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Ask HN: Why haven't we automated government?

2 points by iLoch ↗ HN
I tend to get some really wild ideas sometimes, so bear with me - but I think this is something worth thinking about. Governments (at least the democratic kind) have always been about representing the ideals of the majority of the population. This has often come in the form of elected officers representing constituencies with their platform of beliefs. It's my understanding that this infrastructure was set up this way because it was an individual's best way of having their voice heard at the time. We've obviously come a long way since the invention of democracy... And we've seen how technology (especially the internet) can empower individuals.

So what this has been leading up to is: does it not make more sense to put power back into the hands of the people, and allow everyone to vote on specific topics rather than focusing on what party to vote for?

Edit: I suppose this is more of a question of elections - but perhaps we could dive a little deeper and imagine that there are government works who act solely on the outcome of regular votes.

2 comments

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funkyy
Every "automation" - here IT wise I assume would be vulnerable to hackers, scam (who is maintaining this system, whats his role, who controls maintenance etc?) and other issues. As far as I am a big fan of voting system for investments within the community, full automating government, banks etc is simply impossible.
iLoch
To a certain degree I agree with you (especially maintenance, etc.) However, we do already partially rely on systems which are similarly vulnerable to hackers. Maybe this statement is naive, but I don't think it's impossible to design a system that is impossible to hack (given enough resources) or at least one that would require so many resource that it wouldn't be feasible to accomplish. The other part of that would be internal tampering, perhaps solved with a publicly viewable log of every action taken within the system? (Yes we may still have problems with tampering, but that's not any different than our current system.) Jobs that require humans can definitely still be part of the government by operating as a manual module that has computer based I/O (think MTurk with government workers), but decision making would be left up to the people and that's what would determine what tasks should be accomplished.