Random thought of the day…
As most programmers, I see tendencies of over optimism in myself. Yet Mike Judge’s Idiocracy seems like a strange window into the future. Part of me thinks that government should include an open source heuristic computer simulation doing minimax on wealth creation(aka technology) and personal well-being to aide in decision making.
I suggest a new field of research: Computer Aided Government (CAG). How can we wire sensors and algorithms into society to enable us to make optimized decisions? How can we use game theory, statistics, Bayes’ Theorem, simulation, sensors, neural nets, etc. to improve the human condition? I think IBM is on to something big with their Smarter Planet initiative.
And just to reel it in if you think I’m bat shit insane, think that the current best forms of government were originated over 300 years ago if not earlier. This was before many forms of computation and logic had been explored and applied. Surely technology can improve this field as it has for nearly every other facet of life. I think open source computer scientists can step up in a big way here. Research in the field could affect billions to come.
Think on it and comment.
Well, w/ the rise of the internet, a whole lot of change is going to happen on multiple levels. So, it is a wait/see thing.
But I agree that the more monitoring the better. As long as it is in good hands, which, it tends not to be once it becomes powerful enough.
Great idea! Add to it “Sam Harris: Science can answer moral questions”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hj9oB4zpHww&feature=sub with these comments http://www.project-reason.org/newsfeed/item/moral_confusion_in_the_name_of_science3/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+ReasonProject+Project+Reason:+Newsfeed#When:19:40:07Z and the world will be a much better place in 1,000 or 10,000 years.
A nice, relevant article:
http://asmarterplanet.com/blog/2010/05/how-agent-based-modeling-can-curtail-the-gaming-of-systems.html
You may be suffering from elevated optimism, but what you have assembled in this short ‘thought of the day…’ is really the future of governing. Indeed, if we look at the United State, arguably the most successful nation in applying real democracy to a largest / diverse population of people, we see how incredibly complex it is to maintain such a large system. To bring the whole world into something as coherent will require the very idea you touch on here. And the very groups you identify from IBM to open source development tools and procedures are the raw materials for such an effort.
While I believe we will need something like this for our survival in the coming decades, I believe that the true possibility of CAG is that it could allow us to thrive in a way we previously could not imagine.
Blindly or with great vision, we will eventually use computer networks to govern the entire world. Whether it is us governing ourselves or someone governing us will depend on our willingness as a people to understand the technology and the efforts of ‘optimistic’ people such as yourself to get there first, with a truly open system.