Resolving government corruption and expertise issues

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.

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[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

The role of government in an ideal society

To be honest, modern governments are obsolete.

Think about it.  Aside from the dictatorships and monarchies of the world, governments have been formed to ensure the well-being of a nation’s population.  Enter most democracies and republics of the world.  Believe it or not, but communist countries were also initially structured to serve the population, just like the Bolshevik’s struggle to overthrow the Russian monarchy to create a first socialist state, led by Lenin.[1]  However, in almost every case, these governments founded “by the people, for the people”, changed to compete in global economies and with other countries ideologically.  With few exceptions the benefits of governance have slithered to some sort of ruling class.  Popular democracies, republics and communist nations have turned into oligarchies or plutocracies benefiting only a precious few.  Some countries, like the United States of America and Russia, are plutocracies masquerading as democratic republics and communist countries, respectively.

In our ideal world, we need to restructure governance to give it back to the people, as it should be.  Even though I’m a fervent believer of decentralization, I believe central governance is still needed, but it must be structured in such a way to prevent abuse of power.  Thankfully, our understanding of human nature through science and technology allows us to create an entirely relevant and incorruptible model of government.

As mentioned in the very first section, we want people’s basic needs to be covered.   To do this, we need to have processes that ensures basic needs are distributed to those who have difficulty taking care of themselves.  Here we include the socially forgotten, such as the elderly with no family support, orphans, some sick citizens and a portion of the handicapped.  The automated systems that feed our society need to be overseen whether they are government-run or privately run.  We need some people to take care of regulating new discoveries and adapt to social, economical and political changes in the world, much of which is beyond any individual nation’s control.  We need an entity that will ensure our health and education system is up to par, adaptive and available to all citizens without prejudice.  We also need some way to maintain and decide what infrastructures to build for cities and urban areas impacting large sedentary and migratory populations.  We need an agency to ensure the Internet connects us and wavelengths used for such communications are only beneficial, don’t cause disruption in different industries and uses protocols that play well with other nation’s infrastructure deployments.  We need some form of organization that will take care of national threats.  Finally, we need to identify some representative group or individual that will speak on behalf of the government domestically and on behalf of the nation internationally. 

These are national needs that are extremely hard to cover leveraging disconnected individuals with a wide range of interests.  They need to be organized and must be unbiased so that everyone in the nation is treated equally.

Power, water and public transportation can definitively be privatized or given away to the free market with regulation coming from a governing body.  Plenty of options to choose from very soon to ensure every home, apartment and neighborhood has those things covered.  These can even be subsidized by the government to ensure a great transition towards an independence from the state for those elements.

As we move forward and develop new ideas as societies, we may figure out great ways to decentralize more elements while keeping it unbiased and fair, thus replacing whole public-sector organizations.  Progress and replacement of a better system should be a celebration whenever it becomes possible.

I recommend a structure where all the needs that need to be covered by a central entity are organized by entity.  Each entity is responsible for a single aspect of social need and are directed by a democratically elected expert.  Each ministry can be semi-independent from each other following the regulations of the lawmaking entity.  Each ministry would communicate with each other through rules established by the lawmaking entity. 

For this exercise, let’s call these entities “ministries” even though depending on the nation, they may not be called such.  At the center, we find the lawmaking ministry that discusses and establishes laws fitting the people’s desires, wishes and for the common good.  All other ministries must follow the laws, regulations and constitution put forth by the lawmaking ministry, but they are not under its direction.  Then each ministry would communicate with each other directly in a dynamic fashion to avoid overlap, conflicting goals and to generally get best results.  Artificial intelligence can definitively be used to ensure each ministry receives regular suggestions on changes in directions and adaptation based on each individual ministries’ decisions, to ensure optimal efficiency.

Currently, “government still really works off how a 19^th or 20^th century society works.  In fact, I think right now, politicians are just starting to barely wrap their heads around some of these [technological] changes.”, says Mike Schreiner, Leader of the Green Party of Ontario, Canada.  An AI-assisted system will help all these ministries adapt faster than any human organization could, led by relatively small groups of expert human beings that take decisions for all of us.

We know that given the right institutional guidance, innovators, charitable personalities and business people will drive an economy faster than any centralized government could.[2]^,[3]  Thus, the ministries don’t require many employees.  They do however, need highly qualified individuals driven by the desire to do an excellent job that will impact a whole nation, including spending national resources.

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[1] Communist Russia.  Alpha History - http://alphahistory.com/coldwar/communist-russia/

[2] Empowering the private sector to drive economic growth in low-income countries.  UNESCO Science Report: towards 2030.  Natural Sciences Sector (2016).  - http://www.unesco.org/new/en/media-services/single-view/news/empowering_the_private_sector_to_drive_economic_growth_in_lo/

[3] Brent Wilton (September 2014).  How the private sector drives economic growth and well-being - http://www.tradeforum.org/article/How-the-private-sector-drives-economic-growth-and-well-being/