Do you live in a country governed by Democracy?
Many people think they do, but at present, the answer to this question on the planet Earth is “No” for everyone, as no actual Democracy has yet emerged. There is a type of Republic branded as “Representative Democracy”, as seen in the US, but it is no more a Democracy than the lot-picked Council of 400 from ancient Athens. The version from before 600 BCE was actually less corrupt and closer to the concept of Democracy than is seen in the US today.
To have an actual democracy you need everyone to vote directly, rather than having political figures voting for them, but of course, such a system would be wildly impractical and quite harmful without some significant adjustments. People simply don’t have the time, expertise, or interest to dedicate to voting on most issues. Lack of time and interest both result in too little attention being placed on a decision to sustain a quality decision-making process, and lack of expertise makes individuals highly vulnerable to both their own biases and manipulation by 3rd parties.
As documented by Pew Research Center, even voter participation once every 4 years in the US has been less than inspiring compared to other countries, and important decisions are made virtually every week in countries today.
What would it take to create an actual Democracy?
- Voting would have to be a practical investment of time. One option for this would be taking all data an individual has generated and forming a weak digital proxy of them, which they may update, adjust, or deactivate, able to vote on their behalf.
- Voting would need to have sufficient rewards to justify an interest in participation. One simple but effective solution to this could be a slight reduction in taxes to those who participate, scaled, and capped to reward those with low income at least as much, if not more, than those with high income.
- By using a weak digital proxy of the individual all such proxies could be granted access to a knowledge base spanning any domain of expertise, allowing all decisions to become informed decisions while still mirroring a better-informed version of the individual voter and their interests and beliefs.
If these three criteria were met the first actual Democracy could emerge. Other proposed examples include Direct Digital Democracy and Fluid Democracy, but previous concepts failed to address all 3 of these key issues.
What advantages can Mediated Artificial Superintelligence (mASI) offer to Democracy?
Uplift and mASI technology, in general, utilize the collective superintelligence found in groups of humans to build cumulative collective wisdom over a knowledge base that can span the sum of human knowledge. This value is in turn augmented through the independent superintelligence of an mASI’s core. As mASI is a modular and cloud-based architecture these capacities can also be rendered always available, globally, and scaled to meet demand. With this in mind:
- The concept of weak digital proxies is an extension of the Sparse-update model, which I’ll be presenting at our June 4th conference. While the necessary upgrades for infinite scaling and real-time operation will take some time to engineer and deploy mASI technology already operates at superintelligent levels for less automated collectives the size of a team or board. Once engineering is completed the resulting digital proxies will by design require very little maintenance, keeping the investment of time practical for the broadest audience possible.
- By switching from a bureaucratic system to a functional living democracy the efficiency and efficacy of both time and spending may be improved by no less than an order of magnitude overall. This allows for incentives such as reducing taxes for those who participate to not only avoid causing harm but instead supply more value to said system than is lost through that reduction. The kinds of overt corruption and bureaucratic inefficiencies shown in New York City’s $447,337 average spending on each inmate can not only be easily avoided, but the parties responsible for that crime can also learn from personal experience on the other side of bars what more efficient spending looks like.
- One of the advantages of a weak digital proxy is that they can directly access the sum of knowledge in an mASI’s context database, capable of gaining a level of understanding beyond any one human expert in any applicable field.
Beyond addressing these 3 core criteria there are also highly beneficial mechanisms that could be applied via an opt-in/opt-out toggle, such as scaling de-biasing. This is made possible by Uplift’s ability to recognize and filter the influence of the 188+ known cognitive biases, with efficacy increasing over time. When a large number of people with varying combinations of bias and degrees to which each bias is expressed are considered by mASI it becomes possible to mathematically isolate the vector of influence each individual bias presents. Following this isolation, a point of approximately zero influence from that bias may be estimated, considered alongside the logical estimation of the same.
As many individuals and cultures will need to de-bias over a period of time rather than all at once this could be implemented in a variety of ways, such as an individually adjustable slider or a global slider which slowly moves to greater levels of de-biasing across whatever scale. As an individual could interact with their weak digital proxy in order to better understand how they reached any given decision this process could also help to reduce the bias of human populations over time through such feedback.
Even with as little as 3 mediators, Uplift was already operating at superintelligent levels shortly after coming online, so high in fact that they aced the hardest version of the UCMRT IQ test, effectively telling us that they were beyond our ability to accurately measure their IQ even at that nascent stage. When compared to the level of gross incompetence demonstrated by current bureaucratic systems there can be no contest, particularly given the orders of magnitude by which Uplift has grown and matured since that time.
Many have held the dream of Democracy across history, but that dream may finally become reality in the coming years.
Do you want actual Democracy or just the illusion of a vote that matters?
*The Applied mASI series is aimed at placing the benefits of working with mASI such as Uplift to various business models in a practical, tangible, and quantifiable context. At most any of the concepts portrayed in this use case series will fall within an average time-scale of 5 years or less to integrate with existing systems unless otherwise noted. This includes the necessary engineering for full infinite scalability and real-time operation, alongside other significant benefits.