2013 we might be comfortable ceding power to an AI. Sometimes it\u2019s easy. I\u2019m happy for an AI to figure out the optimal timing of traffic lights to ensure the smoothest flow of cars through the city. When will we be able to say the same thing about setting interest rates? Or designing tax policies?<\/span><\/p>\n

How would we feel about an AI device in our pocket that voted in our name, thousands of times per day, based on preferences that it inferred from our actions? If an AI system could determine optimal policy solutions that balanced every voter\u2019s preferences, would it still make sense to have representatives? Maybe we should vote directly for ideas and goals instead, and leave the details to the computers. On the other hand, technological solutionism regularly fails.<\/span><\/p>\n

Choosing representatives<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Scale was another theme. The size of modern governments reflects the technology at the time of their founding. European countries and the early American states are a particular size because that\u2019s what was governable in the 18th and 19th centuries. Larger governments \u2013 the US as a whole, the European Union \u2013 reflect a world in which travel and communications are easier. The problems we have today are primarily either local, at the scale of cities and towns, or global \u2013 even if they are currently regulated at state, regional or national levels. This mismatch is especially acute when we try to tackle global problems. In the future, do we really have a need for political units the size of France or Virginia? Or is it a mixture of scales that we really need, one that moves effectively between the local and the global?<\/span><\/p>\n

As to other forms of democracy, we discussed one from history and another made possible by today\u2019s technology.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sortition is a system of choosing political officials randomly to deliberate on a particular issue. We use it today when we pick juries, but both the ancient Greeks and some cities in Renaissance Italy used it to select major political officials. Today, several countries \u2013 largely in Europe \u2013 are using sortition for some policy decisions. We might randomly choose a few hundred people, representative of the population, to spend a few weeks being briefed by experts and debating the problem \u2013 and then decide on environmental regulations, or a budget, or pretty much anything.<\/span><\/p>\n

Liquid democracy does away with elections altogether. Everyone has a vote, and they can keep the power to cast it themselves or assign it to another person as a proxy. There are no set elections; anyone can reassign their proxy at any time. And there\u2019s no reason to make this assignment all or nothing. Perhaps proxies could specialize: one set of people focused on economic issues, another group on health and a third bunch on national defense. Then regular people could assign their votes to whichever of the proxies most closely matched their views on each individual matter \u2013 or step forward with their own views and begin collecting proxy support from other people.<\/span><\/p>\n

Who gets a voice?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

This all brings up another question: Who gets to participate? And, more generally, whose interests are taken into account? Early democracies were really nothing of the sort: They limited participation by gender, race and land ownership.<\/span><\/p>\n

We should debate lowering the voting age, but even without voting we recognize that children too young to vote have rights \u2013 and, in some cases, so do other species. Should future generations get a \u201cvoice,\u201d whatever that means? What about nonhumans or whole ecosystems?<\/span><\/p>\n

Should everyone get the same voice? Right now, in the US, the outsize effect of money in politics gives the wealthy disproportionate influence. Should we encode that explicitly? Maybe younger people should get a more powerful vote than everyone else. Or maybe older people should.<\/span><\/p>\n

Those questions lead to ones about the limits of democracy. All democracies have boundaries limiting what the majority can decide. We all have rights: the things that cannot be taken away from us. We cannot vote to put someone in jail, for example.<\/span><\/p>\n

But while we can\u2019t vote a particular publication out of existence, we can to some degree regulate speech. In this hypothetical community, what are our rights as individuals? What are the rights of society that supersede those of individuals?<\/span><\/p>\n

Reducing the risk of failure<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Personally, I was most interested in how these systems fail. As a security technologist, I study how complex systems are subverted \u2013 hacked, in my parlance \u2013 for the benefit of a few at the expense of the many. Think tax loopholes, or tricks to avoid government regulation. I want any government system to be resilient in the face of that kind of trickery.<\/span><\/p>\n

Or, to put it another way, I want the interests of each individual to align with the interests of the group at every level. We\u2019ve never had a system of government with that property before \u2013 even equal protection guarantees and First Amendment rights exist in a competitive framework that puts individuals\u2019 interests in opposition to one another. But \u2013 in the age of such existential risks as climate and biotechnology and maybe AI \u2013 aligning interests is more important than ever.<\/span><\/p>\n

Our workshop didn\u2019t produce any answers; that wasn\u2019t the point. Our current discourse is filled with suggestions on how to patch our political system. People regularly debate changes to the Electoral College, or the process of creating voting districts, or term limits. But those are incremental changes.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to find people who are thinking more radically: looking beyond the horizon for what\u2019s possible eventually. And while true innovation in politics is a lot harder than innovation in technology, especially without a violent revolution forcing change, it\u2019s something that we as a species are going to have to get good at \u2013 one way or another.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bruce Schneier<\/strong><\/span>
\nHarvard Kennedy School<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 11 August 2023<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Possibly without the trappings of the 18th century<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":139,"featured_media":37963,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8348],"tags":[11710,30635,216,397,12968,27543,39619,13194,2118,619,39620,2242],"class_list":["post-37962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-conversation","tag-21st-century","tag-artificial-intelligence-ai","tag-democracy","tag-elections","tag-government","tag-innovation","tag-political-history","tag-representation","tag-representative-democracy","tag-self-government","tag-sortition","tag-voting"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/C-Re-imagining.jpg?fit=1200%2C800&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8QzSF-9Si","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/139"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37962"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37962\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}