As we watch elections in 2024 spanning nearly 70 countries and 4.2 billion people, one thing is clear: the current systems are not working. Voters are not happy and have little enthusiasm for the politicians they can choose between (if they have any real choices at all).
So, come with me to the future, and consider four ‘ridiculous ideas’ for new approaches to Parliaments and Governments. We need to stretch our strategic imaginations in an effort to come up with new political systems.
Watch episode 9 about AI Politicians
Download a copy of the Strategic Imagination Toolkit
TRANSCRIPT
Come with me to the future and let’s have a look at four different ways we could experiment with governments.
This a ThrowForward Thursday, my name is Graeme Codrington and the first way that we could experiment with how governments are run is instead of having elections we could randomly draw the names of adult citizens and those people then had to give a year or two of Public Service.
This isn’t as crazy as it sounds and it isn’t in fact the future, this is what the first major democracy was based on, this is how ancient Greece ran many of their elections so it’s not so crazy that somebody might experiment with this in the future.
The second experiment also comes from the past. I’m picking up a theme from a wonderful short story by the science fiction author, Isaac Asimov. The story was called “Franchise” and in the story, a man by the name of Norman Muller was selected by the great Multivac. This was the 1960s and it was Isaac Asimov’s picture of actually the internet and Multivac selected Norman Muller to be the one person who got to vote for the president in the United States presidential elections.
Basically, through massive predictive data analytics and polling and statistics, Norman was decided by the computer that he was the perfect representative of all Americans and it’s a wonderful story of just his thought process of should he double guess and triple guess himself and what decision should he make and eventually then just makes a decision, and one person’s vote selects the president.
It might actually be that in the future we just let the machine do that based on polling, so we don’t even have to have elections, huh crazy you say. But maybe we are living through an era in which we are seeing late-stage capitalistic democracy dying all around us. Certainly, the elections this year are not inspiring too many people in too many countries, are they?
The third crazy idea for government of the future is going to sound crazy to start with, it falls into the category of ridiculous ideas, something we futurists like to do to stretch our strategic imaginations. This is to turn government into a reality show, anyone who wants to be in government can go into government but every week we as the citizens of the country get to vote somebody out of parliament.
I actually really like this idea and I don’t think it is in fact as ridiculous as it initially sounds. “The tribe has spoken you are the weakest link goodbye”, you know what I mean.
The final option for governments in the future, possible experiments that countries might want to try would be to actually let AI run the government. In fact, in Episode 9 of ThrowForward Thursday and here’s a link for you using the shortcut http:/bit.ly/TFTAIPoliticians. You can go back and have a look at this from over two years ago, in which we put together a little news bulletin from the future in which we said that Estonia had elected an AI politician. This was before ChatGPT and before the new advances in AI, but we knew that something like this was coming and Estonia is very much one of the leading digital nations in the world, have a look at that video.
By the way, this gives me the opportunity to just promote our Imagining Tomorrow Toolkit, a toolkit where we’ve taken some of our best historical ThrowForward Thursday videos and we’ve written up scenarios and discussion guides to help you and your team to think through what would happen if and you can get a copy of two of our favourites for free, again the http://bit.ly/SIToolkit and just download it and use it.
But you can also get some links to be able to download the full book which has 25 of these scenarios, including the AI politicians one. This has got to do with us trusting computer algorithms, where the algorithm is transparent so everybody in a country would understand how the algorithm was written and what the algorithm is meant to maximize, minimize, amplify, and decrease. And if we trust the algorithm, we can just let the algorithm get on to the job of allocating budgets, making choices between different priorities, collecting and distributing our taxes, establishing our laws, and so forth. Why wouldn’t we want to get an altruistic algorithm to run our countries instead of the politicians who do it at the moment?
All of these scenarios are a little bit crazy, I’m not sure any of them will become reality but they are there to remind us that our current versions of politics whether that is democracy or communism or socialism or some kind of hybrid in the world at the moment. These are only the best available options that we know of today, but 300 years ago nobody would have thought about any of the options we have today, and I bet that 100 or 200 years in the future, we’ll look back and shake our heads at how old-fashioned our current systems actually were.
We’ve got to do whatever we can to stretch our strategic imaginations, to think about what might happen after what comes next and what comes next is that our current systems are collapsing. So, whether your name is drawn randomly out of a hat, or we vote you off of the island, the Parliamentary Island, or we just let the computers do the job. As always, thank you for joining me in the future. I’ll see you again next week.
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Graeme Codrington, is an internationally recognised futurist, specialising in the future of work. He helps organisations understand the forces that will shape our lives in the next ten years, and how we can respond in order to confidently stay ahead of change. Chat to us about booking Graeme to help you Re-Imagine and upgrade your thinking to identify the emerging opportunities in your industry.
For the past two decades, Graeme has worked with some of the world’s most recognised brands, travelling to over 80 countries in total, and speaking to around 100,000 people every year. He is the author of 5 best-selling books, and on faculty at 5 top global business schools.