Augmented Democracy
If we manage to rescue civil society from the turbulence of uncertainty and disruption our current managers are leaving in their wake, some form of Augmented Democracy will very likely become the norm.
Imagine waking in the morning to the voice of your personal assistant (Ava) who’s been evaluating proposals recently added to the docket at *The Forum* of the Global Polity…while you slept.
She describes the status of several proposals you’ve asked her to follow, and reminds you of some that will soon be moving to *The Ballot* for a vote. You ask her a few questions about the budget of a specific proposal and then suggest she move on.
A proposal you collaborated on recently with some colleagues (and Ava of course) was accepted by a fairly wide margin. It’s now in the lineup for funding at *The Foundation*. Ava gives you an update on its status, elucidates the probable outcomes, and then suggests you be prepared to solicit pledges from those who supported the proposal in order to make up the potential funding differential. You ask her to take a soft poll sampling of the supporters ‘assistants’ to see if it’d be worth the effort. She does so (in about two seconds) and says you could easily make up any deficit in funding through a pledge request. You tuck that piece of datum way with a smile.
Ava then runs through a synopsis of some local and regional initiatives she’s determined you’ll likely want to be briefed on. She asks if you’d like her to continue as she reminds you that you’re having coffee with your daughter in an hour. You still need to shower so you instruct her to keep an eye on a particular regional initiative and to proxy vote on any other measures she determines to be in your interest.
Ava is your ‘Augmented Voting Agent’. You downloaded her app a year ago from an agency on SingularityNet. She now knows your interests and voting preferences at least as well as you do. That’s what the stats show anyway. She certainly can process a lot more data. So you’ve taken her on as your personal proxy and trained her to track those matters of greatest consequence to you, as well as how and when to vote on them.
As useful as an app like Ava might be in establishing a true democracy, it’s likely several election cycles away. Aside from the social and technical challenges of enabling A.I. to assist us in our civic responsibilities, our current political structures are often regulated by firmly established and well-organized power cartels who would have little interest in allowing any augmentation likely to constrain their privileged status and concomitant entitlements. That said, the dispossession experienced by citizens subjected to this expropriation may end up being the requisite motivation to develop a platform that an assistant like Ava could operate on.
Working along side these political syndicates, large transnational corporations wielding enormous powers have become the unelected and unaccountable agents driving our executive, legislative, and judicial functions. The pre-eminent example of this is perhaps the following historical sequence of decisions made by the U.S. Supreme Court:
- In 1886 an attorney for the Southern Pacific Railroad, former Senator Roscoe Conkling, deceived the Supreme Court into accepting the premise of a forged document stating that the 14th Amendment’s ‘Equal Protection Clause’ was intended to cover corporations, as well as living citizens of the State.
- In 1978 the above Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad decision was used to extend 1st Amendment freedoms to corporations in First Nat’l Bank of Boston v. Bellotti.
- In 2010 the notorious ‘Citizens United’ case built on the concept of corporate personhood with 1st Amendment freedoms by broadening a corporations ability to influence our political process through the formation of ‘Political Action Committees’. 1
Since these decisions became law, transnational corporate interests have become the illiberal superintendents of our democracy while average citizens are left wondering why their freedoms and quality of life are so quickly disappearing.
Representative Democracy has been bought.
Do we need to explore some of the more egregious examples to further substantiate this claim? As the cartoonist “Mal” many years ago suggested, “If you’re not outraged…then you’re not paying attention.”
So what are the options?
Direct Democracy — Direct Democracy makes a noble effort to include all citizens in the legislative process and has been moderately successful in some isolated cases, but it doesn’t scale very well. The more populated, diverse, integrated, and complex a society becomes, the more initiatives will necessarily emerge for citizens to deliberate and to vote on. At some point, the average person will just want to delegate their participation in the process to another person who is more knowledgable, more inspired by the matter at hand, or to someone who’s not going on vacation to some remote location without wi-fi for the next 3 weeks.
Liquid Democracy — This option is a hybrid between Representative Democracy and Direct Democracy which, some believe, is moving in the right direction. Being able to vote on any piece of legislation as a sovereign citizen, with the freedom to delegate your vote to someone more educated on the matter, would be a major improvement to be sure. But consolidated voting privilege ultimately provides a gateway into the mechanisms that centralize power and control.
Augmented Democracy — Using Artificial Intelligence to manage the scale and complexity of a democracy based on the thorough and comprehensive participation of a sovereign citizenry is currently a fantasy that exists exclusively within the realm of science fiction. Online platforms for decentralized governance are currently being developed within some (mostly cryptocurrency) communities, but they’re a long way from incorporating the artificially-intelligent algorithms requisite for the type of augmentation described above.
So what now?
A true democracy needs a diversity of participation analogous to the whole body politic if it is to function at its optimum. The percentage of engagement is very likely parallel to the value realized by the effort. From this perspective, the underlying advantages of a platform employing Augmented Democracy would likely be manifold.
In his book “The Wisdom of Crowds”, James Surowiecki has gathered research illustrating the potential for rather ordinary groups of people to make very intelligent, if not wise, decisions under certain circumstances.
In the introduction, he describes the outcome of a weight-judging contest that took place in 1906 at the West of England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition. Contestants were asked to speculate on the dressed weight of an ox that was on display for their calculations. After the contest (and presumably after the ox had been butchered), a British scientist named Francis Galton obtained the tickets on which the estimates were made. He counted them, totaled them, and then divided the total by the nearly 800 entries. The crowd with their predictions factored together came in at 1,197 pounds. The ox dressed out at 1,198 pounds.
Surowiecki cites numerous similar examples in his book, but what he writes about the above instance of crowd intelligence is particularly interesting:
What Francis Gaulton stumbled on that day was the simple, but powerful, truth that…under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them. Groups do not need to be dominated by exceptionally intelligent people in order to be smart. Even if most of the people within the group are not especially well-informed or rational, it can still reach a collectively wise decision. (Surowiecki, 2005, p. x111)
Designing a system that effectively employs the attributes of this synergistic advantage, and then scaling it to provide access to as many individuals as are willing to contribute to the enterprise, would be a remarkable beginning. Coupling it to intelligent algorithms that allow for accurate and reliable proxy voting could potentially inaugurate the most efficient, effective, and equitable system of democracy imaginable.
In conclusion:
The capture of our administrative institutions by special interests has left us with a surfeit of untenable circumstances that must be re-evaluated and resolved if we are to survive (let alone thrive) as a species. Unfortunately, the unchecked ambitions of our current managers are ransacking the various systems we depend on and the gains they’ve made are not likely to be surrendered anytime soon.
Given this challenge, crowdsourcing a collective rebuild of our global civil society may be our only recourse.
Some have advocated for the development of an augmented, decentralized platform on which to organize a more intelligent and responsible evolution of our civil society. Not a simple task to be sure, but perhaps an essential one if we are to endure beyond the end of this century.
Either way…it’s up to us now.
As together we choose, together it will be.
1- https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/history-corporate-personhood
