cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/69831108
Hacker reverse engineers his Samsung TV and finds on-device AI listening for your dog and baby, watching what you watch, and borrowing your soundbar’s mic if the TV doesn’t have one. Then OpenAI banned him for reverse-engineering it.
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Democracy is ok, but I have a slight tweak in mind. Before taking office, every elected person has to pass independent evaluation. You can’t be a psychopath or a narcissist. If your job involves the financial sector, you need to pass an exam etc. If you’re not qualified, you’ll be assigned a different position. Politics shouldn’t be a simple popularity contest. Politicians should also know what they are doing.
The same but for voters too. If you don’t even understand the cycle of water, you can’t be trusted with weighing on decisions on environmentalism, let alone affordable urban design or how to feed people.
Totally true. People vote based on the weirdest criteria.
“Oh, I’m not going to vote for her because she’s a woman…” Like, do these people even check what the candidate is aiming to accomplish?
I think we should just in general start beating people’s asses when they step out of line. Some tech bro/politician/billionaire says some unhinged shit? Immediately punched in the mouth. I think it’d do a lot of good if people were afraid to be assholes again.
Sounds pretty medieval, because it literally is, but have thought of addressing this issue with a pillory? Sounds like it should keep people in line.
That would require the court system to be involved. Which is already the problem now. Anyone with money for lawyers can just DO things and the rest of can’t resist without a huge hassle. Any old Joe on the street can hand out an ass beating. Immediate consequences for being an asshole.
This is good. I’ll be in charge of the independent evaluation panel.
Yeah, there’s the problem. It needs to be properly audited and independent. Sounds good on paper, but how do we actually implement it IRL.
As long as its an election, becoming a statesman isn’t decided by how good you are at your job, but how good you are at winning popularity contests. And all measures put in place would would get dismantled eventually.
I believe a true democracy would be better - a lottery. Go up to the box, put your name in, lots are drawn randomly and you have your council/senate/whatever. Terms limited to 2-6 years.
A randomly chosen group without overall malicious intentions will always be more effective than a group of educated, elected, “representatives”.
That sounds like a reasonable solution. However, I’m still worried about competence and mental capability. There’s a pretty good chance that a drunken conspiracy nut would eventually hold an important office. Some sort of basic filtering should be in place. Maybe we could give everyone a chance, but incompatible people would need to be kicked out and replaced by more capable people. This system would obviously get abused, just like you pointed out.
What then? Should we just tolerate the fact that a certain fraction of the population, and the governing body, is more or less dysfunctional? Everyone else who has been trusted with power would need to carry them. If the town mayor is too drunk to wake up in the morning, too deranged to have a sensible conversation, or too hostile to be around other people, some secretary would need to participate in all the meetings and take care of the important decisions.
The solution is to normalize the outliers by having multiple people. Having 1 person in charge will make a nutcase inevitable one day. Having a 10-person council would require at least 6 nutcases in a single cycle to gain majority, which is very unlikely. And for congresses you up that to ~100 or more.
I also believe you’re overestimating competence in current governments. Take any council, any senate, you will see most of them attended the same universities, hung around in the same circles, and so on. Even though you technically have a number of different people, their experience in life overlaps so much you effectively have very few distinct opinions in the room. By randomly selecting applicants you guarantee the greatest diversity of opinions, and thus potential solutions to problems.
Here’s what happens when you get 150 randomly selected people in a room and tell them to lower emissions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Convention_for_Climate#Proposals
It is true and I agree that somehow getting the right people in the right positions would be ideal, but the less random a selection process is, the greater the influence that can be exerted over it. I believe the human species would have to fundamentally be different in order to have a more effective selection process than random.
That was a pretty amazing experiment. Random selection isn’t that bad after all, as long as the dysfunctional individuals can blend into the crowd.
And it’s also true that human nature is the root cause of most of our problems. If we don’t have a system for keeping humans in line, they will do what human nature demands. So far, that has led to greed and oppression. Fixing such a fundamental issue would require some pretty radical changes in the human mind. That’s not happening any time soon, so having some scaffolding seems like the best way to approach this problem.
I agree about the psych evaluation. But regarding the exam: a politician is basically a combination of manager and sales person. Of neither role do I expect (deeper) understanding of the things they manage or sell. They need different skills.
But they need to listen to the experts in their ministries and be able to convey their results and concerns to other politicians who are even farther away from their topics and to the public. What they absolutely should not do is push some own agenda; especially not an agenda they somehow profit from.
That implies a certain level on integrity, honesty and humility, which are a bit tricky to test. Would love to see more of that though.