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Comment by akira2501 | Hacker News Reader

> The sooner we can agree to behave accordingly

People don't code out of a sense of duty, they do so to earn money, so there is no mechanism to enforce "behavior."

> our prospects for ripping the reigns of society

There are too many industries that take the mantle of improving society on their back. This is a mistake. There is no natural representative mechanism that ensures your actions are aligned to required outcomes.

This should probably be left to congress. If you're concerned that they won't do it then that should immediately suggest the appropriate course of action to you.

> of those whose only animating principles are avarice and exploitation.

Short term thinking cannot lead to long term rewards without abject manipulation of the marketplace.

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Congress is useless, along with the rest of the planetary corporate-fascist oligarch facsimiles of democracy.

If software engineers united behind true ideals of freedom, we could automate the entire stack of "leadership" and raise the floor of society.

Open source implementations of:

Universal cryptographic identification

Decentralized voluntary anonymous voting, verifiable by every voter

Sovereign algorithmic monetary policy

Liquid representation

Complete digitization of all necessary information to audit any authorities, at any time

Full release of privacy for any "public official" -- service to society should be a burden, not a privilege

This, and much, much more can ALL be done with software. An entirely new paradigm of society, with freedom unalienably encoded into the fabric of the social machine.

Our rights digitized, our privacy, speech, and pursuit of happiness made into software.

I would say software may have an impact, and the thinking of this impact extends far beyond the next quarter of profits. This mindset can extend into a multi-planetary society and beyond. A continuously evolving, open source mechanism of human governance.

> If software engineers united behind true ideals of freedom

You'd have better luck trying to remove jealousy from the human heart. If you can suggest a mechanism for actually making this happen, enforcing it in the face of economic incentives, and measuring it's actual impact then I'll take the ride with you. Until then it is an absolute fools errand.

> we could automate the entire stack of "leadership" and raise the floor of society.

Autonomous societies have been tried before. They have no mechanism to correctly align their long term objectives so none of them have ever lasted. Planning to build another one based on nothing other than assumption is flawed.

> with freedom unalienably encoded into the fabric of the social machine.

Guns exist. The social machine is secondary to force. You have no plan for this.

> This mindset can extend into a multi-planetary society and beyond.

Older people sell younger people pure unadulterated fantasies in order to extract cheap labor from them.

> If you can suggest a mechanism for actually making this happen, enforcing it in the face of economic incentives, and measuring it's actual impact then I'll take the ride with you.

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