I think that a large group of people with shared interests, such as a nation, require at least some form of a governing body and in the real world, governments have done that job for centuries, and it has worked quite well.
But, in the more recent times, we have time and again gotten countless examples of a saying that goes, “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
We all know first hand or through the experiences of someone else, that people in power often tend to be corrupt and at the highest level, that means that entire countries are not able to be run properly.
I don’t want to go too much into details, but I would just like to say that a lot of the governments of the world have proven themselves ineffective and inefficient to run a country, solve its problems and work for the welfare of the citizens.
Whenever something doesn’t work, what do we do? At first we try to fix it and if even after that it doesn’t work, we start looking for alternatives. If there is one thing that I’m sure about, it’s that governments can’t be fixed.
If you think I’m being over dramatic, you should visit some of the developing countries of the world and look for reasons why they are still ‘developing’ even after decades of work. I’m sure the inefficiencies of a government are present elsewhere too, but it is certainly more visible in this part of the world.
I am not an anarchist and as I said, I think there has to be some sort of governing body to keep us humans in check. Without rules and regulations, I fear what we would become as a species. So, the major question that I want to ask, and also discuss a radical solution to, is this: “What can be a viable alternative to a government?”
I have always looked towards technological innovation for the solutions to the problems of humanity and I was thinking the other day whether AI could be the alternative we are looking for. This idea is certainly not new but I was trying to mull over the idea.
If you keep up with the news, you must be well aware that AI has been progressing by leaps and bounds and the exponential growth in this field will mean a highly intelligent artificial intelligent system that can rival even human intelligence pretty soon enough.
This could mean that what the governments failed to do, the AI will accomplish very easily because it won’t have the human attributes of greed and ambition or any other emotion for that matter and it will take purely logical decisions that are highly efficient and guide the country and its citizens towards prosperity. From a strictly decision making view point, there couldn’t be anything better.
But, there are two major problems with this idea. The first is that AI might end up deciding that we humans are just not worth it and could ensure our extinction or enslavement by various means. This has been shown countless times in movies.
The second problem, and something that most people don’t consider is that, the AI system would still need to be programmed periodically or at least done regular maintenance on and the people doing that would essentially be the ones with all the power. This would be an even smaller group of people and it could lead to a disastrous, dictatorial form of ‘government’.
