A Lack of Democracy

We are used to a lot of decisions in this world being made by people with money. I think this is bad, especially if it kills us.

There are many ways to tell the story of humanity. One way to tell it is to talk about power. Let’s use the following definition of power: Power is the ability to make stuff happen in the way you want. It starts with taking a breath and deciding what to have for breakfast. And it can scale up to deciding where to build your fancy castle (be it on Earth or on Mars) and what wars to fight, which people to kill.

About a thousand years ago power was distributed relatively simple. There is a local lord, and he (yep, basically always a he) decides what happens. He ruled, he had the money, everyone worked for him. Over time things changed. Humans made progress, the economy grew. While the lord was busy being stuffed with turkey, hard-working citizens started to accumulate wealth on their own. This gave them a bit of power and people started thinking about the ecomony and the state as separate things. Then democracy came and these days in quite a few countries it is the people who are allowed to decide about the matters of state.

What was not democratized? The economy. And this is kinda understandable. Civil liberties and personal freedom (which is basically the same as having power over your own life) are great success stories (insofar as they have been achieved). And this is connected to declaring the economy “the private sector” instead of a matter of public interest. But I’d argue we went a bit over board with it. Imagine the state (be it democratic or not) forces you to do whatever they want for 40 hours a week. Sounds outrages? The state shouldn’t have that power! Weirdly, we are completely used to being told what to do for 40 hours a week, we just have the freedom to choose by whom, and then it’s apparently okay.

I don’t want to say, that working for money is generally a bad thing. I just want to emphasize that having money means having power and quite a lot of it. Not in the “rich people have it easier to influence politics” kind of way, which is of course also an issue. I mean the direct, “with enough money you can make nearly anything happen” kind of way. And by the way “making anything happen” here very much means telling other people what to do.

Now, one could argue that this is not necessarily a bad thing. After all someone needs to decide. Why not let the people with the money do it? There is a reason they have the money, right? Well, we weren’t okay to have that with the lords and kings for the matters of state. We replaced monarchy by democracy and while it’s arguably not always going great there is a large consensus that this was an improvement. So why do we have it with the lords and kings of economy? And we do have it. Most of the wealth today is not earned, but inherited. Of course some people increase their wealth by a lot more than they inherit. But a lord could also increase their power much more than his father had, e.g. by winning a war or something. It’s still a monarchy and a peasant had basically no chance to do it.

So yeah, the way we structure huge parts of our society is fundamentally undemocratic. While I have probably at this point lost the conservative and liberal leaning parts of the readership, I want to admit that this does not have to be a bad thing. Coordination problems are hard and democratic decision procedures are imperfect. Maybe the economy not being democraticly controlled could be a good thing? I personally would perhaps be okay with it, if it made everyone better of. On the other hand a no-go for me would be … if it kills all of humanity.

Okay, this is a hard twist. I admit I am mixing up two topics here, but I believe they are deeply intertwined. We are currently witnessing that a lot of the world’s wealth and therefor power accumulates in Silicon Valley. And they use it to develop new technologies. They do it fast-paced and without much of oversight. They do it because they can and admitedly some of their output is pretty nice.

These days though the voices become louder that we are running in the direction of a cliff. That shortly AI will become very powerful and maybe kill us all. I have no clue if that’s true. But I find it deeply unsettling when people talk about this like a force of nature. Like there is no way that AI won’t happen. No! It’s the economic lords in their silicon castles who are making it happen.

Again, I don’t know how big the danger is. I just think this serves as a great example. These people believe they have the fate of humanity in their hands, and they very well could. If not because of AI then because of something else, after all they have a lot of power and decide where we are heading in quite a few ways. Do we trust them to make that decision? Are they the ones who should decide it?

They do not ask anyone for permission, because they don’t have to. They have the power. And people talk about it like it couldn’t be any other way …

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