[extropy-chat] Max More's article on Democracy and Transhumanism

[Giu1i0 Pri5c0]

This is a comment to Max More's article on Democracy and Transhumanism and
the ongoing discussion on the wta and extropy lists. Max and several readers
say that, as transhumanists perspectives look much further ahead,
transhumanists should not embrace democracy or any current political system
but rather wait for an entirely new political system developed by posthumans
for posthumans. Now, I am sure posthumans will have the means to implement
smart and flexible government systems much better than what we have today.
For example, if all future citizens (humans, AIs, hybrids, uploaded minds,
...) will have augmented brains permanently linked to the net, it will be
possible to implement direct democracy schemes that would not be practical
today. But I think this is missing the point: we spend a lot of time
thinking about the future, but we live in the present, and the future state
of the world depends on our actions in the present world. The right
questions to ask are not about long term policies for posthuman societies,
but about short and medium term policies that can enable the development of
a posthuman society while improving the lives of today's citizens and their
children. Here and now, we cannot disagree with Churchill's "democracy is
the worst form of government except for all the other forms that have been
tried".http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo/extropy-chat