MIT Professor Thomas Malone recently published his book, Superminds, which describes about how computers can help develop collective decision-making—which is, essentially, utilizing the power of many people to solve a problem or make decisions. Malone is the founder of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.
Superminds describes how technology can harness collective thinking to improve decision-making in both business and government. For business, he points to early tools such as Zoom that enable organizations to be productive though people are geographically dispersed. For government, he points to representative democracy as the first application of the principle: power shifted from the king to a collective group to make decisions on behalf of citizens. He then contemplates what future forms of government may look like. He describes how people could leverage technology to create direct democracy (where everyone votes on every issue) or perhaps a hybrid model, which he calls liquid democracy, where people may vote directly on an issue or delegate their vote to a representative. A citizen could delegate votes to different representatives on different issues (one for national security, another for environmental concerns). A representative may even delegate her vote to another representative! The result would be a more flexible government that incorporates greater personal decision-making than today’s governments.
In my own book, World Leadership, I predicted the next governance basis would be direct governance (today’s governance basis is rule-of-law). The world will continue its trend toward collective decision-making, which we’re seeing in the increased use of referendums around the globe. Professor Malone offers a specific example of how a government might operate under this new governance basis.
Superminds offers an alternative to the current democratic-authoritarian spectrum that we have today. (It is actually an extension of that spectrum.) Some countries are moving backwards toward authoritarianism out of frustration with representative democracy. Offering a new option is one way to ameliorate that frustration, and this option is consistent with the direction in which mankind is moving. It only needs new technology to make it practical.
Source:
Steven Zeitchik, “MIT Author Offers Visions on Work and Government,” Washington Post, 31 October 2021, G2, also https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/26/thomas-malone-mit-faq-work/
Photo: MIT
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