December’s Reimagining Democracy Workshop

2023-08-23 11:06

Certainly we don't want to all have to vote on every amendment to every bill, but what's the optimal balance between votes made in our name and ballot measures that we all vote on?

How would we feel about an AI device in our pocket that voted in our name, thousands of times per day, based on preferences that it inferred from our actions? If an AI system could determine optimal policy solutions that balanced every voter's preferences, would it still make sense to have representatives? Maybe we should vote directly for ideas and goals instead, and leave the details to the computers.

Then regular people could assign their votes to whichever of the proxies most closely matched their views on each individual matter-or step forward with their own views and begin collecting proxy support from other people.

We should debate lowering the voting age, but even without voting we recognize that children too young to vote have rights-and, in some cases, so do other species.

Should we encode that explicitly? Maybe younger people should get a more powerful vote than everyone else.

People regularly debate changes to the Electoral College, or the process of creating voting districts, or term limits.

News URL

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/08/decembers-reimagining-democracy-workshop.html