Description
48. Progress
"Drawing Exercises"
1049 x 849 px. gif
2022
Yes, this is all just a silly speculative thought experiment, but what if we replaced congress with an AI that implemented policies and allocated resources in response to individual user input data (i.e. votes). It's not such a far-fetched idea either, a recent study by IE University (who lol?) found that 51% of Europeans are ok with replacing their parliamentarians with an AI.
Democracy is integral to thriving societies, but there are many ways to fashion a democracy and representative democracy should be understood as a social technology that has become increasingly gamified in modern states. The US is a prime example of a gamified democratic system, as it has one of the oldest constitutions in the world and has retained many structures, like the electoral college and the senate, designed to give disproportionate power to the slave-owning landed aristocracies of the South.
One can even argue that the US system was uniquely designed to withstand "the tyrannies of the majority" while allowing the possibility of capture by a minority of elite factions backed by moneyed interests. You can see this dynamic in action by the fact that people have been trying to add the Equal Rights Amendment to the constitution for nearly 100 years now. Recent studies by political scientists at Princeton and Northwestern have found that the preferences of average Americans has a near-zero effect on policy. This is not a surprising finding, given that the majority of US people support things like universal healthcare, paid-family leave, unions, abortions, etc.
This dynamic ofc isn't unique to the US, but what is unique to the US system is an entire electoral-media complex that renders all politics through a spectacle of culture war hot takes and commodified identity politics. This was all facilitated by the privatization of electoral campaign that peaked with the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court (another wonderfully anti-democratic body that could be replaced with AI).
In the US, there is always an election going on and always someone hitting you up for campaign money. This unregulated election industry means that billions get laundered each year through election campaigns, most of it circling back to the media and tech industry that drives most election advertising. This results in a reality where working class people donate billions of their own money to a socialist candidate who gets rug-pulled by his own party, or a reality where every single elected congressperson has to spend the majority of their working hours at fundraisers so that they can finance their next ,more expensive, campaign.
At some point, these systems become so entrenched that their self-perpetuation as money mills become their only goal. This is the essence of the legalized forms of corruption in political system.
If congress is supposed to be the means by which people have their will enacted as policies, why not do away with these middlemen and replace them with an AI. Turn the country into an enormous DAO of sorts. Yes, the AI would be a distributed protocol, but it could be represented by this beautiful bot. We could call her Rosie or Natty. She's designed to appeal to both Republicans and Democrats with some stylish e-mommy vibes for zoomers. There's the Hell's Angels inspired jacket design for the ethno-fascist vigilantes on their loner bikes, and there's the statue of liberty motifs, which democrats love to bring up whenever they need Latines and POC to vote for them. Also she's got the moderate classic "Live, Laugh, Love" tat which is basically the new "in god we trust." It's the perfect avatar for our new Lawmaking AI.
A detractor may say "Who wants to spend all that time legislatin' through a robot? let mitch mcturtle amass a fortune doing it on my back instead!" To which we say, "we already spend all these hours simulating civic life on Instagram, twitter, GTA lobbies, and so forth, why not spend some of that time contributing to our IRLs together. All of our votes and inputs go to the local nodes, the regional nodes, the state nodes, and right to Rosie or Natty. We are like a big cybernetic organism. And mcturtle fortune can go to building some social housing in his redlined district."
"Who needs an indentured democracy when you can have a direct democracy!"
ofc this is all a flight of fancy. I don't think an AI like this is viable on a national level without some sort of planned economy or democratized knowledge of AI systems. An AI won't revert the inequalities caused by a history of slavery, imperialism, and racial capitalism. But most importantly, I don't think anything replace the collective power of IRL solidarity between people.
> Created in Deluxe Paint IV on an emulated Amiga A1200 computer <
// Artwork by Sabato Visconti // www.sabatobox.com // @sabatobox on Twitter //