Genuine question. It seems like a topic that isn’t discussed in-depth often anywhere I can find online.
To be clear, I’m talking about technocracy as in policies are driven by those with the relevant skills (instead of popularity, skills in campaigning, etc.).
So no, I don’t necessarily want a mechanical engineer for president. I do want a team of economists to not tank the economy with tariffs, though.
And I do want a social scientist to have a hand in evaluating policy ideas by experts. A psychologist might have novel insights into how to improve educational policy, but the social scientist would help with the execution side so it doesn’t flop or go off the rails.
The more I look at successful organizations like J-PAL, which trains government personnel how to conduct randomized controlled trials on programs (among other things), the more it seems like we should at least have government officials who have some evidence base and sound reasoning for their policies. J-PAL is the reason why several governments scaled back pilots that didn’t work and instead allocated funds to scale programs that did work.
It may be described as that on paper, but in our reality what it seems to translate into is the tech CEOs making policy decisions, and all those that have actually been proposed are just regulation cuts that benefit their particularly company or industry and actively harm everyone else. So, yeah, thats bad.
Yeah, I agree that’s an issue. In a way, Americans are experiencing that live, today.
What about a variant of technocracy that accounts for conflicts of interest?
I dont believe in hierarchy, so you lose me there. Decentralized government with a centralized education system is probably a good combination abstractly speaking.
Valid. Why do you think education should be the exception to decentralization?
We’ve seen decentralized education and it tends to have problems with resourcing and economies of scale, and content policies get easily hijacked by loud people with personal vendettas.
Pretty much, a lot of decentralization can have this problem. But our current state speaks plainly against centralization and even ours was supposed to be separated to a degree.
That would be something like an AI technocracy where the AI owns itself and is considered as a living human being for all intents and purposes.
If the AI’s continued existence was predicated on them ruling fairly and maximizing happiness without causing any kind of like asimovian technocratic exterminations, then you might have a chance at something working like that.
The problem is the people who think they are smart enough to pull off such a specific combination of events to make something like that possible are not smart enough to pull it off and will kill us all if given the opportunity.
That would be the ideal, but even without AI, you can still have a society that is more technocratic-leaning than it is now. It’s not like technocracies were historically impossible before AI existed.
I agree about the problem you mentioned. I would not trust someone who is proposing their AI will magically fix all of society’s problems.