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Tim O'Reilly has advocated for the idea of algorithmic regulation - reducing the role of people and replacing them with automated systems in order to make goverment policy less biased and more efficient. But the idea has been criticized as utopianism, where actual implementations are likely to make government more opaque and even less responsive to the citizens who have the least say in the operation of society.
Now, as part of New America's annual conference What Drives Innovation Around the Country? Virginia Eubanks has written an essay examining such automation in the cases of pre-crime and welfare fraud. Is it possible to automate away human judgment from the inherently human task of governance and still achieve humane results? Or is inefficiency and waste an unavoidable part of the process?
(Score: 1) by Murdoc on Monday May 04 2015, @02:01AM
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday May 07 2015, @03:43AM
(Score: 1) by Murdoc on Thursday May 07 2015, @05:20AM
You're thinking of political "technocracy". The one I'm referring to is the economic system known as Technocracy, which is a completely different animal and hasn't been tried before. The term actually referred to the economic system long before it was used to describe any kind of political set-up. So you might want to check it out to see what I mean. It might surprise you.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday May 07 2015, @01:33PM
You're thinking of political "technocracy". The one I'm referring to is the economic system known as Technocracy, which is a completely different animal and hasn't been tried before.
I don't see this distinction as valid since political and economic control don't separate cleanly and each of my examples strongly manifest as economic control systems as one would expect of a technocracy and these economic decisions were made by an elite with the characteristics one would expect of a technocracy. In fact, I find the claim that technocracies haven't been tried to be mystifying because it wasn't hard to come up with counterexamples.
(Score: 1) by Murdoc on Friday May 08 2015, @12:02AM
I was trying to give you new information that I thought that you'd be interested in, but apparently I was wrong. None of your examples is anything remotely like economic technocracy, but if you'd rather keep believing that than learn about something new then you go right ahead.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 08 2015, @03:09AM
I did google around and read a little on technocracy and I just don't get what you are claiming. There is no distinction in the definitions I've read between political and economic technocracy and frankly I don't see how such a division could even be attained. Your economic technocracy can stay that way as long as the elite technocrats never influence the real world. Once they do, it inherently becomes political, unless we're speaking of something almost purely economic, like running a stock exchange or managing the credit card industry.
(Score: 1) by Murdoc on Friday May 08 2015, @03:54PM
Then why didn't you just use the link in my original post? Googling around will generally only give you info on political technocracy, whereas using my link you'd be sure to know that that was what I was talking about. But I'll explain it in brief here: Political technocracy is simply putting scientists, other technical experts, or simply technophiles in political power. It says nothing about how the government (much less the economy) is actually run, because it can still be a democracy, dictatorship, whatever. It may refer to their desire to use technology in some way in government operations, like this article describes, or it could refer to government involvement in the technology sector, which itself could take many forms.
Economic technocracy is a very specific program outlining the operation for a sustainable, post-scarcity economy. It was developed by a group of scientists, engineers, and other technical experts in the 1920s, and uses only science in its analysis and synthesis. The program calls for, among other things, the abolition of money and the value-exchange system to be replaced by a scientific resource accounting system (also described in detail), and also would require no political government. For all the many differences between the two of these concepts, it is this last one that is perhaps most prominent, since by using economic technocracy you cannot put scientists or anyone "in power", since there is no political power to be had. I hope that clears things up.