cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/69831108
Hacker reverse engineers his Samsung TV and finds on-device AI listening for your dog and baby, watching what you watch, and borrowing your soundbar’s mic if the TV doesn’t have one. Then OpenAI banned him for reverse-engineering it.
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That sounds like a reasonable solution. However, I’m still worried about competence and mental capability. There’s a pretty good chance that a drunken conspiracy nut would eventually hold an important office. Some sort of basic filtering should be in place. Maybe we could give everyone a chance, but incompatible people would need to be kicked out and replaced by more capable people. This system would obviously get abused, just like you pointed out.
What then? Should we just tolerate the fact that a certain fraction of the population, and the governing body, is more or less dysfunctional? Everyone else who has been trusted with power would need to carry them. If the town mayor is too drunk to wake up in the morning, too deranged to have a sensible conversation, or too hostile to be around other people, some secretary would need to participate in all the meetings and take care of the important decisions.
The solution is to normalize the outliers by having multiple people. Having 1 person in charge will make a nutcase inevitable one day. Having a 10-person council would require at least 6 nutcases in a single cycle to gain majority, which is very unlikely. And for congresses you up that to ~100 or more.
I also believe you’re overestimating competence in current governments. Take any council, any senate, you will see most of them attended the same universities, hung around in the same circles, and so on. Even though you technically have a number of different people, their experience in life overlaps so much you effectively have very few distinct opinions in the room. By randomly selecting applicants you guarantee the greatest diversity of opinions, and thus potential solutions to problems.
Here’s what happens when you get 150 randomly selected people in a room and tell them to lower emissions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Convention_for_Climate#Proposals
It is true and I agree that somehow getting the right people in the right positions would be ideal, but the less random a selection process is, the greater the influence that can be exerted over it. I believe the human species would have to fundamentally be different in order to have a more effective selection process than random.
That was a pretty amazing experiment. Random selection isn’t that bad after all, as long as the dysfunctional individuals can blend into the crowd.
And it’s also true that human nature is the root cause of most of our problems. If we don’t have a system for keeping humans in line, they will do what human nature demands. So far, that has led to greed and oppression. Fixing such a fundamental issue would require some pretty radical changes in the human mind. That’s not happening any time soon, so having some scaffolding seems like the best way to approach this problem.