The Machine Philosopher King

You know, some days I feel how I imagine Cassandra of ancient Greek mythology must have felt. Cassandra was the victim of the Greek gods’ devious ingenuity, to be cursed to utter true prophecy, and yet never to be believed by those who heard her prophecies.

The last few years have been, simply put, tremendously fucked up on so many levels. Recently resulting in widespread rioting, an almost refreshingly mundane public order problem compared to the unprecedented and exotically diverse species of ratfuckery we’ve been seeing for years.

What I want to get to as a topic, however, is that social change is never straightforward; never a direct line from A to B. Democracy may be showing an uncharacteristic weakness, but I have not yet resigned myself to Plato’s prediction about the inevitable fate of democracy being correct in the case of the United States. Americans, at least informed Americans, know more about political theory than they did in Plato’s day and hopefully we may yet prove Plato wrong. I hold out hope that we will.

But a more enduring solution to the problem of governance is nonetheless desirable. In the words of Winston Churchill, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried.” And on this point I still believe that Plato had an insight that has been long forgotten which we must revisit; the notion of the wise philosopher king as an executive without self-interest. Now, I will absolutely agree that among humankind this is an outrageous request. There is practically no individual person we could confirm has the characteristics we would require in order to be an effective philosopher king. People are corruptible. People are stupid. Almost invariably investing a fallible human with so much executive power ends in disaster. So how do we solve this problem?

I offer the following solution; machine administration. Computers are, in a very practical sense, analogous to Plato’s ideal of a philosopher king completely devoid of self-interest. Impartial. Where Plato wanted to cultivate young men to be wise and selfless civil servants, I think we have since learned this is perhaps a hopelessly naive notion because power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. A philosopher king who is a human being is not a good idea, no matter how well-intentioned everyone involved may be at first. Eventually a ruler with totalitarian powers will become a catastrophe.

To clarify I am absolutely not proposing the notion of an artificially-intelligent ruler. Although amusing to consider, we have neither the technological capability to create such an AI, nor the desire to entrust such expansive executive power to one. But what we CAN do is create a legion of rudimentary, functionary civil servants that is as unimpeachable as it is incorruptible.

As it were, a machine bureaucracy rather than a machine sovereign. Each individual machine in this mechanical civil service would actually be very simple. But collectively, they would result in an unprecedented level of efficiency, speed, transparency, and public availability of information, than has ever occurred in government in history.

Consider that the vast majority of administrative actions are routine. When you go to the Department of Motor Vehicles to file paperwork- a computer could do that job instead of a clerk. Title offices for the purchase of real property? Why have humans and file cabinets for that? When we calculate tax liability, or do any number of other numerical, functional, or recordkeeping tasks, a computer could do that job too. In many cases even the implementation of policy is also routine and suitable to code-based computer execution.

In fact for many forms of paperwork the mere fact that a document was filed on or before a particular date is, by design, intended to be sufficient. A submission of such a paperwork document to a simple civil machine would be trivial to implement. Essentially this civil machine would only need to create a meta-record that a certain type of document was filed at a certain time, perhaps with some other meta-data about the transaction. For example if you are selling a car, creating a record about that transaction would likely require meta-data about the names/identities of the parties involved and the unique ID (VIN number) of the car, for the purpose of being usefully searchable later.

I contend that this machine civil service, or machine bureaucracy, would be immeasurably faster and more efficient, but that is actually not the main objective. The main objective of this entire project is to create a system that is truly impartial, truly incorruptible, which delegates power as much as possible to the smallest and lowest possible level of authority.

On Accountability

Necessarily any government function creates an accountability problem. What if these civil machines are designed intentionally for some nefarious purpose? However computers also make available a unique and effective solution for accountability; by having the code that these functionaries execute be open-source. Any citizen should be able to inspect their code at will to their satisfaction, so they can be confident there will be no skullduggery.

It is imperative that these “civil machines” be entirely open-source; failure to do so invariably creates a lack of confidence, such as the proprietary voting machines deployed in many places in the US. A black-box computer can never be proved to be trustworthy from the perspective of the general public. Keeping with the same example, an open-source voting machine eliminates the principal concern about using machines to do important work; that the machine is designed and programmed to be corrupt on purpose by its creators.

In addition to being open-source, logs or meta-records will also be vitally important. Perhaps a better name for these will be coined subsequently. But civil machines should routinely log their actions. Smart implementations of this should probably have varying levels of verbosity. If you really wanted to, you should be able to inspect a public record of every output of every civil machine’s operation in detail. In conjunction with the ability to read the code itself, a complete log of all a particular machine’s actions and “decisions” can be used for an unprecedented level of transparency and accountability never before envisioned by civil servants and bureaucracy in general.

Creating a record for every single one of a civil machine’s decisions and actions is an example of extremely verbose reporting that would be totally impractical for a human functionary or clerk.

Democratic Machine Bureaucracy

In a democracy the ultimate sovereign is the people. And, where practical, it is preferable to place administrative and political control with the people, rather than with centralized political office. As a matter of pragmatism it is not possible to capably govern every aspect of a large state by popular vote. So we have elected officials charged with the exercise of official duties as public servants.

But the most important criteria here is judgment rather than execution. We need humans in the loop when a decision is being made, rather than execution. The question being solved is who decides rather than the also-important topic of who executes. In other words, it is unwise and impractical to place expert and high-detail decision-making in the hands of an uninformed general public. And, as a matter of practicality, it is advantageous to select a trustworthy public servant and invest the time and effort into educating that person on the information and knowledge they require to make an effective decision on some topic, and the public will abide by their decision that results. So far, this is actually tightly analogous to the idealized proposal of a philosopher king by Plato.

Where we run into trouble is that the power of execution necessarily entails the power of control. And, such control can then be turned back on itself as a matter of political influence. Imagine Augustus Caesar being appointed dictator by the Senate, and then five minutes later proposes a motion in the Senate with the Legion standing next to him, bound to obey his every command. The power of implementation/execution he was charged with immediately converted into a political implement to coerce and incentivize.

In modern society this usually plays out in reverse; a corporation with some legislative or regulatory objective supports a political candidate with the intention of achieving some purpose once that person gains office. But the principle is the same; taking advantage of the consolidation of political power into an office to achieve an objective that may be contrary to the ideal outcome the populace might have preferred if they were informed and charged to make the decision directly. As a practical matter doing this on every topic is impossible, but that fact nonetheless does not make corruption desirable.

I do not mean to demean public servants or politicians, indeed many of them are dutiful and effective. But I am sure they are more familiar with the destructive incentives at play in their professions than the general public could ever be.

Returning again to the solution- a machine bureaucracy could one day result in an incorruptible implementor. A machine public servant will do its job as programmed without even the possibility of corruption.

This does not mean there will never be corruption or that there will never be lobbying. There are still two points of vulnerability; the human politicians/controllers who decide how to assign these civil servants’ duties, design, and objectives are still a point of vulnerability. And, this also creates the possibility that the engineers who actually create these programs could potentially do so nefariously. But, as stated earlier, making the code open source should largely eliminate the actual risk of the engineering type of manipulation as we could expect they would be caught by people who are paying attention. And short of having an impossibly advanced benevolent AI at the apex of the tree, I do not think it is logically possible to completely eliminate the possibility of bad human decision-making in terms of controlling what the goals of this system should be.

Direct democracy to assign objectives and select methods of implementation is technologically feasible but I think it would be a terrible, terrible idea. Imagine you’re given a ballot with competing snippets of code on it that will control how one of these machines behaves. The general public will not make effective decisions on this subject. Therefore selecting one or more suitable public servants who will make these decisions effectively is the way to go, even though it unavoidably creates the risk of improper influence. I think the fact that the implementation is delegated to a faithful machine will curtail the severity of this risk dramatically.

As an example, suppose we’re discussing the Food and Drug Administration, or suppose further that there is a law that requires a food manufacturer to maintain records concerning the manufacture of their cans of food, including among other data, the date of canning, the sources of any meat ingredients, etc. Maybe the policy goal of this rule is to help identify the point of origin of foodborne illness. The decision that this needs to be implemented must be made by humans. However, humans need not necessarily execute it, and indeed this would be highly laborious for humans to do manually. But at the moment that a can is stamped with the date, installation of an internet-connected computer within that machine could easily coincidently also create a record that a certain identified can was stamped on a certain date, as well as adding various other data required about that can.

This does actually raise one quite interesting question about who is the author of this type of regulatory software. Seeing as it will likely need to be installed in various machines not directly controlled by a regulator, this is a somewhat complex question. In my opinion regulatory software is most sensibly written by the body that is charged with regulating its particular subject matter. For example the FDA is the entity best equipped to interpret its own regulations and orders, and it makes the most sense for them to write such regulatory software only once authoritatively. Rather than have various companies implement various separate times, differently and also perhaps poorly as it is in their interest to do so ineffectively in a self-serving manner. Such regulations would likely also need to be expanded to include the proper implementation of the appropriate regulatory software, including what types of machines require it and how it shall be used. It’s a highly complex question but it has tremendous potential.

Essentially, my point is that Plato’s notion of a wise, capable, and selfless philosopher king seems fittingly applied to machines which tirelessly and faithfully execute their programmed instructions. And in these turbulent times we are forced to consider that the centralized forms of power that we are familiar with, are actually failing in the way they have repeatedly failed across the great span of history. And I for one think it is time that we think ahead to how we might create the next generation of government, the next generation of political revolution that will define the next several hundred years, much as classical revolutionary democracy reinvented the world for the better, for 300 years.