Chatbots For Social Change/Designing Democracy

Dirk Helbing succinctly expresses the need and potentials of a digital upgrade to society. He seems quite interested in the applications of upgraded money (in particular, multi-dimensional money) on the revolution and intelligent control of our incentive systems, and thus our organizational principles. I'm more interested in a deeper question, which he also addresses extensively, especially in his book Next Civilization . He discusses such concepts as "computational diplomacy" and "digital democracy".

To ensure fairness in public sector models, we imagine a future where the people developing these models clearly explain the values behind their assumptions and choices, especially when those choices can affect society. By prioritizing decisions that uphold democratic principles, we can address biases and prevent the unfair outcomes that can result from a top-down approach.

- Helbing (2021) Next Civilization

The most comprehensive, recent resource which consolidates the wide variety of prior work in this area, and giving perspective, is

Free Speech

As the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights puts it,

The right to hold own opinions has at least three pillars:

1. The possibility to get access to relevant information with a reasonable effort (in particular, to the facts, which should be recognizable as such).
2. The chance to form an own opinion without being manipulated in that process.
3. Sufficient and appropriate opportunities to voice own opinions without fear of being punished, and without censorship.

I see this project as critically aiding in and being guided by this form of the call to the right of free speech and the freedom to hold opinions.

Secondly, As has been put a thousand ways by academics, and as is easily recognized by most in the world at this point, there are significant manipulations of popular opinion happening on a grand scale. In the United States, this involves destruction of popular trust in science, highly funded and sophisticated propaganda campaigns funded by billionaires or conducted by the military industrial complex which re-write textbooks, legislation, and media reports.

And finally, individuals in the U.S. can (for the most part) speak their minds. However, the extent to which they are heard, listened to, recognized, is not a matter of impartial considerate deliberation, of equal weight. Understanding is resource-intensive, and exposure is subject to the whims of the algorithm. In other words, to the features of the presentation, and a winner-takes-all attention space. This leaves most which is spoken, completely unheard. And what bubbles to the top, which rings in our ears, is only a very selective sample of the universe of understanding. Helbing puts this in the language of complex systems as follows:

[...] asymmetrical interactions may lead to relative advantages of some people over others, the system may get stuck in a local optimum. The global optimum reached when interactions are symmetrical may be better for everyone.