Life in automated world

The assumption is that the initial condition of the fully automated economy and government is ideal in terms of a modern middle-class experience for everyone with a guaranteed income and free entertainment. It can only get worse from there. Humans offer nothing to improve the future of the automation. Inevitably, they will segregate into groups. Those groups will strive for improvements of their condition where their best opportunity is at the expense of other groups. The automation will adapt.

Do we need narratives

We need a new approach to governance at all scales in order to sustain and build upon our culture. I think a new approach is possible by recognizing that narratives are expendable. We do not need consistency of narratives over time, for all narratives at all scales from nations to individuals.

Dedomenocracy: unsupervised government

When we look to data technology to solve problems, we should permit the technologies to identify the problems that can be solved with the current capabilities instead of demanding that the technologies evolve to solve the hard problems we have been working on. There are many opportunities to make progress even if we don’t touch the hard problems. Allowing technology to solve what it can solve now may transform the hard problems to be narrower, or possibly even less visible. For example, there are other ways we can improve overall life expectancy without curing any cancers, perhaps with investments in areas unrelated to health care. It is our nature to focus on objectives that catch our attention. This focus can blind us to immediate opportunities that are realistic given our current situation.

Economy of compensated opinions in a dedomenocracy

The original title for this post was to talk about balkanized data. In contrast to big data, balkanized data stays sealed and protected at the source. The large-scale analytics or policy making needs to engage with specific transactions with data owners to obtain the data they need for each specific analysis they are performing. This type of economy denies the centralized corporations or government access to volunteered release of bulk source data. Instead the centralized entities need to negotiate terms for each transaction. The terms will describe precisely what they want so the source can deliver the most appropriate answer. That negotiation will involve a monetary exchange with amounts proportional to the eagerness of the requester for that data. The result is the creation of a new economy analogous to intellectual property but where the property is simply personal data. Data is property. Owners will soon wise up about giving it away for free.

Big data challenges mechanical determinism theory of mind

This futuristic dedomenocracy offers a way to falsify the deterministic theory of mind by simple observation of innovative crime that occurs despite the power of the available data. Observations of successful innovative crimes that have unacceptably damaging consequence, or that occur in unacceptably high numbers would be evidence that we lack sufficient data for the deterministic model. However, I am assuming a future where we will have observations of just about everything that is observable. If dedomenocracy continues to experience innovative crimes despite having access to everything that is observable, then there the innovative part of the mind must be accessing something that can not be observed.

Dedomenocracy’s nemesis: the innovative criminal

Even including super-intelligent machines into the concept of dedomenocracy, there will remain the present-day complaint that the government needs to get lucky every day but the criminal human needs to get lucky only once. This problem will remain long after we replace democracy with dedomenocracy. The most dangerous criminal is the non-criminal who immediately acts on his newly discovered hypothesis. Even superhuman intelligent dedomenocracy may not be able to discover this hypothesis first.

Data is antagonist of science

In addition to the classic challenge of new data potentially disproving an old theory, the modern reality of practical data technologies makes possible decision making based on data alone without any need for human cognitive theory to justify the decisions.