scrape_r_rational/data/cache/2g3ksh.md

[Q][D] Does a post-scarcity society need democracy?

Post:

I've been working on the rough-draft of that rational mecha story and it occurred to me that, in a world where AI's manage almost everything for humanity, there's not a lot of need for political involvement. Regional conflicts decline in number and severity, which removes the pressure on the citizen's to keep their administration accountable.

The US population hates their government, but only three-quarters of them are registered voters and only 60% show up on election day.

I keep ending up with a scenario where the vast majority of civilization doesn't care about political activity. Economic AI's artificially enforce a credit-based economy so people don't spend too much time in the holodeck, but I don't know how if it's even necessary to have a robust political body.

Comments:

• u/aldonius:

  Have you read Cory Doctorow's *[Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom](http://craphound.com/down/)*?
  
  Post-scarcity, but not AI. The term used is 'ad-hocracy' - people running whatever interests them to run. Currency is explicitly 'social currency' - karma, in other words, though with public tracking of who-endorses-who.
  

  • u/AmeteurOpinions:

    My backlog lengthens yet again...
    
    This sub. This friggin' sub.
    

  • u/alexanderwales:

    Yup, this is not only a good example of a post-scarcity society, but a good book as well.
    

• u/PeridexisErrant:

  First, we should note that post scarcity society is a merely economic state, but I'll consider a utopian example in the spirit of the post. Imagine an ideal government, constructed and maintained with superhuman care, dedicated to enabling or promoting (depending on philosophy) human flourishing. Clearly it must not require the input of anyone disinterested - but equally for those who *do* care, there must be meaningful involvement.  There are many forms that could take, from general debate and universal consensus, to a system like the parliamentary democracy I'm familiar with - with impartial advice and a flawless anticorruption watchdog. Or maybe a system like the benevolent quasi-dictatorship of *To The Stars*, where AIs and gestalt-consciousness committees call the shots. 
  
  Need democracy? Of course not, post scarcity societies can work around that kind of thing. Should have democracy? An entirely different question. Is the question the same as "does democracy lead to more human flourishing?"  Either way, why? 
  
  Part of the fun is to examine what democracy *is*, in a way that lets us work out what defines it and about it we find valuable - and whether, in some circumstances, we might want to replace it with something else.  I know that and why I would want a democracy in such a future - do you? 
  
  And by the same token - what level and kind of cognitive enhancement sets someone apart from humanity?  What does it mean to be mortal if you have backups?  So many interesting questions, and answers waiting to be found!
  

  • u/AmeteurOpinions:

    I used the term 'post-scarcity' because the setting isn't actually a utopia. Utopia's don't lead to much warfare.
    
    I guess I'll go all-in with pseudo-democracy for the state of things.
    

    • u/TimeLoopedPowerGamer:

      > Utopia's don't lead to much warfare.
      
      Need some logical backing for that assumption. Lots of people seem to like warfare, or at least organized conflict, and would be interested in it even as simply consensual sport. Utopia doesn't mean people are perfect, after all.
      
      Why *global* or *intergalactic* utopia? That seems to be defining yourself out of interesting story elements. Even then, there could still be outsiders who need to be fought to defend this specific perfect society, or people defined out of it for whatever reason.
      
      I'm a little tired of this idea that you can't have interesting conflict in a story with a "true" utopia -- that all conflict has to come from internal political and social friction for any "big" story. I'd love to see more attempts to have functional and "nice" societies in speculative and especially rational fiction.
      
      Writers need to stop making society itself hold the idiot ball.
      

• u/Noir_Bass:

  If we're at the point where we have managed to create a provably friendly AI, and have already let it loose...well, that AI is going to BE the government for all practical purposes, whether we realize it or not. Maybe it will let us have the illusion that we're running our own stuff, but in the end it will always have the final word.
  

• u/Nepene:

  Democracy serves several functions.
  
  1. Suppose your AIs are malevolent or actively hostile to society or a part of society. This is a very possible failure mode for any machine or biological creation. You need some clear and well defined mechanism to remove said AI that can't easily be subverted by whatever caused the malevolence in the AI. If they start ordering their mechas to shoot every third civilian in the streets there needs to be a way to stop them. If an enemy nation hacks them you need a way to stop them.
  
  2. In the event of bad code in the AI you need a way to choose a better AI with better code. If the code has decided that writing fanfiction should be punishable by death there needs to be some mechanism for appeal.
  
  You can just assume that nothing bad will ever happen to your post scarcity society but that's not a hugely realistic assumption.
  

  • u/AmeteurOpinions:

    > 1.
    
    This is one of the main reasons why human pilots are still a thing. AI's can advise all they want, but *only the human* can pull the trigger.
    
    > 2.
    
    This is why humans are still involved in ruling the universe, albeit an extremely small faction; to hold the gun to the AI's head and say "Do what we want".
    

    • u/Nepene:

      http://echa.europa.eu/regulations/reach/authorisation/applications-for-authorisation
      
      This is the sort of regulation that the EU has for products. Anything containing certain chemicals has to supply a massive dossier of info containing tests, simulations, field runs, characterizations which ECHA and countries check over. If they miss a bit of data then skilled scientists from countries and other businesses can rip their reports apart in the public commenting phase. I've read some hilariously passive aggressive comments when they are commenting. Once they get past that skilled scientists dissect every bit of the report and decide if the chemical can be sold in the public.
      
      I'd imagine that would be closer to the norm for AIs- you have in depth regulations about what they have to be like and how they have to be written which vary from purpose to purpose, vary according to what modules you include in them, standard code blocks that all have to have, standard code blocks that anyone can include without comment.
      
      It would take too long if every bullet fired, every chemical submitted required in depth approval. You'd probably have regional or local governments which did a general approval on certain things, with humans being responsible for good management of these things within well defined categories, but a great deal of autonomy for how the AIs are used within those boundaries.
      

• u/None:

  A) As /u/PeridexisErrant noted, you need to examine what function democracy is actually supposed to perform, and what function government is actually supposed to perform.  Nastily clever hint: if your society has even-remotely Friendly AI, they ought to understand perfectly well what democracy is for.
  
  B) Seen from a sufficiently advanced point-of-view, there is no such thing as *post*-scarcity.  There is only "resources are replenished, recovered, or collected faster than the mortals can use them."  Since mortals inevitably end up wasting more of whatever seems abundant, and since the phrase post-scarcity implies a value choice to keep the people small enough to live effectively nonscarce lifestyles rather than immediately growing everyone to the level of superbeing who would find resources scarce on a planetary scale, there will still be *some* resource scarcity trade-offs and *some* economy, but it might take place out of the view of your normal citizens.
  

• u/symmetry81:

  A lack of scarcity means that [exit](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty) becomes a viable option in a way that it hasn't since beginning of agriculture and you can actually get government by conensus where anybody who doesn't like things can leave to run their own society differently.  Traditional societies usually worked in that manner.  If that isn't possible for some reason then you've found your scarcity requiring government.
  

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