From the establishment of the liberal democracy till now, we believe that:
- Voters know the best!
- Customers are always right!
- The beauty is in the eyes of the beholder!
These are what we believe in a free-will condition of our decisions (Humanism Era).
But in the 21st century, science opened the Pandora Box (Human Body), especially the brain. We reverse-engineer our body and realize that there are electrochemicals representing the physical casualties behind the decisions of us that we thought they had been emerging spontaneously related with our wishes and desires.
But finally, free-will died! Cognitive science, neuroscience and molecular biology will eventually hack our system of decisions, the brain, by decomposing the password of its massively parallel and nonlinear mechanism.
If Artificial Intelligence (AI) can hack our reasoning system and therefore can guess what we will do consequently or even before we decide/realize, this will potentially shift the domination of Humanism based liberal system to the AI controlled, manipulated ochlocracy!
Increasingly powerful, decentralized electronic and photonic communication technologies has been demonstrated great democratizing impact. Especially the advent of world-wide-web (www) epitomized by the internet and cell phones has been a pervasive democratizing force. It was not Boris Yeltsin standing on a tank that overturned the 1991 coup againts Mikhail Gorbachev, but rather the clandestine network of fax machines, photocopiers, video recorders and personal computers that broke decades of totalitarian control of information.
Below are some subtitles of technological impacts on democracy and their introductory explanations. More details will be mention in the related parts of “Fundamental Mechanisms”.
Digitalization & Disintermediation
Digitalization forces us to get rid of intermediary institutions like in the finance sector where central settlement authorities and banks are getting more worried about the rise of crypto-currencies usage in globally. The new system will be more adaptive to disintermediation paradigm than the current one due to its agile and collaborative inheritance of structure.
The most visible samples of this disitermediantion with the help of digital platforms are municipalities related. Lots of examples of platform sharing by municipalities around all over the world can be seen recently, especially providing self-management opportunity to their citizens in the aspect of fiscal or social facility investments.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotics
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence demonstrated by machines, as opposed to natural intelligence displayed by animals including humans. Leading AI textbooks define the field as the study of “intelligent agents”: any system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of achieving its goals.[a] Some popular accounts use the term “artificial intelligence” to describe machines that mimic “cognitive” functions that humans associate with the human mind, such as “learning” and “problem solving”, however, this definition is rejected by major AI researchers.[1]
AI applications include advanced web search engines (i.e. Google), recommendation systems (used by YouTube, Amazon and Netflix), understanding human speech (such as Siri and Alexa), self-driving cars (e.g. Tesla), automated decision-making and competing at the highest level in strategic game systems (such as chess and Go). As machines become increasingly capable, tasks considered to require “intelligence” are often removed from the definition of AI, a phenomenon known as the AI effect. For instance, optical character recognition is frequently excluded from things considered to be AI, having become a routine technology.[1]
Machines with intelligence have the potential to use their intelligence to make ethical decisions. This raises philosophical arguments about the mind and the ethics of creating artificial beings endowed with human-like intelligence.
AI provides a number of tools that are particularly useful for authoritarian governments: smart spyware, face recognition and voice recognition allow widespread surveillance; such surveillance allows machine learning to classify potential enemies of the state and can prevent them from hiding; recommendation systems can precisely target propaganda and misinformation for maximum effect; deepfakes aid in producing misinformation; advanced AI can make centralized decision making more competitive with liberal and decentralized systems such as markets.
Terrorists, criminals and rogue states may use other forms of weaponized AI such as advanced digital warfare and lethal autonomous weapons. By 2015, over fifty countries were reported to be researching battlefield robots.
We can imagine the power of AI by just conducting a historical assumption experiment in our mind. For instance, if Hitler had AI supported killer drones detecting jewish people and head-shot them one by one, he did not hesitate to use millions of them. And the ‘game’ could be over in opposite way and not in years but even weeks! So, with AI based high capable technology we do not have a chance to make Hitler similar mistakes in the old fashioned democratic systems. We need to develop it!
References:
IntelligentDemocracyProject 