At least with a democratic government I have means to try and build a coalition then enact change. The alternative requires having money and that seems like an inherently undemocratic system.
Why can't AIs be controlled with democratic institutions? Why are democratic institutions worse? This doesn't seem to be the case to me.
Private institutions shouldn't be allowed to control such systems, they should be compelled to give them to the public.
As long as Zuckerberg has no army forcing me, I'm fine with that. The issue would be whether he could breach contracts or get away with fraud. But if AI is sufficiently distributed, this is less likely to happen.
>At least with a democratic government I have means to try and build a coalition then enact change. The alternative requires having money and that seems like an inherently undemocratic system.
I don't think of democracy as a goal to be achieved. I'm OK with democracy in so far it leads to what I value.
The big problem with democracy is that most of the time it doesn't lead to rational choices, even when voters are rational. In markets, for instance, you have an incentive to be rational, and if you aren't, the market will tend to transfer resources from you to someone more rational.
No such mechanism exists in a democracy; I have no incentive to do research and think hard about my vote. It's going to be worth the same as the vote of someone who believes the Earth is flat anyway.
I also don't buy that groups don't make better decisions than individuals. We know that diversity of thought and opinion is one way to make better decisions in groups compared to individuals; why would there be harm in believing that consensus building, debates, adversarial processes, due process, and systems of appeal lead to worse outcomes in decision making?
I'm not buying the argument. Reading your comment it feels like there's an argument to be made that there aren't enough democratic systems for the people to engage with. That I definitely agree with.
I thought you meant that governments generate wealth because the things you listed have value. If so, that doesn't prove they generate wealth by my argument, unless you can prove those things are more valuable than alternative ways to use the resources the government used to produce them and that the government is more efficient in producing those.
You can argue that those are good because you think redistribution is good. But you can have redistribution without the government directly providing goods and services.
I should probably read more books before commenting on things I half understand, my bad.
A bunch of well educated citizens living on government housing who don’t go out and become productive members of society will quickly lead to collapse.