Comment by michaelscott | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelscott | Hacker News Reader

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It feels like the world is in a weird place at this point in history. We've left a world of city-states (mostly) where laws, wealth and society were hyper-localised and conflict was probably more frequent, but we're not quite at a point where the whole planet is represented by a single government. I imagine this will happen when we are properly multi-planetary and our ability to defer governmental roles to machines is sufficient, given the already visible cracks in the cultural seams that larger sovereignties create (I'm thinking situations like Catalonia, Hong Kong, Scotland etc.).

Until then we're at a point where governments are too small for us to have free movement across continents and truly beneficial globalisation, and too large to represent minority cultures adequately. I think this reversion to city-states will continue to grow across the world as governments struggle with their size and powerful individuals who are not politically linked chafe at the legal bit. Can't really tell whether it's a good or bad thing yet.

Small is beautiful.

Small things dont blow up and cause huge collateral damage.

Restaurants go out of business all the time. 1 collapse doesn't do anything.

However, 1 monster entity collapsing (LTCM, Lehman, AIG, any pharma today, or Amazon, Google, or 1 ship blocking a key waterway, etc) and its pandemonium.

City states may have warred more frequently, but they never led to the type of destruction that you saw with WWI, WW2 or the french wars of revolution.

Its wise to have resiliency by decentralizing central power, even if it costs a bit of convenience to the individual.

I tend to agree with you. I think on the whole moving to more city states and fewer monoliths probably suits the way humans operate both as individuals and communities more. I also think we're probably at a point now where doing so won't lead to small scale wars city states experienced in the past, or at least far less frequently.

> when our ability to defer governmental roles to machines is sufficient

This baffles me. I’m genuinely curious what this would look like to you. Would you please describe how you imagine this to look like? What makes it beneficial to give governance power to machines? What fundamental changes (technological, social or otherwise) have to happen to get us there? And lastly, what components make up the plumbing of a system like this?

I honestly have no idea how this would work mechanically; I'm talking about a point in the future where we are a fully multi-planetary species with governmental bodies across planets, so the level of tech that's assumed here is already reaching the level of magic.

If we don't assume magical AI, machines are never better than humans at social decision-making so I can't see the President of Earth being a machine in this scenario. What machines are better at is information gathering and processing, which would allow them to synthesise minor political events happening in one corner of the world more effectively than any person and then present findings to a human to make decisions on. In other words it wouldn't be machines doing the governing, but they fulfil governmental roles in that they make increasing bureaucracy efficient enough that a body of humans could realistically govern at a global level.

This isn't necessarily a good thing. China already has an incredible level of surveillance and info gathering ability within its borders and while their governmental structure allows them to be very effective and decisive with it, I don't think it's a good thing for corruptible humans to have that much power. Cue our magical AI.

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