Is the government a new era bench player?
Digital services have constantly been a clash with the rule of law and governance. It seems somewhat ironic when technologies such as deep learning software and self-executing code could be in the driving seat of administration. At the same time, in today’s world, humankind is skeptical about human knowledge and wisdom, the human’s capability to make a good decision. Now, the human race has more confidence in Big Data, the blockchain, and computer algorithms. Nevertheless, the data is so massive that humans can no longer cope with its large flows. I sometimes cannot distill all the inflow data into information to create a clear picture of something, not to mention the emergence of sought-after outflow knowledge or wisdom from such data. And we’re just wrapping the outflow which is expected by a human brain from the usage of those data.
Eventually, the work of processing the data should be entrusted even more to electronic algorithms, whose capacity way exceeds that of the human brain. To the system with the massive decentralization where an immense mass of data would flow as freely as possible. No central processing unit as authority should be in the purview of administration. The information should flow freely between millions of nods, the millions of computers.
The rise of the internet gives us a taste of things to come. Cyberspace is very crucial to daily human lives, our economy, and our security. Blockchain, which is a database or ledger of all transactions, grouped into “blocks” and replicated across thousands of “nodes” gives us the possibility to participate in the decision-making process, which is done by consensus algorithms such as Proof-of-Work or Proof-of-Stake, that provide us wanted decentralization which is merely striving to emerge.
Not so far from the present, the TCP/IP protocol (the internet) was on the same query way — the parallels between a blockchain and the web are clear. Just as the internet enabled two-way information sharing, Bitcoin allows two-way financial transactions. The development and maintenance of blockchain could be open, distributed, and shared — just like the Internet. Today more than half of the world’s most valuable public companies have internet-driven, platform-based business models. The very foundations of our economy have changed hugely. The internet unlocked new economic value by dramatically lowering the cost of connections.
Similarly, blockchain could reduce the cost of transactions significantly and so much more, for example, it can solve the problem of trust and fake data. Still, for certain individuals, it might sound dubious today. Besides, with consensus, we do not need to trust someone. The decentralization is conceivable due to the rules each blockchain hold. The blockchain nodes and users do not need to abide by laws that made by human and that could be freely changed. All in the blockchain system follow the programming logic, which is ensured by math, algorithms, programmed systems and more. The implications might be fascinating.
As both the volume and speed of data increase, intends data-processing conditions change, venerable official institutions like elections, parties and parliaments might become obsolete, because they do not process data efficiently enough. These institutions evolved in an era when politics moved faster than technology. Apart, the government often finds itself embarrassingly naked in front of difficulties brought by technological shift, which is natural. Technicians and coders design change and executives have to think about appropriate regulations for that change. The principal question is the quality of laws and regulations from the controller, which affects the tech growth and everyday experience.
By switching to the economy, which is the crucial part of the political responsibility, probably, the market forces are the ones, who should be partly in charge of the price and the number of digital assets, the research-and-development priorities. A free market can make agreements, develop the economic models, organize the nations’ governance by creating future governance tools applications and resolve disputes within the reached consensus. If market forces make the wrong decision, they soon correct themselves within the decentralized systems.
The idea is that the executive people should get together with the computer scientists to understand what they’re up against. And if it is not up to the state, it is up to the prevailing consensus. I want to have that conversation. I want business or administrative staff, who are preferably analytically very sharp and philosophically interested to get together with the computer scientists and to understand each other’s language to bring meaning. The historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari in his book called “Homo Deus — A Brief History of Tomorrow” said, that for current human purposes it does not matter whether the theory of capitalism is correct. The crucial thing is that the approach understands economics regarding data processing.
The politicians are far from the greatest minds in this grizzly world! Modern governmental structures cannot collect and process the relevant data fast enough, and most politicians or lawmakers don’t understand what is happening well enough to form any pertinent opinions of new economic sense or tokenization. Traditional politics loses control of events and fails to provide their residents with meaningful visions for the future as the essential means to improve their nations. The world they are living in is short of a future vision which is the drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going. Fiction or imagination forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts. Have a meaningful vision for the future is one of the most extraordinary things one can do. Designing a next-generation world and modern robotic humans are far beyond the regulatory agenda.
Present-day politicians are holding on a far smaller scale than their predecessors a century ago. In the early twenty-first century, politics is consequently deficient of grand visions. The government has become mere administration. It manages the country, but it no longer leads it. Yuval Noah Harari also gave a great example of a government these days — The government makes sure teachers are paid on time, and sewage systems do not overflow, but it has no idea where the country will be in twenty years. Which is relatively not always wrong thinking of Nazis as the one who grasps what would happen in twenty years. Still, being in quite the opposite dimension and reflecting the lack of inefficiency maybe it is best to leave all the critical decisions in the hands of the free market.
Well, the humankind will eventually abandon the practice where a person has to stick to certain state rules and ridicules decisions, or other seemingly traditional governance matters. As a result, people would voluntarily form their consensus on specifically defined commands and will create the tools for governing them. Either for AI or the blockchain. AI technologies are already pushing their algorithmic fingers into legal processes — and perhaps shifting the line of the law itself in the manner. There is no certainty that the next generation “legal tech” or governing systems are not unfairly biased against specific groups or individuals or would be efficient. All these formations will compete with a particular old school governance practices until someone with the “better” controls would win. As the lawyer and philosopher, Mireille Hildebrandt said, sure, it is going to be a competitive market for such tech, and there’s going to be good and bad stuff, and it will not be easy to decide what’s good or what’s bad. But, It’s about a mindset and about an informed mindset on how these things matter.
Conclusion: If traditional political structures can no longer process the data fast enough to produce meaningful foresight, then new and more efficient structures will evolve to take their place. These new structures may be very different from any previous political institutions, whether democratic or authoritarian. The only question is who will build and control these structures. Today, we google for everything, mostly information or products. Maybe, we will perform the equivalent of “googling” to verify records, identities, authenticity, rights, work done, titles, contracts, votes, special elections, paying taxes and other valuable asset-related processes.
Originally published at axon.partners.
