The best way to
ensure ministry leaders and their staff remain incorruptible is by making it
extremely difficult for individuals with the wrong motivations to be placed in
those positions. This automatically
removes the possibility of any kind of self-candidature process. After all, a candidate that wishes to be a
ministry leader may be doing it for other reasons than to serve. We’ve seen what happens when self-serving
individuals are placed in position of power in our history.
Therefore, the
selection of leaders must be through a proper selection process by peers. This means a type of democratic selection
process, similar what we see today but with some notable differences.
For example, an
electoral process where everyone can vote for every single ministry leader
would give good results. Studies have
shown that ordinary folks, on average, are only able to select slightly better
than mediocre leaders from a group of political candidates.[1] It is the system we’ve been using in
democracies around the world for years.
The research does show that this system prevents the selection of
terrible leaders, but it also prevents the selection of the best qualified candidate.
Often the
candidates are placed there by investor-organizations that desire to profit
from the policies put in place after the election is won, or the candidates
want the position for personal gain. Few
elected officials are there truly to serve the people with no strings
attached.
Most modern
nations have in fact chosen a democratic process as a measure to avoid being
led by undesirable leaders when they started praising the democratic system. We deserve better.
Encouragingly, what
the same studies have shown, is that if the voters are experts in the field the
candidates are elected for, it is highly likely the best candidate will be
chosen if sufficient amount of people participate in the voting process (to
avoid statistical anomalies). The theory
around these results is people are generally able to identify incompetence
despite their ignorance of a certain domain of expertise, but they cannot
differentiate who is best in a field among skilled candidates.
Professionals in
a field however, can make the distinction between someone that is good at his
job, an expert, an authority in the field, and the very best they have.
Thus, I recommend
we establish a system where every adult citizen can democratically vote for
potential candidates into leadership positions based on their individual
expertise. Each leader would be voted
into position for a limited amount of time ensuring there is opportunity for
changes and giving a sense of urgency to projects.[2] I believe a significant number of scholars
agree this is necessary but that it may be better, in in our model here, to allow
the chance for leaders to remain on the ballot in each electoral cycle.
The determination
of expertise could certainly be made using our good friend, the unbiased AI
which would sift through public social profiles, professional profiles,
publications, videos, pictures, and of course a public registry through the
ministry of citizenship and immigration (census data).
To select the
best candidate, all the information about the candidates would need to be
publicly available and the record for each candidate must be as complete as
possible. The AI system must also be
able to remove false information from the records and quickly identify any
attempt to add misleading information.
Thankfully, we already have great AI made by several organizations, like
Google and others that can do this exact job.[3] Currently, some are used in search engines
and some are made expressively to analyze social online comments to determine
what comments come from unique individuals, how many come from robots (or
‘bots) and how many are not corroborated by facts.
Individuals would
be notified which ministry leader they can vote for when it is time and could do
it online through a new secure voting system, perhaps powered by blockchain
technology or other decentralized unbiased system of choice, thus one that is
not controlled by the government itself.
The system, powered
by AI to go through all the data and make the best recommendation, would select
many candidates from each pool of citizen-experts to be voted on by each matching
group of professionals from the population.
We could ensure
that a very broad base of the population had at least one vote to ensure best
results. After all, there is a balance
between having too few voters, causing statistical probability issues. On the other hand, if we allow citizens with
too little knowledge in the domain of interest to vote, we decrease the chances
of finding the best candidate out of the bunch.
There is a balance to be had that can only be achieved through
statistical analysis and experimentation.
Let’s take a field that I know a bit about: infrastructure. Infrastructure means the supervision of
building and roadway construction, city planning, and the building supervision
of our future autonomous systems to provide food to all people in an efficient
way by private enterprise. Depending on
how we tune the artificial intelligence system for optimal selection
efficiency, most likely all trained engineers would be given a vote for the
leader of the infrastructure ministry. It
is also very likely lawmakers, (policy-makers and lawyers) that specialize in
civil engineering, construction or transportation regulation (municipal level
or otherwise) would qualify as proper experts.
City planners and builders would certainly have the competence to vote
here too. You get the idea. If these citizens have sufficient knowledge,
determined case by case by the system, they get a vote.
Now, it is simplistic to think that we’ll give the AI selection
rules strictly based on career paths.
The current trend after all is that more and more people work as
contractors instead of employees[4],
and we change jobs even more often as a result.
The sorting would need to be made by looking at both formal education
and strict experience. For example, it
is reasonable that a person with a bachelor’s degree in education may have
sufficient experience to vote for the education ministry leadership, even
though the person may not have worked in the field yet. It is equally valid to allow two votes to the
professional plumber that has spent his or her evenings for the past 10 years
reading, discussing politics and publishing political articles on professional networks. One for the leadership of the ministry of
foreign policy and another for the leadership of the infrastructure
ministry.
Artificial intelligence can do what no one could ever do in
our past: sort through massive amounts
of data that define millions of individuals and, based on set rules, learn how
to determine who votes on what, without prejudice or bias. Everyone would be treated the same.
Following this logic, some people may be able to vote for
leaders of several different ministries, and some citizens may not have the
competence, experience, or mental capacity to vote for any leader at all.
Those that have no voting right yet have something to aspire
to by gaining the experience and knowledge to be put in a voting pool
later. In current democracies, the right
to vote is paramount and an important social right. In our ideal society, the right to vote must
be earned through social participation, not simply for being alive.
Accountability and best results
Even though the
system should prevent putting the wrong person in a position of influence over
our population’s lives, it is wise to have a supervision system in place that could
trigger a new election as needed in case a leader becomes a serious problem,
such as being found guilty of a crime.
Since the ministry
leaders are selected from the best of us by the nation’s citizen-experts, the
position should not be a popularity contest.
Thus, it is expected that, on occasion, unpopular decisions are made for
the people. These do need to be
scrutinized and commented on by the people, giving additional weight to the
comments provided by the pool of experts in that field. Thus, an online system should be used, like
it is already done in many Western countries, keeping all government
discussions, projects, processes, and decisions public and transparent to
citizens. This allows for the population
to participate in running the country beyond the electoral process itself. If the decisions made by a ministry do not
correspond with the population’s wishes, as observed on the interactive online
system, then other ministries could be solicited to weigh in and either support
or reverse the unpopular decision. If a
decision is deemed not in the best interest of the population after all this,
then the originating ministry leader may be replaced by another leader that
would better serve the population.
The
infrastructure ministry could supervise this whole system as well but once
again, the system would ideally be a decentralized system controlled by the
whole population. Internet and national
citizen communications systems should be independent from private sector biases
at all cost. This same national
communications system can house all proceedings, decisions and discussions at
all levels of government for all ministries and allow individuals to comment
and discuss about their needs at all levels.
Of importance would be the municipal/county level governance
communications platforms that have the most direct impact on the population in
their day to day lives.
Thanks to
technological advancements in hardware costs, artificial intelligence, and
internet infrastructure, each citizen would have an opportunity to learn about
what the ministries are doing, fed to their favorite media, unfiltered. I’m sure media outlets would adapt to such a
system, providing biased analysis as it is done today, but if the government
does a good job with the provisioning of properly synthesized information to
the population, the people will be well served.
In addition, personal AI assistants will make it easy for any citizen to
keep track of all government decisions through summaries to individuals and
facilitate interaction between citizens and government ministries.
Who is the leader?
In many Western countries, government is divided in 3 major
branches: the legislative branch, the
executive branch and the judiciary branch.
In some of these countries, the leader of the executive branch is the
country’s representative domestically and internationally. In practice, the executive branch is just as
important as any other area of governance.
I always found it strange that it would be so. The US and Canada are structured in this way. While the ministries operating within the
executive branch are extremely important to the country, they serve the people
by providing them with needed services.
Why would it be the leader responsible for the executive that connects
with foreign leaders instead of a legislative leader or even judiciary?
I always found it silly myself and I really don’t care about
the historical reasons for this. Leaders
of the executive ministries (security, infrastructure and others), should be
focusing on their tasks, while the foreign affairs leader takes care of his
job: foreign affairs. Thus, I propose the foreign affairs leader,
being the nation’s top diplomat of sorts, be the voice for all other leaders. This person can represent the nation in
discussions. We the people can rest
assured that our nation will be well served internationally if we are
represented by the very best we have to offer.
The foreign affairs leader would be our nation’s
spokesperson but would not be involved in legislature. That’s another person’s job and an entirely
different skillset. It is no less a
prestigious service position as the leader of the judiciary or security
ministries. It must not be prestigious. Just a top expert, elected into position by
his peers and other knowledgeable expert citizens to work for the people on
their behalf.
[1]
Leon Watson (February 2012). Is this the
reason democracy can’t work? Study find
humans are too dumb to pick the right person to lead us - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2108341/Is-reason-democracy-work-Study-humans-dumb-pick-right-person-lead-us.html
[2]
Maurizio Zanardi, Paola Conconi, Nicolas Sahuguet (August 2008). Democracy and accountability: The perverse effects of term limits - https://voxeu.org/article/democracy-and-accountability-perverse-effects-term-limits
[3]
Jackie Snow (December 2017). Can AI win
the war against fake news? - https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609717/can-ai-win-the-war-against-fake-news/
[4]
Elaine Pofeldt (June 2017). New
study: why self-employment keeps
accelerating - https://www.forbes.com/sites/elainepofeldt/2017/06/13/new-study-why-self-employment-keeps-accelerating/#593cb1396ac8
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