The final thing I’ll say is that government will never run the way Silicon Valley runs because, by definition, democracy is messy. This is a big, diverse country with a lot of interests and a lot of disparate points of view. And part of government’s job, by the way, is dealing with problems that nobody else wants to deal with.
So sometimes I talk to CEOs, they come in and they start telling me about leadership, and here’s how we do things. And I say, well, if all I was doing was making a widget or producing an app, and I didn’t have to worry about whether poor people could afford the widget, or I didn’t have to worry about whether the app had some unintended consequences -- setting aside my Syria and Yemen portfolio -- then I think those suggestions are terrific. (Laughter and applause.) That's not, by the way, to say that there aren't huge efficiencies and improvements that have to be made.
But the reason I say this is sometimes we get, I think, in the scientific community, the tech community, the entrepreneurial community, the sense of we just have to blow up the system, or create this parallel society and culture because government is inherently wrecked. No, it's not inherently wrecked; it's just government has to care for, for example, veterans who come home. That's not on your balance sheet, that's on our collective balance sheet, because we have a sacred duty to take care of those veterans. And that's hard and it's messy, and we're building up legacy systems that we can't just blow up.
For example, the BART extension to south Fremont cost around $150 million per mile and took 3 years longer than planned. CA can't seem to maintain roads, and when it does it costs bazillions of dollars.
Wrecks require reimplementation. In politics, as in software development, one should think very carefully indeed before declaring something a wreck.
Sure, technology can help implement solutions to social problems, but it will not arrive at these solutions of its own accord. That is because technology only ever magnifies our inherent human capabilities, it doesn't give us new ones. A case in point: Internet and the social media have made communication and the exchange of information as easy as never before. We can use this power to keep in touch with distant friends or take free classes from a university on another continent. We can also use it to spread fake news and organize terrorist plots. But it is not "the Internet" doing all this, it is the humans sitting at either end of the data cable. Technology is not of itself good, nor is it evil. It is merely an enabler and an amplifier.
Technology is about optimizing metrics. (Say, time spent doing a certain task, or money invested to achieve a given aim.) Politics is about finding out what the problem is, agreeing that it is a problem worth solving and then discussing what a suitable metric is to tackle this problem. (For example: high housing prices may be considered a problem. But do you tackle this by raising the spending power of your citizens or by lowering the average rent?)
Politics is about humans, and that is something technology in itself can never be.
For example, consider homelessness. No one has any clue what, if anything, is the best solution, because there are tradeoffs of values.
One possible solution (these are examples, if your personal pet solution is not included or is misrepresented, I apologize) is you ignore the homeless and just let them be, and allow individual communities and cities to address charity and enforcement. Another is for states to house all non-mentally ill homeless for free, for, say, a year, and, in mental health instutitions, house the repeat homeless, the mentally ill homeless, and those that after some period of time cannot or will not find work.
AI can help you diagnose the problem, and make predictions about it, but those two solutions above have VERY different outcomes, have very different pricetags, and accomplish very different goals. An AI can’t think about the high level moral tradeoffs of questions like “is 100% getting homeless off the streets worth a fraction of the population being held at significant cost to taxpayers and against its own will?”
Somebody, at the end of the day, must decide which, if either, of those plans people will use, and that somebody is a politician you elect. AI is not going to replace that.
So I'll go with "No, politics is complex and hard".
An AI will try to achieve its goals by any means. I believe it coud be useful as a helper, assistant, etc.
Anyway no politician would allow to loose powers because a machine took his/her job...
Isn't government all about asking one yes or no question and collecting a response from every citizen and going forward with the majority answer.
Isn't scenarios where we go ahead with minority decisions where the issues arise?
No, it's not. In our modern representative democracies, government is about asking as many people as possible for their input and then going forward with what seems wisest to you. Modern societies face problems that are much too complicated for the simple majority to be a good indicator of the best course of action.
We vote for our politicians because we agree with their set of values, and by electing them give them the responsibility of taking decisions for us, based on those values. In effect, we ask them to do the hard work of thinking through problems thoroughly enough to arrive at a good solution.
(Of course, that doesn't mean that what we think becomes unimportant, or that the "average citizen" is unable to form valid opinions on social matters. And one of the defining factors of a good politician is and always will be that he listens to the people. But his responsibility is to take the decisions that he believes are best for the people, not necessarily the ones the people want.)
Brexit is a prime example for what happens when politicians shirk their responsibilities and hand the decision-making back to an uninformed majority. (This is an almost literal quote from a friend of mine who voted Leave!)
It is just this mindset that is ruining the whole world. One persons so called wise choice which goes around creating discomfort for majority is what creates imbalance and intolerance across community and ruins every ones peaceful life.
>> We vote for our politicians because we agree with their set of values, and by electing them give them the responsibility of taking decisions for us, based on those values. In effect, we ask them to do the hard work of thinking through problems thoroughly enough to arrive at a good solution.
No politician will ever be skilled enough to make a decision. A politician is just a servant. I don't let my servant decide what to cook or what to do with their time.
I decide what menu i want and they just prepare the logistics and production.
Today i tell them to pick what majority wants and tomo i tell them to make what rest of them wants so that everyone is taken care. Each individual cannot or need not think and execute on how to clear the trash in their apartment. That's where a politician comes in i tell him daily we will keep trash outside home n u get some people to come and collect and dispose it using this technique and he just serves that task.
It should be the common people the actual customers who are making the decision not the service providers like politicians.
Or we can have multiple governments running simultaneously and i can just switch to the government of my choice and live by that rule. Something like changing from Verizon to Tmobile.
But is that a good idea?
But the current crap in crap out system has no hope.
Is the current system a good idea?
