From: Emlyn O'regan (oregan.emlyn@healthsolve.com.au)
Date: Tue Jan 21 2003 - 17:34:37 MST
(sorry, this originally, accidentally went to wta-talk but was supposed to
go here. Cross posting is bad!)
I think that if you are talking about a posthuman world (Eliezer will slap
me, consider me slapped already ok), then you'd want to do away with
representative democracy altogether.
Instead, my vague notion is that, where you need government, full direct
participation is the go. You have groups like commitees for all the
different functions of government, influencing and directing each other in a
complex and self evolving web. Posthumans would, as far as they would care
to, directly participate for as long as they cared to, in the areas of
interest to them; no barriers to entry. Assuming that a posthuman mind is a
vast and fragmentable thing, a posthuman could devote more or less mental
resources to each area of interest/concern, and exercise some kind of
proportional power in the group.
Ideas like specialisation, modularity, and simplicity of organisation do
tend to go away (or recede) in the face of vastly increased intelligence; if
all players can comprehend an entire complex networked social environment
all at once, the need for central control goes away.
Representative democracy is a least worst system, where communications
bandwidth & latency is poor (compared to thought, say), and where the
sentient beings involved are mentally quite limited (single gepographical
location, ability to simultaneously attend to a few things at most, etc).
The idea of a few making decisions for the many, in the future world of
unchained cognition, makes little sense.
Emlyn
avatar wrote:
> In a more postmortal environment I'd propose a two part
> governmental system, part one being a house elected by
> proportional representation (with 6,000 members, each 0.1% =
> seat, i.e. one per million, allowing political swings in
> cultural/ethnic groupings to have a say). Part two being a
> powerful local government with one area seat per 1,000
> persons, i.e. 6 million worldwide - with the ability to form
> loose coalitions - this is a high rate of representation,
> with a representative body about half the size of a Western
> police force, appropriate for a society with less violence
> and more cultural whims. Executive power within the
> proportional house would probably be best served with
> something close to the American system (seperate head and
> judiciary) but with a much weaker executive.
>
> Solar system government? Yes, but decentralized, with very
> powerful and very small array of local governments (including
> coalitions) and strict rules about freedom to leave zones and
> freedom to pass through zones. Freedom to enter permanently
> might be subject to majority agreement or unaminous blocking.
> Universal base level human and sentient rights ought to
> apply. Issues such as allocation of virtuality resources
> (outside of the individual's brain) would be matters for the
> Solar government.
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