The objective of my "Maximum Satisfaction" series of proposals is to provide options for the future of democracy by the application of certain modern engineering concepts to social "science" with the ultimate goal of achieving "individual dignity and respect".
I incorporated HyperInfo Canada Inc. in 1989 with a sole purpose of putting the Statutes of Canada on a machine-readable CD-ROM. My motivation was to filter out noise and find out (using the search, retrieve and sort capability on a personal computer) how many and what laws and regulations actually apply to me as a citizen, a question nobody around me seemed to answer. Unfortunately, the interest and funding in such a CD-ROM venture turned out to be insufficient to make it a viable business back then, when very few people even heard of CD-ROM. My interests have since shifted to improving information access using artificial intelligence, knowledge base systems and automated agents rather than simply publishing stuff on the CD-ROM or on-line service. Most electronic publishing products presently still offer only flat text format, not even hypertext, and it is up to you to labour to find a needle in a stack.
I guess I am neither educated nor informed, not knowing exactly what Thomas Jefferson said, but am creative enough to point out that some of the assumptions when the "Fathers" (note the lack of Mothers) drafted constitutions no longer apply. The intention of the indirect democracy was to insulate the uninformed general public from the "prevailing cooler heads". Today, however, the general public has the means to be much more informed and is demanding empowerment. What were each representative's comprehension levels of the substantive issues in those days compared to today's complex telecommunication issues, health care, etc.? I believe that the 2 levels of decision making could be shifted from the "Lower House and Upper House" to the "General Public and Upper House" model, where the general public can effectively participate in democracy, directly or indirectly depending on the individual's preference and competence within the fundamental democratic principles.
As a computer nerd, I don't mind voting on every esoteric referendum since my HyperAgent would be able to come up with most of the answers based on my philosophy and principles coded in the Personal Profile. What if there is an intelligent system to categorise mountains of faxes, email, calls and visitors, and present the summary in a way anybody can make a rational and logical decision? In fact, the U.S. White House is reportedly looking for such a system to automatically sort out thousands of E-mail messages to "president@whitehouse.gov" and "vice-president@whitehouse.gov".
As for the security of "electronic democracy", I am familiar with the terms hacker (as a kind of low-level hacker myself), wire-fraud, viruses, personal data exploitation and industrial espionage. In any introduction of new things, these glitches and pitholes occur, just as a new version of software tends to contain many bugs, which doesn't mean that the previous version was superior but it's progress nevertheless. There was a catastrophic failure in the first telephone voting a couple of years ago for a political party in Nova Scotia, Canada, because of a telephone switch overload. The second attempt was successful, giving the telephone company enough learning curve to offer it to other parties. The encryption and digital signature in Electronic Data Interchange are not yet perfect but statistically much better than the reliability of Canada Post and U.S. Mail.
Yes, I would like to see more discussion to look at how to discern truth in the face of media-induced misinformation and misrepresentation. But what about the definition of "truth" itself? For example, I firmly believe that the Sun rotates around the Earth. It is "true" if one uses a different (and very complex) coordinate system to represent the Newtonian motions of the Sun and the Earth from the one on every text book! In society, world revolves around me.
Object-Oriented programming is used to solve the complexity of computer programs (convoluted subroutines and spaghetti code) by structuring the program into object classes which encapsulate methods and communicate with other objects by means of passing messages, allowing modular increment of features and functions. While one its main advantages is to better model the real world, the real world can benefit from the better organisation by Object-Orientedness. Thus, the concept can be used in organisations, where an individual is treated as an empowered object entity instead of a mere number in a hierarchical and jurisdictional structure. It is happening in the form of virtual corporation staffed with networked individuals and self-employed consultants.
P.S. What's a "nerd" anyway? If someone spends 4 hours on the computer, he/she is normal but someone else who spends 5 hours on the computer is labelled and stereotyped a "nerd"?
