How a robot historian from the future sees the American revolution
Ted Chu claims in his book ‘Human Purpose and Transhuman Potential: A Cosmic Vision for Our Future Evolution’ that humans will create a higher intelligence that will finally replace its creator. Let us now imagine that one of those robots from the future becomes a historian that studies co-determination of humans in a group. It would most probably conclude that the American and French revolution wasn’t such a big step forward as the humans from the 21st century believed. It would see that ‘Mr. President' is not that far from ‘Your Highness’.
From its future perspective, it would see a spectrum of co-determination. It would place dictatorships or complete despotic top-down and pyramidal political systems at one end of the spectrum without co-determination and on the other end complete co-determinative systems. Between the dictatorial end and the middle point of that spectrum, it would see countries like China or Russia with dictatorships but with capitalist systems. More or less in the middle of that spectrum, it would place the representative and capitalist democracies. These would be the countries without a monarchy like the USA, France, Germany or Italy and those countries with a monarchy like the United Kingdom or Spain. In these groups, every single member can vote for an organization that represents them to take decisions during a predefined period. Only Switzerland is due to the possibility to realize topic related direct voting would be placed a bit further towards the complete co-determinative end.
This historian robot of the future would also see two disparities. The first one is concerned with what is possible through technology available in order to exercise a much higher amount of co-determination and the actual reality at the beginning of the 21st century.
In the past, similar disparities led to a revolution in which the ruling class would loose or their lives as in the French revolution or territory as in the American one. The non-ruling class would win more co-determination. Black people even gained freedom during the Independence war of Central and South-America from Spain. In all three cases, a new and more innovative type of co-determination was set up, the ones on the American continent were more sustainable probably due to a new geographical area.
In the past though, only representative democracies could blossom due to the available informational infrastructure, but prevalent technology at the beginning of the 21st century offers the possibility of a breakthrough in co-determination. Unfortunately, our historian robot does not see any other space for deterritorialization of innovation at the present time. There is no land west of the West. There is no land to be discovered and colonized where you can set up an adequate type of co-determination.
The other disparity the robot historian recognizes is the major lack of co-determination at another type of group almost all humans used to belong to: companies. Almost all companies need to be placed on the dictatorial end of the spectrum mentioned before. The disparity lies in the fact that humans at the beginning of the 21st century have a rather good grade of co-determination for the group 'country' but almost none for the group 'company'. This disparity is even more acute as they spend much more time and effort building up the last one.
But the people involved in the making of binary computing machines have launched a new initiative to build independent sea-based territories that could serve for experimentation, failure and at some point to solve both disparities at once.
