While SALT has hosted a bevy of fascinating and influential guests, including Craig Venter, Jimmy Wales, Francis Fukuyama, and Ray Kurzweil, Daemon: Bot-Mediated Reality by author and software engineer Daniel Suarez was one of the most interesting and thought-provoking (mp3 here).

Suarez describes our world as being increasingly run, unconsciously, by an increasing number of bots, defined as “narrow AI”: robots that are very good at doing one, narrowly defined thing, like scraping auto insurance rates from websites, deciding whether you qualify for a mortgage, and so on. The scenario of increasing automation raises a host of troubling questions about the possibility of privacy (this on the heels of an announcement of the UK’s intention to scan every single email correspondence) in a world where proliferating electronic devices silently communicate your information and daily activity to each other, opening up more and more points of entry vulnerable to exploitation and digital eavesdropping.

But more worryingly, and more interestingly, is the spectre of a society in which decisions are made by closed-source algorithms (bots), the inner workings and logic of which is unknown to the majority of humanity. This, says Suarez, leaves societies open to domination by a small set of people who control these bots or understand how they work (here Suarez, I think somewhat illegitimately, conflates this prospect with the worrying but not intrinsically related phenomenon of the growth of malicious Internet-based botnets).

Suarez’s proposed solution–or, better, proposed avenue of exploration–is a sort of open-source operating system for democracy, in which decision making is fully decentralized, and open source bots are used simply to filter and sort information which is then decided upon and acted upon by three levels of people: average citizens, recognized experts, and then a third circle of even more respected experts.

For instance, people receive news from bots of an environmental spill on their mobile devices; they read it and classify it, as part of their civic duty; bots pass on the info to experts (as determined by social-network-like authority/ranking systems), who enact another layer of decision-making; bots then pass this information on to a final (set of) decision maker(s) who allocates necessary human and financial resources to resolve the issue, all of this taking place without any centralized government.

Whether this could still be called democracy is of course up for debate. Before this sort of technology, an advanced technocracy was perhaps not possible or viable without representative democracy, but Suarez paints a fairly convincing, if sketchy and in outline form only, picture of what such a system would look like.

I have to say that the proposed solution is not a whole lot less concerning than the alternative of a world run by bots and tyrants. In any case, the ideas are fascinating, and credit must be given to Suarez for formulating them and linking them together in such a creative and challenging way.

Citing Cambridge archaeologist Colin Renfrew and Guns, Germs and Steel author Jared Diamond, Pesce asserts that it was through increased sharing and connectivity that homo sapiens crossed the boundary from nature to culture, and again (e.g.) it was through the sharing made possible by Gutenberg that another burst of cultural development was set in motion, leading to the industrial revolution.

Today, contends Pesce, we are undergoing a similar process, with half the world owning their own mobile phone, and vast and increasing numbers of people being online. What this leads to is hypermimesis, a sped-up version of the “learning through imitation” that is at the basis of human development. Reminiscent of Clay Shirkey’s discussion of how the Internet speeds up the proliferation and dispersion of new knowledge, Pesce suggests that

Only a decade ago the network was all hardware and raw potential, but we are learning fast, and this learning is pervasive. Behaviors, once slowly copied from generation to generation, then, still slowly, from location to location, now ‘hyperdistribute’ themselves via the Human Network. We all learn from each other with every text we send, and each new insight becomes part of the new software of a new civilization.

This growing, amorphous Human Network encounters barriers and resistance from conservative forces but, says Pesce, every assault on its logic and movement has failed–even China’s great firewall has been acknowledged a failure. What does this mean for politics? Well, for liberalism:

[Wikipedia's] phenomenal success demonstrates beyond all doubt how the calculus of civilization has shifted away from its Liberal basis. In Liberalism, knowledge is a scarce resource, managed by elites: the more scarce knowledge is, the more highly valued that knowledge, and the elites which conserve it. Wikipedia turns that assertion inside out: the more something is shared the more valuable it becomes. These newly disproportionate returns on the investment in altruism now trump the ‘virtue of selfishness.’

I’m not sure what definition of liberalism Pesce is working from here, but I fail to see how liberalism entails a scarcity of knowledge controlled by powerful elites. I think the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition shows how the new, post-modern conception of knowledge is entirely compatible with liberal capitalism. If liberalism means, basically, protection of the (property, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, freedom from arbitrary detention, etc.) rights of the individual, I don’t see any challenge to the core of liberalism here.

But what about democracy? Taking his cues from the mobilization of Obama supporters in the US which has become a mobilized mass, doing as it pleases, Pesce contends:

Fasten your seatbelts and prepare for a rapid descent into the Bellum omnia contra omnes, Thomas Hobbes’ “war of all against all.” A hyperconnected polity—whether composed of a hundred individuals or a hundred thousand—has resources at its disposal which exponentially amplify its capabilities. Hyperconnectivity begets hypermimesis begets hyperempowerment.

Going further,

The power redistributions of the 21st century have dealt representative democracies out. Representative democracies are a poor fit to the challenges ahead, and ‘rebooting’ them is not enough. The future looks nothing like democracy, because democracy, which sought to empower the individual, is being obsolesced by a social order which hyperempowers him.

I think there’s a lot missing from the pseudo-syllogism, “hyperconnectivity –> hypermimesis –> hyperempowerment”. While the link between the first two terms is attested, we have yet to see anything like “hyperempowerment” resulting from increased connectivity and the broader adoption of social media. Honestly, we’re still pretty happy when we just get “empowerment”. If you look at Canada’s proposed amendments to our copyright legislation (Bill C-61) and the popular resistance that that bill has seen then you maybe get a taste for what Pesce might be talking about, but that’s one issue, and there’s no reason to think that that will become the norm, nor that that experience will bleed into other political issues, nor even that a significant portion of the 70,000+ people who joined the Facebook group have done anything to address the issue beyond joining the Facebook group.

I think there’s merit to some of what Pesce is saying and I’m glad there are people with his perspective to push the envelope and get us to think differently, but I just can’t be as starry-eyed. Show me something a bit more tangible than 135 comments on a post at DailyKos and maybe I’ll be a bit less cynical.