Monarchism

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Nice. Hats off to you, ouinon. Although if you're talking up stability as a benefit of using a computer to govern, it had better be running on Linux! Imagine a country ruled by Windows ME.

Thank you. I couldn't resist it!


Is that necessarily a bad thing? Many things which exist now were once sci-fi.


In what way? The computer would be responding on a frequent/constant basis to data from society ( production, wages, inflation, etc etc) .


A lot simpler, just a paper/e-mail in everyones letterbox every few years, to be filled in and sent off, with a list of 20 or so items ( environment, welfare, education, transport, "freedom of choice", etc) to be arranged in order of priority. Direct feedback from individual to computer. It would be data, not voting.


What about a king with Alzheimers, or other illness? Someone takes over temporarily. So the computer would have back up.


The equivalent of the accredited representatives/officers that currently manage more or less to make election voting processes honest.


Lau?




Tests, and more tests, but not impossible.

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What about Cowperthwatism? I think it's the freest form of government there will be. It's not a democracy but not tyranny either.

Sounds like futarchy a bit up at the top, however, to be honest, I don't agree with the fundamental presuppositions of the current workings of society.

I doubt it, the computer will lack full information, and not all positions fall into currently quantifiable notions. Not only that, but I am not even concerned with long-run interests of everybody at all, what I find objectionable is the power in and of itself that this computer would have.

The notion I am thinking of is dispersed information, as Hayek looked upon it, in his essay "The Use of Knowledge in Society" : "But a little reflection will show that there is beyond question a body of very important but unorganized knowledge which cannot possibly be called scientific in the sense of knowledge of general rules: the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place." This is even relevant to political actions, but a computer might not really be able to quantify some unorganized set of knowledge like that.

Heck yes.


Makes sense.


People certainly are not trustworthy.

Power will never be abolished. I simply don't want to force other people to walk lockstep with one another. It has the potential to harm me. You can say that this is a non-neutral desire, and I will admit to that, which is why I am a Friedmanite anarcho-capitalist(his system can theoretically be totalitarian, it just seems unlikely to him and adherents) and not a minarchist.

But a self-modifying AI is rather unlikely, and that is where the inflexibility comes in, how could the computer adjust to a situation that seems very different than the situations it has been programmed for? How could it handle a complete paradigm shift in modeling practices.


A working democracy is also not impossible, but we don't see many that aren't full of crap.

No one wishes to defend democracy as being superior to monarchy? It makes this thread rather disappointing if I'm left arguing with an anarchist and a futurist.

I'm pretty sure you just made that up, since it gets no hits on Google at all. Perhaps you would care to elaborate though?

Monarchy=Feudalism AFAIC. It is a form of government that is far too backward for the post-industrial information age.
Ive always stood firmly against hereditary priviledge, and while we still allow the inheritance of property, the inheritance of power is unjustafiable and should never be allowed.

For those who live in the US, monarchy is nothing more than a pipe dream because our constitution does NOT allow it under any circumstances and I happen to be a constitutional literalist.

Dont forget the Marxist

The problem with democracy, anarchy, monarchy is not so much the system as the people that it supports. The general population is too uneducated to respond in an appropriate manner to the threats posed by all of these systems.

On a shallow level the idea that a despot can make decisions for a population that cannot be trusted to do this for itself makes sense. Since joining this forum it has occurred to me that the problem with humanity is its relatively low level of intelligence. For example I have an IQ of 125 +/- which puts me somewhere in the top 15%. I do not regard myself as being particularly intelligent. Then when you realise that the median is around 100 we as a whole are not that smart. Given this understanding it makes sense to have the world governed by some Genius empath.

This conclusion is shallow because it fails to take into account the effect of education. What we need is a extremely well educated and informed population. If we had this, Democracy, Marxism, and maybe Anarchy would all work, in fact all three would probably meld into some hybrid ideology.

Your construct that a despot without the need for re-election somehow makes tough decisions easy fails. If a despot is not popular they risk revolt, fear of revolt leads either to compromise or defensive behaviour. Defensive behaviour can have many outcomes. In the case of a monarchy I suspect history would repeat itself and we would end up with feudalism.

I support raising the consciousness of the population to a level where it can make the correct decisions not the opposite

No, feudalism is a highly decentralized system whereas I've been pushing for a centralized autocracy. Completely different things.

And as I've already said, an absolute ruler doesn't have to be chosen by heredity. The Holy Roman Empire had an elected monarch, and there are plenty of other conceivable ways to choose an absolute ruler.

Well, that puts you at odds with the people who wrote the Constitution.

Oh, right. You commie bastard!


Couldn't the same charge be leveled against Marxism?


If this morning's practice GRE is to be taken seriously my IQ would correlate to circa 140+, and I don't think I'm someone who should be running the country. But smarter people than me exist, and if we only need to find one person or a few people who are intelligent enough to be in charge...


Sorry, but in my experience the vast majority of people are irreversibly stupid and no amount of education will solve that.


I suggest that the posters who have mentioned feudalism do not understand the historical definitions of feudalism and monarchism.


I support the claim that this is impossible or impractical.

As far as Marxism (and this is coming from a former Socialist, mind you): the issue is free-loaders. I remember using school-owned musical instruments, and that was the strongest argument I ever saw against socialism. People would refuse to take decent care of things that did not actually belong to them, but to some abstraction or group. Without private property, resources are not preserved or used efficiently. However, I have seen essentially Marxist principles work in the free-software movement: from each according to his ability and inclination, to each according to his wants. The difference here is that once the code is written, it costs next to nothing to distribute it, so freeloaders have a neutral effect on the system.

Absolutely

We are really going to have to agree to disagree on this one, I am a firm believer in education. This process will not happen quickly, it may take 100, even 200 years to bring the population up to the required standard.

With regard to feudalism, it arose due to the need of the monarch to maintain an expensive army and control the country, the elite classes where given fiefdoms to control whilst maintaining loyalty to the monarch. My suggestion is that the need to maintain ones monarchy in the face of opposition from the masses could lead to a form of feudalism to help control the situation.

Admittedly I have only a limited understanding of enlightened despotism, but instinctively I suspect that history is looking at these rulers through rose coloured glasses.

Another solution for democracy - before you are allowed to vote a person must pass a test showing that they accurately understand the issues involved.