I suppose they could, and from now on I’ll consider this to be one of the many significant dangers of governance by AI.
Part of the problem with direct democracy is that it provides no unambiguous mechanism for leaders to exercise judgment about the relative importance of different individuals’ preferences and concerns, or the quality of their information and reasoning. A great many of America’s, and the world’s, most important advances and accomplishments in governance have happened in spite of, not because of, public sentiment. As I see it, many of the failings of American democracy in recent decades are rooted in the fact that we now demand a level of transparency that precludes the kind of quiet, private dealmaking and negotiation that used to enable elected officials to handle matters where their constituents’ claimed preferences are inconsistent, incoherent, misguided, or otherwise not good for the country as a whole.
Is the less transparent human alternative often dangerous and misguided too? Absolutely. Could a truly virtuous (possibly sovereign) AI do better than any set of humans at setting up governance structures that facilitate human flourishing like never before? Also yes. But there are many ways to get the aggregation mechanism even just slightly wrong that could then turn into catastrophic or unrecoverable mistakes. Right now, if anyone proclaims any intention to try to implement such a thing, I’m quite confident they have no idea how to do so in a way that avoids such dangers.
your desire for a government that’s able to make deals in peace, away from the clamor of overactive public sentiment… I respect it as a practical stance relative to the status quo. But when considering possible futures, I’d wager it’s far from what I think we’d both consider ideal.
the ideal government for me would represent the collective will of the people. insofar as that’s the goal, a system which does a more nuanced job at synthesizing the collective will would be preferable.
direct democracy at scale enabled by LLMs, as i envision it and will attempt to clarify, might appeal to you and address the core concern you raise. specifically, a system that lets people express which issues they care about in a freeform way would, i think, significantly reduce misguided opinions. today, individual participation mostly looks like voting for candidates who represent many opinions on a vast range of issues—most of which we almost definitely don’t care about—instead of allowing us to simply express our feelings about the issues which actually affect us.
in other words, when politicians hold rallies and try to persuade us, they’re usually asking us to care about things as distant from our real lives as Russia is from Alaska. and those opinions become the most misguided ones: the bigotry we harbor toward people we don’t know, the technophobic or blindly optimism attitudes (either extreme) we have toward technology we don’t understand, and the moralism that makes us confident projecting our voice across domains where we’re ignorant.
all this to propose: a system representing the collective will as a synthesis of individual wills expressed freeform. i’d encourage anyone interested in this issue to work on it ASAP, so we can coordinate around extinction risks before they’re here.
I agree that AI in general has the potential to implement something-like-CEV, and this would be better than what we have now by far. Reading your original post I didn’t get much sense of attention to the ‘E,’ and without that I think this would be horrible. Of course, either one implemented strongly enough goes off the rails unless it’s done just right, aka the whole question is downstream of pretty strong alignment success, and so for the time being we should be cautious about floating this kind of idea and clear about what would be needed to make it a good idea.
There’s a less than flattering quote from a book from 1916 that “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” That pretty well summarizes my main fear for this kind of proposal and the ways most possible implementation attempts at it would go wrong.
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”
Yes, I think this is too idealistic. Ideal democracy (for me) is something more like “the theory that the common people know what they feel frustrated with (and we want to honor that above everything!) but mostly don’t know the collective best means of resolving that frustration.
a system that lets people express which issues they care about in a freeform way
We already have that: the Internet, and the major platforms built on it. Anyone can talk about anything.
allowing us to simply express our feelings about the issues which actually affect us.
If the platform is created, how do you get people to use it the way you would like them to? People have views on far more than the things someone else thinks should concern them.
“If the platform is created, how do you get people to use it the way you would like them to? People have views on far more than the things someone else thinks should concern them.”
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If people are weighted equally, ie if the influence of each person’s written ballot is equal and capped, then each person is incentivized to emphasize the things which actually affect them.
Anyone could express views on things which don’t affect them, it’d just be unwise. When you’re voting between candidates (as in status quo), those candidates attempt to educate and engage you about all the issues they stand for, even if they’re irrelevant to you. A system where your ballot is a written expression of what you care about suffers much less from this issue.
I suppose they could, and from now on I’ll consider this to be one of the many significant dangers of governance by AI.
Part of the problem with direct democracy is that it provides no unambiguous mechanism for leaders to exercise judgment about the relative importance of different individuals’ preferences and concerns, or the quality of their information and reasoning. A great many of America’s, and the world’s, most important advances and accomplishments in governance have happened in spite of, not because of, public sentiment. As I see it, many of the failings of American democracy in recent decades are rooted in the fact that we now demand a level of transparency that precludes the kind of quiet, private dealmaking and negotiation that used to enable elected officials to handle matters where their constituents’ claimed preferences are inconsistent, incoherent, misguided, or otherwise not good for the country as a whole.
Is the less transparent human alternative often dangerous and misguided too? Absolutely. Could a truly virtuous (possibly sovereign) AI do better than any set of humans at setting up governance structures that facilitate human flourishing like never before? Also yes. But there are many ways to get the aggregation mechanism even just slightly wrong that could then turn into catastrophic or unrecoverable mistakes. Right now, if anyone proclaims any intention to try to implement such a thing, I’m quite confident they have no idea how to do so in a way that avoids such dangers.
your desire for a government that’s able to make deals in peace, away from the clamor of overactive public sentiment… I respect it as a practical stance relative to the status quo. But when considering possible futures, I’d wager it’s far from what I think we’d both consider ideal.
the ideal government for me would represent the collective will of the people. insofar as that’s the goal, a system which does a more nuanced job at synthesizing the collective will would be preferable.
direct democracy at scale enabled by LLMs, as i envision it and will attempt to clarify, might appeal to you and address the core concern you raise. specifically, a system that lets people express which issues they care about in a freeform way would, i think, significantly reduce misguided opinions. today, individual participation mostly looks like voting for candidates who represent many opinions on a vast range of issues—most of which we almost definitely don’t care about—instead of allowing us to simply express our feelings about the issues which actually affect us.
in other words, when politicians hold rallies and try to persuade us, they’re usually asking us to care about things as distant from our real lives as Russia is from Alaska. and those opinions become the most misguided ones: the bigotry we harbor toward people we don’t know, the technophobic or blindly optimism attitudes (either extreme) we have toward technology we don’t understand, and the moralism that makes us confident projecting our voice across domains where we’re ignorant.
all this to propose: a system representing the collective will as a synthesis of individual wills expressed freeform. i’d encourage anyone interested in this issue to work on it ASAP, so we can coordinate around extinction risks before they’re here.
I agree that AI in general has the potential to implement something-like-CEV, and this would be better than what we have now by far. Reading your original post I didn’t get much sense of attention to the ‘E,’ and without that I think this would be horrible. Of course, either one implemented strongly enough goes off the rails unless it’s done just right, aka the whole question is downstream of pretty strong alignment success, and so for the time being we should be cautious about floating this kind of idea and clear about what would be needed to make it a good idea.
There’s a less than flattering quote from a book from 1916 that “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” That pretty well summarizes my main fear for this kind of proposal and the ways most possible implementation attempts at it would go wrong.
Yes, I think this is too idealistic. Ideal democracy (for me) is something more like “the theory that the common people know what they feel frustrated with (and we want to honor that above everything!) but mostly don’t know the collective best means of resolving that frustration.
We already have that: the Internet, and the major platforms built on it. Anyone can talk about anything.
If the platform is created, how do you get people to use it the way you would like them to? People have views on far more than the things someone else thinks should concern them.
“If the platform is created, how do you get people to use it the way you would like them to? People have views on far more than the things someone else thinks should concern them.”
>
If people are weighted equally, ie if the influence of each person’s written ballot is equal and capped, then each person is incentivized to emphasize the things which actually affect them.
Anyone could express views on things which don’t affect them, it’d just be unwise. When you’re voting between candidates (as in status quo), those candidates attempt to educate and engage you about all the issues they stand for, even if they’re irrelevant to you. A system where your ballot is a written expression of what you care about suffers much less from this issue.
the article proposes a governance that synthesizes individuals’ freeform preferences into collective legislative action.
internet platforms allow freeform expression, of course, but don’t do that synthesis.