Media by Joshua Sukoff
In your TED talk : ‘ A bold idea to replace politicians ’, you talked about combining direct democracy and software agents . This reminded me of how the Five Star movement mobilised in Italy and how the Trump administration campaigned . How can we ensure direct democracy is nor hijacked by charismatic populists or people with bad motives ?
I think there is a mismatch between communication technologies and democracy . In our history of governance , we are on the second wave of governing ourselves . Until the American revolution or French revolution , we had monarchies ruling the world . A ‘ one to many ’ authoritarian system . Then we made the decision to have a democratic system , which is still a one to many system in which we are choosing that certain one . And not surprisingly , that is a change that happened after a change in communications technology : the invention of the printing press . We started the development of sciences as we know them today and eventually the process of development of the public sphere in which we wrote books and pamphlets , that led to the political discussion on how people should govern themselves .