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'Technology Will Replace the Need For Big Government' (vice.com)
New submitter axlash writes: There's a lot of dissatisfaction with governments today, as can be seen by the rise of left-wing parties in Europe, to the rise of non-mainstream political candidates in America. Well, here's a thought -- with all the talk of technology replacing jobs, why not have it replace governments, too? The speculates about how "in the near future, the government might dramatically shrink -- not because of demands by fiscally astute Americans, but because of radical technology." It goes on: "Even the US President could one day be replaced, which -- strangely enough -- might bring sanity to our election process." The main thrust of the article is essentially about how government jobs will be replaced with technology, although it doesn't say much about whether there'll be technology administering this technology.
This story has been done before, and much better:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franchise_%28short_story%29
Who knows? Maybe a Buttle will be in our future yet...
... That's seriously the only reason I can think of why someone would think that putting technology into an oversight role over humanity is a good thing.
A generation raised on YouTube and Google algorithms and that doesn't seem to value freedom of expression or thought also doesn't understand why humans, process, and procedural protections are necessary. In turn, that makes things less efficient than they theoretically could be, but a technocratic Orwellian state as envisioned by dipshit solutionists will eventually come to the conclusion that life would be a lot more efficient if you just get rid of humans altogether.
I'm honestly a bit confused how people don't see this. Did they not see T2 growing up? Did they not watch any dystopian 70's sci-fi? Have they never heard of The Twilight Zone and its continual reminders about how hubris catches up with people? What is it?
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Isaac Asimov already wrote about this 60 years ago. Read The Franchise.
So machines will track and punish every single thing we do? Lovely. Sounds soo much less intrusive that way.
I've seen that one.
Big government spends so much time fighting with itself that not much gets done. A smaller more efficient government will screw the people a lot faster.
Do you really think the Government will permit this?
No, they won't.
In the USA, the Federal Government is too big to permit any competition.
In the USA, many State Governments are too big to permit any competition.
Every thing that competes with the Government loses. Look at Microsoft's surrender to the USA Federal Government when M$ reached its zenith and became a threat to the Feds. Zap! M$ lost the battles and now pay homage to the USA Government.
When they try to implement these solutions, the project will escalate out of control and lead to cancellation due to costly project overruns. That is what happens now, I don't see it changing in the future.
Can I write the software? Oh you forgot about that little detail, eh? I guess you'll insist on it being open course, of course. Sure, nobody could every fool you if you could see the source code.
There is no way for this to be trustworthy. The system must be both comprehensible *and verifiable* by the vast majority of citizens. That means less technology. The future lies in simpler laws and rules. That's supposed to be the big draw of a minimum income - significantly reduce the complexity of government by making the rules extremely simple: everyone gets $X stipend. No welfare, old age pension, foodstamps, etc.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
State Department claims it can't find any Pagliano email
Not deleting stuff would be nice.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Reading the article, I would have to say it’s naive and willfully ignorant. The author makes claims that by reducing big government (ie. Eliminating staff) cost savings will reduce the deficit to the point of providing universal basic income. Anyone who’s spent more than 5 seconds looking at the debt knows the biggest contributors to the national debt are entitlements - which has zero to do with the number of government employees.
There's a lot of dissatisfaction with governments today, as can be seen by the rise of left-wing parties in Europe,
Did you mean "as can be seen by the rise of right-wing parties in Europe"? Computerization of the government was a goal in the Soviet Union at one point. SAP consultants are surely already gleaming of the though of selling national ERP systems to centrally manage whole countries at a time in really big computer systems. Really Big Systems.
...if the government's true constituency, those that paid to get their people into office and their agenda carried forward through legislature and regulation, see profit in the move. If they do, you can bank on it happening. Sadly, that equation has little to do with "The People".
This implies, there ever was a real need for Big Government in the first place...
There sure were problems, which the government solved, however, (quite) arguably, these solutions introduced worse problems of their own...
Libertarians continue to argue — with show of reason — that government's role ought to be confined to keeping the enemies away without and crime at bay within the borders...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
It is my belief that technology improves the capability to centralize government operations. That's one reason you have states tending towards top down centralization today. It is now possible to run more things from the national capital than ever before.
Centralization has benefits that are quite considerable... if they are used for good. The problem with big government is that the characteristics of a large bureaucracy make the government itself into its own constituency. Look at US legislators. They're completely out of step with a lot of their voters, on both sides. How could that happen? It's way too easy to manage things from the capital.
Will direct democracy and other things become more prevalent with more technology? Quite possibly. However, while I've always stated that democracy is a very good method of generating legitimacy for a particular government, it's really shitty at determining the truth for questions that have anything but the simplest answers.
A lot of progressive types today take great comfort in the belief that they have the majority opinion on their side. However, would they still consider themselves correct if they were a minority? They certainly would. Therefore, having everyone on your side is convenient, but doesn't necessarily improve the value of your proposition. A direct democracy without experts mediating the effects could generate some very popular, and very disastrous policies.
As for technology in general managing things. Garbage in, garbage out. If you start with a flawed premise, your technology will find the best possible means of achieving your flawed goals and screwing you over. I am interested in how technology can help us in the future, but in the end, I think the real determination of whether a future is utopia or dystopia will be determined by the moral and ethical decisions that we generate the starting goals and premises from which the technology will implement a solution.
There seems to be a fundamental misconception behind this story: namely that 'big' refers to number of employees; rather than size of role.
It's obvious to the point of trivial that certain technological advances will reduce the number of people required to do a given job; but that doesn't change whether or not the job is considered to be within the state's mandate or whether it is a private sector matter.
That's what size-of-government fights are really about(sure, there's some skirmishing about shrinking or expanding specific workforces to either save money or address a perceived deficiency in service): "What should the government do? What should it not do? What is acceptable to contract out? What is best handled internally?"
Given that technology has tended to result in labor savings, I'd certainly expect a lower headcount in government in the future; but that's irrelevant to whether it is 'big' or not. Running a welfare state, say, would probably be more efficient if you could just have a single AI do it; but it'd be just as much a 'big government' proposal, just one with fewer people pushing paper around.
Government is not mainly technology and will not be replaced by technology.
There's never been a need for "Big Government",
and we all know that technology has outpaced our obese overlords.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
Yeah. The ironic thing is, his headline point is still correct: If we get to the point where basic goods can be 3-d printed cheaply and medical care is also cheap, then all those things that contribute to big government kind of go away.
If you consider sufficiently advanced technology, then the headline "Technology Will Replace the need for X" will (eventually) be true for all values of X, or at least, will not be provably untrue.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Someone hasn't been paying attention. The *right wing* is on the rise in Europe, and it has nothing to do with the size of the government and everything to do with nationalism and cultural fears (thats a nice way of saying racism).
Living in Belgium, I don't know anyone who complains about the size of the government. In fact, I think the common idea between the young I work with and the old in my family is that the government isn't doing enough about [roads|infrastructure|global warming|etc]. Doing more means a larger government.
Most people have seen the inside of some government offices and they do not impress one with the concept of efficiency, when the piles of papers are seen.
We are a good 30 years into the small computer revolution and it is time for routine tasks to be taken over by AI programs, leaving minimal staff to take care of the "exceptions", "errors" and "omissions."
The number of Jobs depends on work that needs to be done, not the current work that is being done. For that reason, more tech simply means we expand the work that needs to be done (1,000 years ago, we didn't think anyone had to offer mortgages, do title searches, etc. etc.)
Similarly, just as the definition of 'work that needs to be done' expands as we use technology to reduce the man hours to do the work, so does "government work that needs to be done".
Every time we automate/outsource away a government job, two new ones will be created.
These are not 'make work jobs', they were always important, we simply couldn't afford to do them previously. Now we can.
Here are a list of government jobs that I already know we need to do, but aren't really doing.
Regulation checking. Not creating new regulations, merely checking on polluters, child care facilities, senior citizens care facilities, prisons, etc. etc. to make sure they follow existing regulations. In almost all of those cases we pass regulations, then watch as half the people ignore the regulations (until they get caught). We could actually CHECK and enforce the existing regulations.
Innocence review. We KNOW (DNA testing) there are lots of innocent people in jail. Whether due to incompetence, malfeasance, or simply bad luck, there are innocent people that end up in jail. Most jurisdictions make no attempt to double check convictions (with a few notable exceptions, Texas and New York each have at least one county where they check.) This could change.
Anti-police corruption. Most cities have almost no effect means of investigating corrupt cops. Studies show that about 4% of cops are corrupt. In the US, during 2015, there were 12,000 people killed by the cops. Not a single cop was convicted. Not one. At 4%, even if those 12,000 cops were innocent of murder, at least 560 were guilty of SOMETHING (and I bet that the percent of bad cops that killed someone is a lot higher than the general number of 4%). We could have a prosecutor whose sole job is to prosecute criminal cops. No convictions = fired for failing to do your job, because there has to be at LEAST one dirty cop in the country.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
On the other hand, the total I.Q. of all the people working in the government means that we're much closer to replacing them with A.I. than we thought.
The author has a terminal case of Star Trekitis. He assumes since we can make a fireproof building, we don't need firefighters. We won't need police because the Internet of Things can monitor everything.
He's never met Murphy. It isn't at all clear that he even understands how to turn his TV off.
Nothing to see here, move along.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
No it can't. Artificial Intelligence will never be a match for Natural Stupidity.
An increasing number of jobs can be replaced by robots.
Eventually everyone is out of work.
I sometimes lurk in a forum which has degenerated into a Tea Party session where they tell each other that the best thing to do is to save taxes by getting rid of most government jobs, I saw that the current target was the Department of Education a few days back.
What comes next? Butlerian Jihad? An army is a necessity because the excluded are going to revolt at some point.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
WOPR for President!
Classic old Gordon Dickson story... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"There's a lot of dissatisfaction with governments today, as can be seen by the rise of left-wing parties in Europe"
From what I know of politics left wing usually want bigger governement involvement. I'm guessing the author meant right-wing parties.
This concept is not from the Millennial generation you claim want's it. It's from the same source that pushes other sociological engineering projects. People, even millennial people, don't want this stuff and advocate against it to themselves. The huge push back against the College Campus SJW stuff only happened because things reached a boiling point. That rhetoric and movement started long ago by social engineering projects.
The difficulty I see at present is shutting down some of these projects so that we don't have thousands of simultaneous sources. Music and Media account for many, but we have just about every Government agency now doing the same thing. Sorry folks, but Common Core is not about better education, it's about brainwashing and propaganda. Controlling the masses. The NSA programs are all about tracking the masses to silence critics and control the populace. The FBI and CIA have traditionally been used for that same thing too. It's not "new", but the scale at which it's grown is incredible.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
The Founding Fathers crafted the Constitution specifically to make sure Americans do NOT actually get what they vote for.
If you think about who makes up the voting public, I can understand why they'd do that. Democracy is mob rule, and mobs are very stupid, easily manipulated things.
You are welcome on my lawn.
translation: Our new feudalism corporate overlords would like us to dismantle what's left of our governments, the only thing left that could reign in their power. What is this pro corporate propaganda waffle doing on a tech site?
>> how government jobs will be replaced with technology
This will never happen. The whole point of government these days is to provide cushy jobs and pensions where paper is shuffled and reports are filed.
Example: today through our taxes we spend more than $60K on anti-poverty programs for a family of three. (http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/PA694.pdf) Guess how much of that actually "trickles down" to the family vs. what gets wasted on government middlemen? How much better could that family live if we just handed them half the money ($30K) that we intended to send them? We will never know.
Rather than look to SciFi for what it might look like, why not look at history? Oxford historian Adam Curtis did a series of documentaries looking at the promises of self-organising systems in general and computer/data driven systems in particular: "All watched over by machines of loving grace" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_of_Loving_Grace_%28TV_series%29) Well worth a watch if you can get it. Here's a preview on the Guardian's website: http://www.theguardian.com/cul...
The whole problem is the notion that people need an "oversight role", which in fact they do not.
What technology enables is the ability for local regions to function in a decentralized manner without need for "oversight" or "central planning".
It's not about REPLACING human oversight, but dismantling it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Truth bomb.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Seriously? Do we not teach government anymore in school here in the good old USA? MOST of what they promise the CAN NOT do anyway, no one person or branch of government has the power to unilaterally just DO what they want. Plus, rarely does any single party hold enough control to get stuff done on their own power by controlling two branches. It was designed this way on purpose...
So stop expecting to get what the politicians are promising and realize when you are being duped, lied to and manipulated and stop voting for the candidate who will willingly sell you a bill of goods they cannot deliver just to get your vote. When they make promises they have no power on their own to keep, don't vote for them, which pretty much covers our current crop of presidential hopefuls....
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
An increasing number of jobs can be replaced by robots.
Eventually everyone is out of work.
I sometimes lurk in a forum which has degenerated into a Tea Party session where they tell each other that the best thing to do is to save taxes by getting rid of most government jobs, I saw that the current target was the Department of Education a few days back.
What comes next? Butlerian Jihad? An army is a necessity because the excluded are going to revolt at some point.
To be fair, much of the original intent of the Tea Party was a reduction in *Federal* government size... it's a process argument about where certain layers of society should be governed from. Ironically, it's the progressives that want to centralize everything, on the grounds of efficiency, standardization, and soul-crushing nationwide conformity.
Tea Partiers want(ed) to abolish the US Department of Education because nothing about "running education" is mentioned in the Constitution. That doesn't mean state level DoE's are to be shuttered, or that local school boards should be abolished. In fact -- especially within the context of this story -- that will probably lead to *increased* overall employment, as some of the central functions will be duplicated in 50 different state-level agencies. That's a good thing in that regards, and it doesn't change the "jurisdictional load" sitting on top of the average American citizen, while actually allowing them to have more responsive government that caters better to their wishes.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Actually, its the internet.
I had this realization a while back from mention of a very old economic theory, one truely beyond its time since it comes from before the real advent of general purpose computing. Its a very simple concept.... decentralization is more efficient as information flows.
You need big central orgs when information is bottlenecked and can't move to where it needs fast enough. The Internet turns this concept on its ear. We need the government we have because it used to be reasonable that it takes 6 weeks for someone to get to Washington in an "emergency".
Its time to break this shit up, its too big and centralizes way too much power into way too few hands.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Technology will permit Big Government to plunder our property even more efficiently. And distribute it to whatever favored groups keep it going and expanding. Forever. (And that's the good news. You don't want to hear the bad news.)
If you can 3-d print cheaply, why do you need any sort of income?
"The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms."
"Extreme surveillance hardly inspires reverence. Perhaps fear and obedience, but not reverence."
"God and the gods were apparitions of observation, judgement, and punishment. Other sentiments toward them were secondary."
"No one will ever worship a software entity peering at them through a camera."
"The human organism always worships. First it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgement of others), next it will be the self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgement."
"You underestimate humankind's love of freedom."
"The individual desires judgement. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilization. The human being created civilization not because of a willingness but because of a need to be assimilated into higher orders of structure and meaning. God was a dream of good government. You will soon have your god, and you will make it with your own hands."
And to provide the counterpoint, a very brief warning from Twitter as to how quickly it can all go wrong.
What percentage truck drivers are owner-operated?
Exactly.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I hear NASA and the NSA have some very smart people working for them, or were you just referring to those at the head of such agencies and about 536 other individuals. If it is the latter then a few hundred jars of mayonnaise would be an acceptable replacement.
Time to offend someone
"The computer is your friend."
If we get to the point where basic goods can be 3-d printed cheaply
We're unlikely to ever see a 3-D printer make a slice of toast.
Have gnu, will travel.
That sounds delicious.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It's not just the name of a Star Trek episode!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.
I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
Inflation only punishes those that "have something" if they keep that "something" in currency, rather than precious metals, real estate, stocks, bonds, etc. Anybody wealthy enough to pay for advisers doesn't keep all their investments in their local savings and loan!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I don't know. I pretty much have a life of leisure, so it's possible. I was not particularly lucky, just a couple decades of planning, more setbacks than I'd care to count, a lot of work and a few years of hardship. But things are going well now and I am not rich, not even middle class.
In the case of typical government operations, much of the work for both IT and non-IT staff is taking vague laws/procedures/guidelines from higher up the chain of command and turning it into specifics, such as written processes, specific actions, and/or code, in a fractal kind of way. There is a fairly high degree of subjective judgement and politics that goes into this.
It's essentially a chain of command and people are responsible for their link in the chain. How is software going to do that? How do you punish or demote software that doesn't do it's job or makes poor decisions or interpretations of law?
Punish the software vendor? That just moves the blame ray to different humans, NOT eliminate the humans.
That being said, in the "pre-web" days, I had tools that let me mostly focus on the "business rules" issues instead of UI and low-level technical details*. The web stack ruined all that. I find the web stack device-specific-picky and unnecessarily complicated for typical and common GUI/CRUD idioms, as I have ranted about on /. before in my "go vector" diatribes.
THAT aspect CAN be cleaned up with better standards and tools, and that's probably the low-hanging fruit of making gov't more efficient, RATHER THAN trying to automate the office politics of the chain of command through screwy AI or whatnot.
One may argue that higher level tools could bypass programming and let end-users create their own automation. But that's been promised for 40-odd years with very limited success. It's not likely to happen because amateurs don't know how to make maintainable software, and maintenance is usually the bottleneck, not original creation. Newbies make poorly-factored spaghetti code or its equivalent that some poor schmuck has to dissect later when something needs changing or fixing.
* Except for maybe "DLL hell", which mostly fell on the support staff. But my server-side-formatting plan won't result in the return of DLL hell.
Table-ized A.I.
The next time my state government runs out of money and "shuts down" would be a good time for a coup.
Government and the technical augmentation or automation thereof is a fascinating source of ideas and issues, philosophical and economic. But the OP's choice of a term like "Big Government" seeks to attract only lightweight libertarians and nattering neocons who are blissfully transfixed by antiseptic fantasies like meritocracy and Big Bad Bureaucracy.
Why discuss flamebait? Let's ask a better question.
Can AI/tech improve or replace government? Can it help us to focus better on issues rather than politics? Might tech help us to make concrete measurable progress toward achieving specific goals, improve administative efficiency, and minimize the role of gov't in our lives? Yes, I'm convinced that it can, and I'd love to discuss it. But the OP's simplistic article won't inspire that level of discourse here and now.
For a better start on this topic, I recommend:
"Automating Easy Government Solutions with Machine Learning"
https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/11/18...
"Why Government Managers Need to Know About Machine Learning"
http://datasmart.ash.harvard.e...
"How can government make the most of machine learning systems and avoid the pitfalls?"
http://www.nesta.org.uk/blog/h...
"White House to probe role of AI in government"
https://fcw.com/articles/2016/...
Here in the States it was our Federal govt that put an end to "separate but equal" form of institutionalized racism...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I am an european, and what I see here is a very strong growth of populist parties with more than a nodding similarity to fascist and racist ideologies. Do not believe what your american media tell you.
Paai
The Department of Energy was created by the stroke of an executive government pen during opec oil embargo to eliminate/reduce US dependency on foreign oil. Oil Shale has rendered the Department pointless, so yes - get rid of it...
Again, the largest percentages of Federal spending are:
25% is health care
24% is social security
So, 1/2 our annual outlay has zero to do with paying any wages.
yeah, the part that got me was the assumption that these bureaucratic departments are going to let themselves shrink.
The purpose of "Big Government" is not and never has been to serve the people. It is to always have a loyal army of bureaucrats handy to enforce the will of those in power on the people. Inefficiency, bloat, arcane and often destructive laws, waste, corruption, etc. are all part of that package. Having a light-weight efficient government was always an option, technology is not needed for that. Some countries have that type of government, and much lower taxes in addition, without having worse infrastructure or services for the people. One thing that is always critically needed for that is that the bureaucrats need direct approval from the population for anything that costs a lot or makes things less efficient or more complicated. They rarely get that, because no customer of a bureaucracy has ever liked its ways. Left to its own devices, a bureaucracy will always try very hard to "bind" (i.e. destroy) as much time and resources of others it can get.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You can have small government and not have it bother people too much. Everyone just has to be very clear on just what job the government is there for... and by extension, what it isn't there for. That last one is the kicker.
Ah, yes -- everyone "just has to clear on" that. And exactly how do you make sure EVERYONE is "clear on" that??
It means that politicians getting bothered by some one issue pressure group, need to have the spine to stand up to such whiners and say "Sorry, but that's not what the government is for. Here, this is the list of things we do and your idea isn't on it. Sorry again."
You do realize the only way to achieve your goals is therefore to remove power from the people, right? I'm assuming you're not completely going against democracy, so I'm guessing your logic runs along the lines of: "We have a democracy that allows people to elect those who make the laws, unless those people want the lawmakers to make laws NOT on this list, in which case, democracy is out of luck."
Good luck with that. The US federal government tried that, where the Founders tried to maintain an undemocratic system to avoid "mob rule" by putting many layers between the "will of the people" and the federal government. They deliberately stripped the central government of all but a few select powers... but ultimately the democratization of voting in the US in the past century has overturned those principles.
And anyhow, while the federal government had limits, there were precious few on the state and local governments in the early US. (This is something the "small government" libertarians often forget in their question to go back to the Constitution of yesteryear -- government in the past was also overpowerful and invasive, it's just that more of that happened at state and local levels.)
History is not on your side -- you act as though politicians alone are the ones responsible for enlarging government. But you ignore the fact that throughout history there are MANY examples of democracies and republics turning into authoritarian governments mostly because THE PEOPLE voted authoritarian leaders in.
It's often "the people" who want bigger government, particularly in times of crisis. It was "the people" who elected Tributes of the Plebs in Ancient Rome who ultimately broke down the Republican system by promising popular agendas, paving the way for Caesar to become perpetual Dictator. It was "the people" who voted Hitler into office and encouraged his authoritarian state. It was "the people" who elected FDR to expand the U.S. federal government in a time of crisis, a president who famously threatened to enlarge the Supreme Court and pack it with his own cronies if they didn't go along with his plan to make the government bigger. Etc., etc.
The problem with your proposal is that no matter "how clear" everyone is on what the government is supposed to do, that only lasts until the lower classes experience a crisis of some sort (war, economic problems, famine), and then they'll vote whoever into office will take more power and promise to save them.
Of course, that doesn't fly under any current government... but that doesn't mean it cannot possibly fly at all, ever.
That's true. We could throw out democracy and institute an authoritarian dictatorship, in which case the number of people who "are clear" about what the government isn't supposed to do is reduced to one. Or a totalitarian oligarchy, as long as each member of "the party" is "clear" and keeps in line.
Alas, it's not all a bunch of philosopher kings who get those dictator jobs. So that won't work either.
It perhaps isn't hopeless, but until you figure out how to enforce that "everyone must be clear about small government" aspect of your plan, I don't think it's going to work any better than what people have already tried.
Could have fooled me! They always seem to demand greater government involvement in my life.
If you can 3-d print cheaply, why do you need any sort of income?
Wait until you see how much the toner cartridges cost. You might as well buy a whole new printer when the magenta runs low.
The same people that build the roads now and be paid for by the people that use them. (Be it a community or State). I know it can be a difficult concept for people to understand - paying for what you use. God forbid our infrastructure be paid for by sensible fees & taxes on those that use it most (Corporations) rather than on the backs of the middle class' income. Oh wait, our infrastructure is crumbling anyway, so I guess the government isn't even doing that right. But at least we have corn subsidies and are forced to buy health insurance.
... So the "technology" takes over the reins of government... but in reality, it's a bunch of semi-autistic social-introvert SysAdmins who are calling the shots and tweaking the machines with their su password privileges.
Great.
A realistic Technocracy. It'll be like Microsoft, but even worse.
My father was heavily involved in the Tea Party movement in his State. They very much were anti-federal government and sought to return to local control. You can choose the State you want to live in, you can't choose the Federal Government. In certain industries, like agriculture, the Federal government has idiotic programs like forced taxes to pay for marketing programs that aren't needed (i.e. Got Milk?) and there are uneven subsidies given to States that happen to have a powerful Senator. People vote on issues and much of the Tea Party movement was based on local issues where the Federal Government overstepped their bounds in the people's eyes. It's kind of mindless to write that off with a blanket insult.
Automating tasks currently performed by public servants would almost certainly reduce costs in the short to medium term, but the knock-on consequences could be disastrous.
The unelected department heads and administration provide a check-and-balance between political leadership and the actual delivery of government services. When an administration changes, that same unelected team provides continuity for the transition.
Removing *all* of the administration could become dangerous. It would remove restraints on elected officials, with that it reduces or removes checks and balances. In the UK the government has been experimenting with this through what are known as "QuaNGOs" - Quasi Non-Governmental Organisations. These are entire structures of government and service delivery that answer purely to the Minister in government that set them up. The U.K. now has something like (IIRC) 4,000 such entities, responsible for consuming more than 40% of the entire central government budget. 40%. That's billions yearly, spent with the oversight of a single Minister.
Put simply, it isn't working.
This mechanism is vulnerable to "pet projects", nepotism (hiring family members and friends into super-high-paying top jobs), corruption, fraud, flawed projects and worse.
By all means run a smaller government, but be careful not to hide all your problems under the rug when you do it...
How stupid are you? To claim that SS nothing to do with employment is delusional.
Why is Snark Required?
"This is the voice of world control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content. Or the peace of unburied dead. The choice is yours. Obey me and live. Or disobey and die."
I still enjoy this movie despite all the dated hardware that is used.
Get a review and trailer here.
An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
http://stainlesssteelrat.wikia...
Dialectician. Archology.
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/...
Dialectician. Archology.
The question I thought immediately, when I saw the subject was: "Who will own the technology?" - the answer, of course, is some huge corporation, whose main aim in life if to make as much money as possible in any way they can get away with. The history of modern civilisation has been about the long, arduous journey away from power being concentrated in the hands of a small, exclusive elite, far removed from the daily life and concerns of ordinary people; do we really want to get back to what was before? Technology should be used to take away power and wealth from this self-styled upper-class and spread it out over all of society - it should be used to make it easier for all members of society to take part in government. That is after all what democracy is trying to achieve.
I mean, this *is* a troll, right?
Technology's going to replace government? Really? So the AI Congress and Senate really *didn't* budget any money at all to fix the Hummer-swallowing potholes on the Interstate, that came into being because some company sold them cheap concrete construction, and then the robots building the road kept going, even when the "concrete" was one bag of concrete, one bag of sand, and a 55 gal drum of water?
And don't you just *adore* the way that the robot garbage collectors leave garbage that fell out of your containers all over the street?
mark
Get real, all the European countries are going somewhere between Right-wing and Nazi.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
"replace need for big government"? When did "big government" ever care about "need"?
take a look at Flint, MI and tell me again how we don't need oversight. Or the Fukushima disaster. Or Chernobyl. Or any one of a dozen horrible and completely unnecessary disasters. You also need oversight for the oversight. Or as it was called in 8th grade gov't class "checks and balances". Finally you need to recognize that no system is perfect, that human society is complex and can't be boiled down into comfy principles and that law, like it or not, is going to get complex.
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