General Politics Thread

@ De Marquis

Then you get into the problem of a computer lacking the criteria for when do you need to punish a deed and when not to do so.

Using your example, what if the driver of said speeding car was doing so due to an emergency or because he/she was running away from someone? Or what do we do if said camera had an exploitable blindspot or was hackable?

Edited by raziel365 on Feb 18th 2021 at 9:34:15 AM

I'm not arguing that we should immediately involve machines in governance, I just disagreed with the assumption that an AI government would involve a non-sapient machine.

@Raziel: You would have to argue that the challenges facing a computer-driven system are greater than those of an all-human system. What if a patrol car is sitting there, and isn't aware of the emergency? What if the nearest police officer gets distracted?

Edited by DeMarquis on Feb 18th 2021 at 12:52:41 PM

And what happens if a blackout hits a district? All of those cameras would be useless if they are cut off from their power supply, and even if they had batteries they would still need a way to properly reconnect with the main computer to keep data coming.

I think we can all agree there are many serious flaws with non-AGI machine governance, which is presumably why it mostly hasn't been done.

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Feb 18th 2021 at 10:00:39 AM

What happens if the police go on strike? What if they have a racist culture?

No machine is perfect, but it's trivial to design them to outperform humans.

Note that I'm not saying advanced AI would necessarily be worse, just that it's not intrinsically unbiased and is still fallible. AI in administrative roles can be just fine, but they need the same checks and balances you give to human governing bodies.

Edited by Protagonist506 on Feb 18th 2021 at 10:24:50 AM

A machine is only as perfect as its creator.

If a twitter bot can be taught to be racist, so could a computer be fed data to expect the black or latino community of commiting crimes and thus zero in on them since it's not programmed to understand the reasons why crime can exist in the first place.

Edited by raziel365 on Feb 18th 2021 at 10:25:02 AM

As for Tay, I'd actually argue it's an overstatement to say that it "turned racist". It's like putting a parrot in a Klan rally and then saying the parrot is now racist because it repeats what it heard at the rally. In fact, it's more like putting a tape recording in a Klan rally and calling the recorder racist.

The AI doesn't understand what it's saying, it just is repeating what it heard.

A rather apt comparison, since the parrot wouldn't know what it was saying any more than the AI chatbot does.

Exactly, which was my original point. Automating, say, arrest procedures could be programmed to be as fair and legal as possible, yet have the effect of increasing racial disparities rather than reducing them.

Right, you can't teach an AI the why of what you're teaching it, at least not yet. I think an AI would need a certain level of self-awareness for that, a theory of mind it could then apply to others.

We don't actually know yet, but this is drifting away from the topic. We could take this to one of the artificial intelligence threads if you wish.

Is it possible to have a centralized government and a federalized state?

The two are distinct regionsof a spectrum in my dictionary. "Federalism" implies there are multiple levels of government where each are responsible for different areas and one level generally cannot seize such responsibilities from another unilaterally. In the extreme the members that make up the union could retain so much power and the centralized government be so weak you end up with a confederation like Switzerland or the pre-Constitution USA 1.0.

"Centralization" suggests the policy-making is being done by one apparatus in one single location, and the various sub-units only carry out the orders from the central government and generally do not have much power in policy-making for their own areas except for whatever the central government explicitly gives them (and which the central government can unilaterally take away).

So short answer, not in the extreme case — a federal system requires at least some amount of decentralization, though the reverse (a relatively decentralized in practice unitary state) is possible (e.g., Spain).

Edited by megarockman on Feb 20th 2021 at 1:57:04 PM

I would argue you can but to a limit.

Centralization-decentralization is a spectrum not a binary and thus you can have a generally centralized state that is part of a federated polity. But, because of the intrinsic nature of federalism, there will be a hard upper limit to how centralized it can become.

So yes, the state can be centralized but it can't be the most or very centralized.

The most fundamental difference between social democracy and socialism in my view is that social democracy wants to humanize capitalism by supporting an extensive welfare state, a strong labor movement, and government intervention into the economy.

Inversely, socialism supports abolishing capitalism typically through the socialization of industry. But it doesn't necessarily mean GOSPLAN, making every major corporation a cooperative would also be a form of socialism.

With Bernie Sanders, I think his policies are social democratic but the man himself would do more if he could. If we look at his record he's always worked with liberals, because fundamentally he's much more pragmatic than what his rhetoric might suggest.

As for countries, the Nordic Countries are social-democratic. I'm not sure if I'd call any countries socialist, maybe Cuba. China isn't, it's authoritarian state-centric capitalist, and Vietnam seems the same.

Warren is unambiguously fond of capitalism, Sanders and AOC are mixed. Their policies are social democratic but I wouldn't be surprised if they'd be more left-wing if they could.

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Feb 25th 2021 at 3:51:40 AM

Man I think social democracy is great. I do generally agree with your assessment of the differences.

If I were to lay it out it would be:

Capitalism is a dog:

Socialist: It's rabid. Kill It!

Social-democracy: It's a wild dog that you can never truly tame, but you don't need to kill it. Just muzzle it and put it on a tight leash.

That's a pretty good analogy.

I like that metaphor.

Though I'd modify the socialist part by changing it to "it's rabid and inherently stronger than the hand that holds the leash, kill it".

Socialists don't disbelieve that regulation can work, we just don't believe it can work in the long term.

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Feb 25th 2021 at 4:03:35 AM

Thanks for the explanation, that’s very clear. Given that we have some very successful examples of social democratic states and no exaples of a successful democratic socialist state, I would say that I support social democracy on the whole (with some allowances for nationalizing certain natural resources or inherently monopolistic or oligopolistic industries).

I see the strengths and weaknesses of capitalism as being essentially the same qualities. Rather than assuming people are basically good and will work out of a sense of social responsibility irrespective of income [which dud not work well for, say, the USSR), it recognizes that people are selfish and, as per Adam Smith, harnesses that selfishness to incentivize behaviours) that benefit others (innovation, invention). At the same time, though, that selfishness is also directed at getting around any regulations used to avoid concentration of corporate economic power, and leads to abuses and inequality.

If I was designing a state from the ground up, I’d be interested in testing out a system with free enterprise but with a law saying that nobody within a business, including the owner/CEO, could earn more than 10x the annual salary of the lowest-paid employee. Even a 100x differential would be way better than what we have now. That could potentially prevent both substantial income inequality and concentrated corporate power.

I work for government. I know from experience that it’s cautious, risk-averse, slow to change, and that there are many things it’s simply not good at. There are important things that it can and should do, but it can’t run everything.

Co-ops are good in theory, but there are plenty of people who would prefer just having a steady, reliable wage over the risk of being part-owner of a business and bearing some responsibility for its management.

Edited by Galadriel on Feb 25th 2021 at 7:42:20 AM

The historical argument is fair enough, but there was a time when liberal democracy was also the untested thing that "couldn't possibly work" (not that you've said this specifically, but others obviously have), heck I'm sure people would point to the fall of Rome or Greece to explain how representative democracy could never work.

Social democracy is good to live in when it works, but unfortunately, history isn't much kinder to it. The majority of European social democratic parties have been hollowed out and puppeted by neoliberalism, and in the US social democracy never really managed to entrench itself as much as they did.

I take issue with that, especially cause I don't think they're as failed as your making them out to be. More to the point I'm not sure a truly Democratically Socialist society wouldn't be subject to the same problems of backsliding.

Edited by jjjj2 on Feb 25th 2021 at 8:54:33 AM

I mean, factually the neoliberal backslide is objectively real. I don't think Western Europe is some kind of free-market hellscape, but the idea of a backslide is not a controversial concept.

As for the rest of your post, I don't see how. The reason it happened (to be somewhat simplistic) was that capitalists used their funds to agitate and push back against social-democracy. In a socialist state, there are no capitalists. That doesn't mean it can't have its own social problems, but there's little reason to believe it would face that specific problem.

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Feb 25th 2021 at 5:59:42 AM

I disagree with the notion by the mere fact that a socialist society won't get rid of capitalism unless every other country in the world has left capitalism behind.

Since that is not happening anytime soon, social democracy seems to be the better alternative.