Cyber Republic: Reinventing Democracy in the Age of Intelligent Machines - Hardcover

Zarkadakis, George

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262044315 ISBN 13: 9780262044318

Verlag: The MIT Press, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

How to make liberal democracies more inclusive and the digital economy more equitable: a guide for the coming Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Around the world, liberal democracies are in crisis. Citizens have lost faith in their government; right-wing nationalist movements frame the political debate. At the same time, economic inequality is increasing dramatically; digital technologies have created a new class of super-rich entrepreneurs. Automation threatens to transform the free economy into a zero-sum game in which capital wins and labor loses. But is this digital dystopia inevitable? In Cyber Republic, George Zarkadakis presents an alternative, outlining a plan for using technology to make liberal democracies more inclusive and the digital economy more equitable. Cyber Republic is no less than a guide for the coming Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Zarkadakis, an expert on technology and management, explains how artificial intelligence, together with intelligent robotics, sophisticated sensors, communication networks, and big data, will fundamentally reshape the global economy; a new “intelligent machine age” will force us to adopt new forms of economic and political organization. He envisions a future liberal democracy in which intelligent machines facilitate citizen assemblies, helping to extend citizen rights, and blockchains and cryptoeconomics enable new forms of democratic governance and business collaboration. Moreover, the same technologies can be applied to scientific research and technological innovation. We need not fear automation, Zarkadakis argues; in a postwork future, intelligent machines can collaborate with humans to achieve the human goals of inclusivity and equality.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

George Zarkadakis leads the Future of Work consulting practice at Willis Towers Watson, a global risk management consulting firm. The author of In Our Own Image: The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence and other books, he has written extensively on science and technology for publications including Aeon and Wired.

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For most citizens in liberal democracies, life is dependent on the provision of good-quality public services in education, health care, retirement, policing, taxation, and the courts—to name but a few. These valuable public services are becoming extremely costly over time, contributing to the swelling of government deficits and the ballooning of national debts. Bad demographics make this trend worse, as many liberal democracies are trapped in a vicious circle of ever-diminishing tax receipts, due to the scarcity of young, taxable workers, and an aging population demanding more public services. This situation is clearly unsustainable. Artificial intelligence is a technology that could help alleviate some of these imbalances—for example, by optimizing the distribution of scarce public resources, improving decision-making based on intelligent predictions, and preventing tax fraud. Shouldn’t we therefore welcome the computer automation of government and public services using AI?
The relationship between computers and governments goes back a long way. In The Government Machine, historian Jon Agar argues that the ideological roots of computers are found in public administration. According to Agar, the mechanization of government started in the late eighteenth century when the public administration of the United Kingdom, trusted with running a global empire, invested in efficient operations, as well as in the collection and processing of information from across the world. In a liberal system of government, where civil servants run everyday government affairs, the computer is a reflection of a technocratic vision for efficiency and process management. As Agar says, “The general purpose computer is the apotheosis of the civil service.” Until recently, computer systems were acting as the “peripheral nervous system” of government organizations: automating some processes, collecting data, and using simple interfaces to serve citizens over the web. Extending the brain metaphor, the “central nervous system” of government has remained the cabal of top-level human administrators; the departmental directors, directors general, and ministers. For it is at that level where the ultimate responsibility for decision-making and action still resides. Nevertheless, complex government decisions require not just data and information fed upward by administration processes but expert advice too. Indeed, the rise of expert advisors in public administration—such as statisticians, health scientists, economists, and so on—is absolutely necessary for “evidence-based” politics, or what the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas calls the “scientization of politics.”
Enter AI, which can potentially automate the central nervous system of government, as well, and deliver an efficient, mechanized “organizational brain” that can make complex decisions autonomously by accessing vast amounts of diverse knowledge and data. By replacing human decision makers in public administration with informational processes controlled by AI algorithms, one could get the perfect government: impartial, efficient, and effective. But what would be the consequences of transforming the metaphorical “government machine” into a reality?

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: The MIT Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2020
• ISBN 10: 0262044315
• ISBN 13: 9780262044318
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Sprache: Englisch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 176
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar