From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Mon Aug 05 2002 - 23:37:20 MDT
On Mon, Aug 05, 2002 at 11:12:06PM +0000, Sean Kenny wrote:
>
> and you do of course have Alastair Reyonolds new book, Redemption Ark? :)
Sure. Very good book. Although his form of demarchy is different from
what we have discussed, a system of implant-mediated direct democracy.
The Conjoiners are interesting, although I feel that he did not really
describe how their political system really works (or perhaps, how it
*should* work - the current situation appeared to be somewhat special).
If access to citizen mindstates is possible, one can do a lot of
interesting politics. One form would be like Reynold's demarchy, where
knowledge of issues is downloaded and views then compiled. Another form
would be "upload demarchy" where the system randomly "drafts" copies
into a parliament for a certain time (they would afterwards be merged
with their originals - although if this is not done they could actually
be trusted with all government secrets (but then we need a culture that
doesn't mind throwaway copies)). The Conjoiners act as a hive mind,
although the perspective in the book is from the most independent
individuals. I'm not certain how a hive mind would actually make
decisions. Perhaps it would correspond to a background mental process
among everyone, where debates between different preferences occur and a
consensus is formed. Another form would be to have an AI learn accurate
preferences and represent them in some virtual parliament, the solution
in Karl Schroder's _Ventus_.
Of course, these doesn't help us much *now*. But we might remember them
for the future.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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