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213 points lexandstuff | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.462s | source
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jandrewrogers ◴[] No.44477503[source]
A critical flaw in arguments like this is the embedded assumption that the creation of democratic policy is outside the system in some sense. The existence of AGI has the implication that it can effectively turn most people into sock puppets at scale without them realizing they are sock puppets.

Do you think, in this hypothesized environment, that “democratic policy” will be the organic will of the people? It assumes much more agency on the part of people than will actually exist, and possibly more than even exists now.

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jongjong ◴[] No.44479345[source]
The Greeks already figured out thousands of years ago that the best way to implement democracy was via random selection. Yet here we are, everyone believes that 'democracy' necessitates 'voting'; totally ignoring all the issues which come with voting.

The concept of voting, in a nation of hundreds of millions of people, is just dumb. Nobody knows anything about any of the candidates; everything people think they know was told to them by the corporate-controlled media and they only hear about candidates which were covered by the media; basically only candidates chosen by the establishment. It's a joke. People get the privilege of voting for which party will oppress them.

Current democracy is akin to the media making up a story like 'The Wizard of OZ' and then they offer you to vote for either the Lion, the Robot or the Scarecrow. You have no idea who any of these candidates are, you can't even be sure if they actually exist. Everything you know about them could literally have been made up by whoever told the story; and yet, when asked to vote, people are sure they understand what they're doing. They're so sure it's all legit, they'll viciously argue their candidate's position as if they were a family member they knew personally.

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cmitsakis ◴[] No.44480225[source]
Good idea. Random selection is interesting but I don't know if it can work today. A solutions for the issue you mentioned "Nobody knows anything about any of the candidates" is a system that allows people to vote only for people they know personally, and use some algorithm (maybe something like the PageRank algorithm that Google used) that rates each citizen according to the votes they get but also the votes are valued according to the rating of each citizen. That way the rating flows to the people who are really trusted by the people and not the best funded career politicians. Just an idea. maybe there are problems with that too if it can be gamed but it's worth trying.
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1. andriesm ◴[] No.44482801[source]
A solution does exist? - micro democracy, delegate more decision making authority to the smallest geographic unit possible. Then people are voting for someone from their neighborhood.
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2. const_cast ◴[] No.44483898[source]
This comes with a lot of trade-offs. The complexity of regulation explodes, because everything takes more hops and there's more context switching.

Even with just 50 states in the US currently, the complexity is very high. Operating in all 50 states or just a few is very difficult and costs a lot of money. Usually what happens is the "lowest common denominator" solution: whereby companies just follow the superset of laws that comply with the most stringent regions.

That's why California law is pretty much the most important state law. California has the biggest economy, and a lot of companies are headquartered there. In addition, their laws tends to be more restrictive for companies. So even if you're in Texas, there's a good chance you're just controlled by California law.