At 11:00 PM 9/25/96 -0700, Dale Thorn wrote:
jim bell wrote:
That's about it. I long ago noticed the similarity between AP and the fictional Gort. Problem is, Gort would have to be programmed. How would you write such a program? Governments would want their hand in it. They'd insist on "government exceptions" to rules, like: "All violence is forbiddden! (except for violence by duly authorized government employees!)" Not very practical.
Indeed it may not be practical to try such a program on current computers. I've had thoughts for some time about an analogy where each person in a civilization represents a cell in a single brain, and so on, so perhaps AP is merely a portion of the program for this "brain". As to what happens when you try to concentrate a disproportionate amount of the programming task into a few hands, that appears to be the situation we have now.
Exactly correct. The current system is intended to present the illusion that it is the product of the voters, where it is really defined by the political establishment. Bill Stewart pointed out (correctly) that what I'm proposing is "mechanism without a built-in policy." While this may appear to be a bit reckless, the reason I'm confident it will work is that the status quo has a _throughly_corrupt_ policy, a policy which is actively hostile to the interests and rights of the average citizen. Replacing that system with one that is merely neutral is a great improvement, particularly if there is no way for that policy to be hijacked by a tiny minority of the public. Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com