• Council of Europe’s definition of “democracy”:

    • Individual autonomy: The idea that no-one should be subject to rules which have been imposed by others. People should be able to control their own lives (within reason).

    • Equality: The idea that everyone should have the same opportunity to influence the decisions that affect people in society.

  • Compare/contrast with Dahl’s criteria.

    • Equal opportunity is a key part of most of Dahl’s 5 critical properties.

    • Can we as technologists quantify the “equality” of “influence”?

  • Social influence distributions

    • One person, one vote: democracy (nominally)

    • One dollar, one vote: economics, corporate ownership and governance

    • One web page, one vote: PageRank initial condition

    • One reference, one vote: PageRank output condition

    • One joule, one vote: Bitcoin

    • One machine-learning input sample, one vote: governance by AI

      • Including learned bias





Last modified: Thursday, 21 October 2021, 11:22