The democratic singularity

in «Politics & Human Rights» by moftasa

Warning! This post is very old and may contain information or opinions that are no longer valid or embarrassing.

A technological singularity is a predicted time at which technological progress accelerates beyond the ability of present-day humans to fully comprehend or predict.

'''from the Wikipedia'''

I don't know if the political climate before the technological singularity have ever been discussed. But I am sure someone did and I am probably not aware. Which in itself means that we are still far from the singularity.

I speculate that today's democracy (in the world, I am not talking about Egypt) would be pushed towards an extreme form of direct democracy. Direct democracy basically means citizens would be able to vote on every law being passed. And that citizens could start initiatives and almost write their own laws. And that they can recall the politicians with petitions and the like.

Some form of Direct democracy is practiced in Switzerland. Where they hold frequent referendums over a great deal of issues in which other democracies leave MPs to vote up on. May be some online communities do practice it today. Direct democracy was first practiced for 400 years in ancient Rome and was a factor in its rise. It was relevant at that time since the population was small.

Today citizen journalism is the first step toward citizen lawmaking and other features of direct democracy.

Personally, I don't think that in the singularity we might modify our race or have amazing intelligent AI systems. I disagree with futurists and post-humanists on this.

We would however have mind-boggling amount of data that would be very fast to access, very easy to manipulate and easy to contribute too. This would be the true intelligence that is almost infinite. This is what I think would help a concept like direct democracy to exist.

For sure, countries that do not have true democracies today will not stay the same. The level of intelligence and communications that are available now and their exponential increase would make it impossible to avoid democracy. Guerrilla communications would be far more effective and their message will be delivered to a much wider audience.

Third world dictators would crumble in mere days.

Another technological phenomenon that is soon to exist is social networks. In a few years, we will learn how to create disorganized, efficient, decentralized and highly effective social networks. Individuals would be able to tap into the resources of others very quickly and easily. Favours would be a currency between people. And these networks would have alerts and distress calls that can be turned off by individuals in moments of injustice or stress. They would spread their message to larger amounts of friends of friends and so on.

I don't fear the future, as long as we can communicate and keep on communicating faster and easier.