London Futurists
Around the world, liberal democracies are in crisis. Citizens have lost faith in their government. At the same time, economic inequality is increasing dramatically; digital technologies have created a new class of super-rich entrepreneurs. Automation threatens to transform the free economy into a zero-sum game in which capital wins and labour loses. But is this digital dystopia inevitable?
In his recent new book “Cyber Republic”, technology and management expert George Zarkadakis presents an alternative. Presented as a guide to the coming Fourth Industrial Revolution and the post-pandemic world, the book outlines a plan for using technology to make liberal democracies more inclusive and the digital economy more equitable.
George shared his ideas in conversation with London Futurists on Saturday 5th December 2020. The event was hosted by David Wood, Chair of London Futurists.
For more information about this event and the speaker, see https://www.meetup.com/London-Futurists/events/274514391/
Source
Modernize:
Make elections fair, transparent, and equitable:
#Fair: Every resident adult gets a ballot in the mail – a say in how tax-dollars are spent
#Transparent: Every submitted ballot is posted online in machine-readable form – everyone can verify results
#Equitable: Any candidate with more than some minimum percentage (e.g. 1%) of the vote is "seated". Seated representatives vote shares proportional to their percent of the vote times the population of their district.
Our current voting system assures that the majority of voters are mis-represented by the candidate that happens to get a plurality – not even a majority. A proportional representation system can mitigate this substantially. Of course, the idea that professional politicians have their own agenda's – something other than representation, something other than their constituents well-being, may still be a problem. This might be mitigated by replacing elections, competitions between self-selected wannabe law-makers, with a draft – representatives would be drafted from a pool of qualified citizens – like jurors. They would serve a short term where their responsibility would be limited to a few well-delimited questions – again like jurors.