Technologies That Governments Need to Integrate Now

Even though the governments have gone through huge changes in recent times, but do these changes meet the challenges by technical advances? Or are they good enough for the upcoming challenges? To answer these questions we need to think about 2 things.

1. The present government systems and how they have changed from the past.
2. And how much the technologies have achieved and what they promise to change.

Government systems are different for different types of government. While the idea of democracy is widely being accepted all over the world at this moment, but the version of democracy varies in terms of every government. Because even the most authoritarian governments with horrible dictators in charge seem to portray themselves being elected by the people. It’s true that in the past century, monarchy or the idea of absolute power ended or lost its credibility in most of the cases. Still, a huge part of the world remains under authoritarian regimes. Government systems are somehow completely out of reach from the very people it should serve. Funnier thing is, even the most renowned democratic governments are somehow isolated from its people because the central government is way more powerful and seems to be controlled by a clog of system which is very hard to understand. But yet democracy seems to be the best option. Because no matter what it comes with the most important idea that everyone is equal. It promises transparency, justice for all and a system where everyone can feel they have a chance. Now I will not get into the debate between socialism and capitalism and how the capitalist democracy won the battle (Technically not over socialism, but over the horrible communist people who preached the idea). Even if the goal of any democratic government is in some cases to fulfil many of the socialist criteria’s but due to extreme propaganda against capitalism and some other ideas the socialist may portrait dictatorship, failed economic reforms, hunger and endless misery for everyone. We now somehow adopted few of the good ideas by labelling them in different terms. I do believe that that may be the best way to achieve a system that is good for everyone and where normal people will not suffer from extreme capitalism and at the same time our freedom to make our own choice will be preserved.

But now the question is, are we doing a good job to achieve those reforms that can change our state?

The answer is a straight No. Yes, the ideas such as minimal wage, good healthcare system is very hard to achieve. Again a government that depends on its people to make most of the decisions and are transparent about its decisions is somehow nothing but a dream. But I don’t believe they are impossible to achieve.

But here I’ll use few example of countries who are doing things somewhat uniquely. I wouldn’t go into much details because explaining a government system in 4/5 lines is really useless. Whenever people talk about a good government system they bring up the name of Switzerland’s government system. And I wouldn’t do any different. Because their system is really good. Decentralised government system where the main government system is not that powerful and referendums are common thing so that people can take part in democracy directly. I wouldn’t go into much details. But I highly suggest you study about it if you don’t already know. Keep in mind that many government can technically have referendums but very few actually do because that is not practical and not efficient due to population and other factors. Second country that I would like to mention is Taiwan. Taiwan is developing their policies by forking the government and reforming policies by machine learning using huge amount of open source data. To better understand those idea you can watch Audrey Tang’s video.

Now I have to mention that we have already seen some of the machine learning based models being used by some other governments. Mainland China is also using few similar technologies which is one of the key factors to their rapid development. But at the same time those are being used in a very anti-democratic way which may not be something that we want. And we all know about how targeted advertisements by data analysis may have affected US Election as well as the Brexit. Before giving other example I think I should mention Estonia which may be the first completely digital country. There, with just a simple card you can basically access anything. By this time you might argue that many of the other countries are also developed and somehow they possess superior technology than Taiwan or Estonia. But I mentioned them for a completely different reason. Because it is not how technologically advanced you are. It is rather how you use it. As mentioned earlier, China is using technology for their own propaganda and US and UK are going through crisis for not using these properly. No matter how we put it, the development of any country depends mostly on how they use technology. The economy of most countries depends on their technological advances. Most of the greatest empires in the world were mostly established based on their superior technology. But their empires failed. Because you cannot enslave people by technology. Because better technologies arrive and they always win over the people who tried to use it for their own cause. So any country should always consider how they can effectively use them to not control others but how to use it to give people more freedom and better lifestyle.

So what are the technologies that should be used to develop people’s lives?

Firstly let’s talk about digitalizing different platforms in general. Even though most of the developed countries have digitalized their processes in general. But their still seems to be lack of systems to make their lives easier. Because most of the countries lack Initiative. Because with proper initiative the country can be digitalized fast as I have mentioned Estonia’s example before.

But building such platform might be realistic for developed countries, but for the underdeveloped countries the model is somewhat unrealistic because the processes involved are very time consuming and costly. So here comes our second idea, the idea of Forking the government. As I have mentioned earlier how Taiwan are developing government platforms by forking. This might be the model to use for a lot of underdeveloped countries. And as much of the platforms are already developed and they are open source, other governments can modify them using low resource.

Next we should make more decentralized applications for tax payment, land management system, different asset management system and processes that depend on bureaucracy. Especially in the underdeveloped countries a large part of the government earning is lost because of corruption. Permissioned apps can keep a clear track of what process took how much time and how much cost it took. So for example land taxes can be collected properly and land ownership can also be managed as there is clear record of how the ownership changed. Processes such as infrastructure development takes a lot of time since there is a huge paper trail and each step is related to a lot of corruption. But if all the different users of this system can be connected using apps then a most of the paper trail and the corruption will go away easily. Again, if government ID is combined with decentralized platforms it may be used to take referendums and enable people take part in direct democracy. I am not proposing to take referendums as much as the Switzerland government but the idea to at least consider the people mind-set before making policy may actually give the government more power. Because then they don’t have to worry about damage-control.

At this point I have to mention that idea of dapps and ml based decision making may not be new since a lot of these have already been mentioned when I pointed you towards Taiwanese policies. But then here we go again. In Arab Spring, a lot of the governments were overthrown by the people by using social media. But at the end of the day they were replaced by even horrible dictators. And a lot of the governments around the world are somewhat facing problems after making most of the policy. It is true that the idea of referendums might not be useful when a huge part of the population is still uneducated. But to make policies government should consider taking polls in more regular manner. Yes, there are many government agencies that take polls regularly but they are conducted in somewhat old ways. But using sentiment analysis in social media can connect to even larger number of people more easily. And using different characteristics of peoples’ behaviour in ml models may give us ideas to make policies that we didn’t even know existed. Finally, it is actually possible to predict different aspect of peoples’ lives such as jobs, education system and health care system in ways that we did not anticipate before. Many of the online job platforms actually use ml models to predict what they want. Government can use such models to create jobs based on people’s need. Healthcare system can be adjusted fast by different models. Agricultural as well as industrial products can also be controlled using AI models. And even education system needs to be modified. More digitalized education system enables more effective education.

So by using these technologies we can easily change how we perceive our government system. Rather than seeing government as an isolated system we can effectively become part of the system. Policies can be made effectively and in more democratic way. To perfectly describe how our government view should be I have to quote Audrey Tang:

When we see internet of things, let’s make it internet of beings.

When we see virtual reality let’s make it shared reality.

When we see machine learning let’s make it collaborative learning.

When we see user experience let’s make it human experience.

When we hear the singularity is near, let’s remember the plurality is here.

Lastly I have to say I am neither a political expert nor a technical expert. But I involve a lot of my time in these matters watching books, blogs and videos. And certainly can be regarded as an enthusiast student of world politics and technology. So it would be great if you leave more ideas and resources as comments.