Back in 2016, post Trump and Brexit, I found a new political party in Australia based on the notion of real-time, blockchain based direct democracy - the Flux Party. Flux was premised on the notion that elected representatives in a parliamentary democracy would be human proxies for continuous real-time votes on individual policies. That is, representatives would vote on every single policy according to the outcome of daily blockchain-managed policy votes held amongst their electorate, and with each member of the electorate holding a different number of votes for different policy issues, based upon their qualifications and authority. It was intriguing. But it hasn't caught on. Like, not at all.
I love the idea of direct democracy. Input on issues you care about. My ‘what if’ brain throws out a whole bunch of scenarios where things don’t go so well. Who can become ‘trusted advisors’? How might people use AI bots to skew the feedback/votes/comments? As Ros mentions, what if the trusted experts are steeped in conscious or unconscious bias with authority on their side? Could it become yet just another social media type place where people hurl insults at one another? Maybe we can mitigate against these things. And maybe it would be better than gerrymandering rep democracy for the wealthy.
The problem I see here is that as soon as there are economic and self-interests at play, those with a lot of influence but the wrong agenda will impose their beliefs on others, buy their acceptance with social and publicity campaigns as any other politician does today. We need to restructure our society to make this work at scale. We need to rethink our values.
Now this is what I'm talking about! I'm all for expanding on current crowdsourcing models, imperfect as they are, because they help us see so clearly what we have to solve for it to work at scale.
Unfortunately Wikipedia is a terrible model, based on what I have seen on certain pages in which I am an expert. Those pages appear to be controlled by the same dysfunctional males with too much time on their hands. Basement-dwelling incels, I suspect.
As prone to their own biases as anyone, it is bad enough that they are left in control of the narrative of what is factual, let alone the narrative of society.
Back in 2016, post Trump and Brexit, I found a new political party in Australia based on the notion of real-time, blockchain based direct democracy - the Flux Party. Flux was premised on the notion that elected representatives in a parliamentary democracy would be human proxies for continuous real-time votes on individual policies. That is, representatives would vote on every single policy according to the outcome of daily blockchain-managed policy votes held amongst their electorate, and with each member of the electorate holding a different number of votes for different policy issues, based upon their qualifications and authority. It was intriguing. But it hasn't caught on. Like, not at all.
I love the idea of direct democracy. Input on issues you care about. My ‘what if’ brain throws out a whole bunch of scenarios where things don’t go so well. Who can become ‘trusted advisors’? How might people use AI bots to skew the feedback/votes/comments? As Ros mentions, what if the trusted experts are steeped in conscious or unconscious bias with authority on their side? Could it become yet just another social media type place where people hurl insults at one another? Maybe we can mitigate against these things. And maybe it would be better than gerrymandering rep democracy for the wealthy.
The problem I see here is that as soon as there are economic and self-interests at play, those with a lot of influence but the wrong agenda will impose their beliefs on others, buy their acceptance with social and publicity campaigns as any other politician does today. We need to restructure our society to make this work at scale. We need to rethink our values.
Now this is what I'm talking about! I'm all for expanding on current crowdsourcing models, imperfect as they are, because they help us see so clearly what we have to solve for it to work at scale.
Unfortunately Wikipedia is a terrible model, based on what I have seen on certain pages in which I am an expert. Those pages appear to be controlled by the same dysfunctional males with too much time on their hands. Basement-dwelling incels, I suspect.
As prone to their own biases as anyone, it is bad enough that they are left in control of the narrative of what is factual, let alone the narrative of society.