Democracy 2.0 - AI + Blockchain take over the polls

Representative Democracy does not work

Let's face it: representative democracy does not work. Does it? It is not hard to see that the will of the people is not always reflected in the outcome and decisions made in by the representatives we all voted. We are using an outdated system that has a revision overdue. More and more controversial topics expose the impartiality of the political class, and how the choices they make do not benefit the general population. Frontal conflicts of interest (raising wages for politicians, lifetime pay for retired PM's and ministers, legal immunity, nepotism,corruption) faced by the current ruling class often expose such difference in opinion between WE THE PEOPLE (of any democracy) and THEY THE POLITICIANS who are meant to represent us. Additionally, growing controversial topics (abortion rejected by the Argentinian senate while accepted in the wide popular vote , trade taxes rejected by some of the American people, constitutional changes rejected in Spain, gun control not directly voted by the american people, questioning the role of monarchy in Spain) make this issue more and more obvious.

To top that, working for the government seems to be the only job where performance is not only not enforced, it is not even measured or monitored!!.

Politicians stay in on the job for 4 years and nobody questions their outputs until the next round of politicians are chosen.

There are several politicians that do not even show up for work (see this from the Spanish Congress, where some of them do not even show up in 30% of the votes!!!, likewise in the European Council there are instances where less than 30 representatives show up for the morning sessions!!!). Try not showing up for work 1.5 days per week and see how long you last, because they keep their seats for 4 years!!

Not to mention the tremendous amount of layers of politicians nobody really understands what their purpose is. People that get in charge because they were voted but never got to show their competence on the matters they need to rule about. I am a strong believer that a minimum education should be enforced to the politicians that are meant to represent the interest of the community, the same way industry chooses the best leaders to lead their companies. Without finger pointing, I am sure you can think of politicians in your own country (or others) that are clearly unfit to carry the duties they have been elected for.

All of this happening in the era of communication, where I can see what happens in the other side of the globe within milliseconds and every body carries a cellphone in their pockets. Century XVIII called, they want their old methods back!!

Democracy falls behind on times

You no longer trust your navigation capabilities when looking for directions, because your phone has a GPS and a service which tells you what is the best route for you to get to work, based on life traffic updates. Social interaction has radically changed with instant messaging and sites where pictures can be posted 24/7 at no cost. Communication is no longer an excuse in long distance relationships because you can text your other half for free instantly. Even more... the process of FINDING a lifetime partner has also been brought to this century. With a swipe of your finger (and few answers to preferences) you can help a computer recommend you a person who might fit your lifestyle as a partner. Think about it, just reducing that pool of potential partners to those you share interests and visions (and not just location, work or other) narrows the search substantially. Your streaming service recommends you movies to watch based on the ones you already watched and liked, you can have personalized radio tunes based on your preferences and your online store recommends items other people bought together with the one you are interested in. You pay your bills, make a budget and monitor your finances from your phone. Even soccer, the most conservative sport ever, has accepted the need for video reviews (as of the latest world cup).

Yet when it comes to democracy, we still put that paper in an envelope once every 4 years and we expect the outcome to be the leader (or the team of representatives) who will take all the right decisions for us in the next 4 years.

Such cycles are not only too long, but also seen as a clean sheet, where nobody will measure performance unless a big issue happens (like this one in Spain recently).

It is clear that politicians are falling out of times. The embarrassing kind of questions Facebook got in the Congress hearings, the lack of understanding of the times and regulation to follow regarding the growth of UBER/Cabify (in Spain) and the frontal opposition of the taxi sector, the need/lack for regulation of autonomous driving and many other examples make it clear politicians and technology do not mix well. The political class just does not know how to react to the latest situations with technology and they are continuously on a catch-up game on such topics.

Let's move on to democracy 2.0

I see the need for an update (or at least a face lift) to this democratic system we are using, and based on the few sections above, I would expect a lot of resistance to it by the political class. Here is the story of my proposal:

• Voting is easy, there is an app for that: revolutionary, use your phone to vote!!! you already use it for everything else, why not for your vote? not sure about you but I do my banking through my phone, and I value more my money than my vote, so why not voting with your phone?
• Vote more (often): well, well, well, now if I can vote with my cellphone there is not excuse to say polls are expensive they suddenly became free of charge. Just put the question and you can let everybody vote instantaneously and not every 4 years.
• Make an AI assisted Digital Persona: but I do not want to vote every bill or every law, just want to maybe vote on some topics. Great!! fill in this questionnaire, our AI will make a model of you (your digital persona) and formulate estimated outcomes for specific questions. The same way your streaming provider provides estimates for what movie you will be watching next, or your navigation app uses your driving habits to give you advice on your route, your digital persona will generate an answer/vote on the topics to come based on the answers to all previous questions posed to you. Your digital persona learns over time, asking additional questions maybe based on the news or based on upcoming questions that will be discussed in the government.
• Override the Digital Persona: But you can always override the digital persona with your own generated vote (from which the model on the digital persona will be updated). Based on your votes and your responses to specific questions on sensitive topics, your digital persona is able to formulate an opinion on future topics.
• Delegate your vote to an EXPERT:You can delegate your vote to a person you trust on a particular topic. Maybe my wife is more knowledgeable on healthcare topics, because she is a pharmacist, then I might want to delegate my vote to my wife on such topics. This would effectively be a mean for technocracy on certain topics.
• Default on Democracy 1.0: You can always delegate your vote to a party and disable the Digital Persona. This means effectively you default on the current Democracy 1.0, which would be the situation if ALL citizens would decide to turn off that feature. You can see as delegating your vote to an EXPERT and that expert being the politician, but I would encourage to NOT take that view (sorry, from where I stand, I would not see politicians as experts).
• Digital Personas also die: with the real people. Proof of life is needed periodically to ensure that no digital personas continue to vote beyond their real counterparts passed away.
• Make digital vote secure, state of the art Cryptography and Distributed Trust : Let's use Blockchain technology for what we believe we value (our vote). That is a clear case where better trust the machine than the politician.
• Decisions need DATA to be backed up: the role of politicians now changed, data needs to be provided to people to better assess their choices. That changes the whole dynamics in democracy. The same way engineers make simulations before taking design choices, law makers should make simulations (and USE technology) to check the outcomes of certain decisions/laws/bills before even proposing them. Such information needs to be made available and possibly defend-able by Politicians in order to convince people of their choices. The dynamics and the role of politicians now changes, they no longer decide, but they need to CONVEY the options in a manner that enables people to vote.
• Performance review of politicians: now that the cost of voting has been lowered, we can consider doing performance reviews to politicians. Can we measure performance and set goals? Sure!! Like in any other job position. Easy voting means the lack of need for these election calendars, long campaigns and guesswork. Did the economic numbers turn out to be as promised? No? then lets consider whether you are the right person for the job!

Afterthoughts

I was extreme in this article to make points clear. Is this the only way forward? No, and by no means the formulation of the proposal is complete. Neither it needs to at this point. I just want to spark some ideas on the matter and make us all realize how technology affected so many of our daily matters (videoconferencing, instant messaging, navigation, finance, media streaming, somehow healthcare) but it did not touch the concept of democracy and the way we run countries.

I am aware of the controversy of the proposal and the limitations and possible flaws in manipulating it (if we believe Russians rigged the US presidential elections, giving our vote to an algorithm might not be the best of the ideas). On the other hand we cannot turn our heads away from progress. As a matter of fact that skepticism on technology is forgotten when we use our apps for banking or when we (shortly) are going to have autonomous cars taking over our streets, and dating apps choosing our partners.

As a closing though I want to emphasize the proposed methodology empowers the people. This might be seen as, besides a great punch line, an improvement overall and emphasizing the meaning of democracy (which it will). The author though is not sure whether this would be an improvement or not. People have shown sizable lack of judgement recently (US elections, Brexit, Spanish general elections), and the proposed method just gives them even more power. Is this the way to go? Maybe we should use the proposed system in a way that EXPERTS have more weight into the guidance of countries. But that makes for a complete different article.

DISCLAIMER: This article presents my subjective view on a topic. This does not represent the thinking of my employer, previous employers, my customers or any other affiliation I might have or have had in the past.