From: Maru Dubshinki (marudubshinki@gmail.com)
Date: Sun Feb 06 2005 - 19:52:30 MST
Here hear! An excellent defence of demarchy. But what I find to be
the nicest thing
about the whole conception (besides stopping most corrupt political
games; and the fact that by sheer chance most decisions would probably
be made by lower and middle-class people, the ones who, y'know, will
actually have to live with the choices gov.'t makes, and are not able
to scoot off to the Bahamas or to gated communities) is the procedural
elegance of it.
Think about it: what is the easiest procedure to follow and verify?
A massive, nation-wide election, with countless polling place, private
companies sticking their fingers in, manipulatively or not; or a
simple drawing from a set of names?
And Buckner, your analogy is a little off: sure worms have often
patched security holes, but a better analogy would be a hacker
installing a rootkit.
~Maru
On Sun, 6 Feb 2005 14:40:10 -0800 (PST), Thomas Buckner
<tcbevolver@yahoo.com> wrote:
> A powerful, well-funded authoritarian coalition,
> which does not actually believe in democracy, has
> disabled the checks and balances in this country
> and now rules almost unopposed. To put it in
> computer-security terms, the software had
> security flaws which were identified and
> exploited by unfriendly haxors who are now
> plugging the holes to make sure they cannot be
> evicted.
>
> As I do not expect the authoritarians to give up
> power, legally or not, peacefully or not, and as
> they now have surveillance and armament
> sufficient to put down any opposition I can
> envision, I do not anticipate a random or
> open-source system here. Only a transhuman or SAI
> can undo what has been done. Even then, it will
> not necessarily matter who 'should' impose hir
> decisions on the rest; it will only be a question
> of who can.
>
> I am willing to see this particular discussion
> sniped, as it's not exactly AI related; however,
> it does happen to be roughly where I came in. See
> the fictional essay I wrote about three years
> ago, to be included in a book that never appeared
> (I've learned a lot since then, but the general
> idea of the essay still holds).
>
> http://www.singularityawareness.com/2251.html
>
> Tom Buckner
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