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Comment by andy_ppp | Hacker News Reader

I have this horrible feeling that you'll soon buy the government you want; Amazon or Facebook Gov is a terrifying idea: "do you want to add on the international development budget for £14.99 per month".

I wonder if it would be better than what we currently have?

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Representative democracy doesn't really represent me.

I want to go online and fill out a long, myers briggs like personality test that judges my political leanings, and then have that data fed to a script that votes on all the issues for me directly, skipping the middlemen. Collectively those scripts would be a far better representation than any human.

Replace all politicians with tiny shell scripts.

There is not a person, alive, dead, or not yet born that I would trust to write such code.

As opposed to politicians who take bribes in the form of campaign donations?

So instead of repealing bad legislation we should invent a whole new system from scratch using technologies the very inventors barely understand? Eesh.

Haha, I’m only playing devil’s advocate, it’s a terrible idea clearly.

This is the self driving care problem

People want a perfect system to replace an imperfect one. When instead they should rationally look at it and ask "is it better than what we have now" instead they pick it apart for any flaws then proclaim that is not workable because it is not 100% perfect every time

Not asking for perfection mate. Just don't ask me for a blessing when the cure is worse than the disease.

I like the idea of direct democracy, but I don’t think I’d go that far with it. More appealing here would be to have the ability to delegate my votes on issues in certain sectors to someone I trust. Maybe with a delay so I can override their decision if I disagree with something important.

I volunteer to write that script. I am very trustworthy and totally won't abuse this position to push my own political leanings.

How will those shell scripts discuss the merits of various proposals? Discussion and compromise are vital aspects of political decision making.

Isn't that what surveillance capitalism is alsready doing on your behalf?

You would have to keep those scripts secret otherwise someone could easily build an adversarial neural network or a hacker might just find an exploit. Secret scripts that decide everything isn't a democracy. That's an AI government and we all know that we shouldn't let AI have military access.

Competition in a government space would be a good thing, imo. For a while at least. Beats being quite permanently attached to a shitty gov at birth.

Kinda what voting is for - to change the current gov't.

Voting can be helpful, but not always. For a long time the voting majority in some places thought treating black people as lesser human beings was fair. In those cases, having the option to easily choose a different government would be useful.

In a way, having states in the US is that idea. E.g. moving from a deeply racist southern state during the height of equal but separate era to a more progressive state would have given you far better results than voting in terms of how you were treated by the local government.

> having the option to easily choose a different government would be useful

This opens everyone up to the kind of complexity nobody is ready for.

- Would the groups split under different governments but sharing the same territory? Who has the final word?

- Do they split the territory? Who gets the better one?

- In any group someone will be unhappy with the treatment. How many times do you split and "get your own government"?

- Maybe the competition is between the already established governments of existing countries. What happens when one government (or the people it represents) doesn't what specific people from joining the group?

Depends on the type of voting employed.

First Past the Post (what most nations us) is not a way to pick a true representative official, it breads defensive voting, vote spoiling, and all kinds of other problems where you end up in a spiral of worse and worse people, and where everyone says "I do not want either option but...."

A functioning government more or less is a negotiation and arbitration platform between large economic players - the state being one of these, of course.

So I'm not sure what 'buying the government' actually would mean or how it would be different...

What is this functioning government of which you speak?

You have just inspired me. I've always wanted a political fiction to try and write in my spare time, this sounds perfect :)

Not sure if you've read Jennifer Government

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