Endgame: The Kardashev Scale for Democracy
Contemporary democracy, particularly its incarnation in party systems and the ritual of voting for specific parties, feels increasingly constrained by structural limitations. The voices of party members, the organized votes of specific support groups, or the opinions of a select few experts—policies emerging from political parties inevitably tend to be skewed by a limited range of information and values.
Yet, our society is teeming with individuals who possess astounding knowledge and insight in specific fields but do not, cannot, or see no point in participating within the conventional frameworks of political activity. This vast reservoir of "hidden knowledge," like an untapped vein of precious ore, holds immense potential for building a better future, yet it remains largely unutilized.
Concurrently, in a future saturated with superintelligences like LLMs, the mere fact of "being human" may grant no more than ceremonial value to one's voice. This suggests a potential seismic shift in values we\'ve taken for granted—such as trust, credibility, and the special status attributed to human-to-human interactions. If malicious actors were to harness this potent technology, society could plunge into unprecedented chaos. Previously, the malevolence of a single politician or ruler had a limited impact on society as a whole; this was, indeed, one of the crucial values of "democracy" in preventing the concentration of power. However, the advent of AI is fundamentally altering this premise.
Imagine a society where every individual makes decisions in consultation with AI. What, then, does "individual independence" or "freedom of thought" truly signify? Traditional democracy has derived a degree of legitimacy from the sheer "number" of ayes and nays on policies.
However, now that AI agents can generate opinions and analyses of quality comparable or even superior to humans, human preeminence in "quality of opinion" is no longer absolute. Indeed, AI, unswayed by human biases and emotions, might even offer more objective and comprehensible proposals. How long can we cling to the notion that "being human grants one vote its value"?
The concept of voting itself also feels antiquated. Elections are a prime example; in an era of exponentially advancing technology, shrugged off current system of electing representatives once every few years seems ponderously slow. But what, fundamentally, is "democracy"?
Today, many associate "democracy" with "voting" or "elections." However, we believe this is merely one form—an early-stage iteration, at that—of a "coordination system" for making the best collective decisions. Crucially, democracy is not a fixed, perfected state but an evolving framework for maximizing Collective Intelligence (CI), a system still under development. Collective intelligence is not exclusive to humans. Trees connected through fungal networks (mycelia) exhibit intelligent behavior by sharing nutrients and warning of dangers like droughts or pests. Bees and ants, using their unique languages of body movement and pheromones, engage in complex processes of selection, deliberation, and consensus-building, displaying astonishing "swarm intelligence." Humans are not the only animals that engage in voting behavior.
Based on this understanding of democracy as a "framework for eliciting collective intelligence," the current electoral system—an extremely slow communication system transmitting only a few bits of information every four years—is by no means its final form. A new framework is needed, one that can function even as the boundaries between humans and machines blur, to achieve better governance.
The Kardashev Scale: Civilization\'s Ascent Through Energy Mastery
Proposed by Soviet astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev, the Kardashev Scale is a method of classifying technological advancement based on the amount of energy a civilization can utilize.
- Type I Civilization: Planetary Energy Harnessed
- A civilization capable of controlling and utilizing all available energy on its home planet, including all incident stellar energy (sunlight, geothermal, wind, etc.).
- Type II Civilization: Stellar System Energy Commanded
- A civilization capable of controlling and utilizing all the energy of its parent star system (e.g., the Solar System). This involves capturing the total energy output of its central star.
- Type III Civilization: Galactic Energy Orchestrated
- A civilization capable of controlling and utilizing the energy of its entire host galaxy (e.g., the Milky Way). This involves harnessing the energy of countless stars within the galaxy.
This scale is theoretical, offering no practical blueprint for building these civilizations. However, it serves as a potent thought experiment, prompting us to imagine the technologies required to reach each stage.
For instance, achieving Type II status is thought to necessitate the construction of megastructures like a "Dyson Sphere"—a colossal shell enveloping a star to capture its entire energy output, thereby meeting the civilization\'s immense energy demands.
Advancing to a Type III civilization would likely require self-replicating robotic swarms or analogous ultra-advanced technologies to span the galaxy, harvesting energy and transmitting information.
The Kardashev Scale, by measuring civilizational evolution through the singular metric of energy use, provides a grand framework that expands our thinking to a cosmic scale.
A Kardashev Scale for Democracy: Charting the Evolution of Governance Technology
Just as the Kardashev Scale measures civilizational progress by energy utilization, could there be a similar scale for democracy as a system of governance, indicating its evolving "intelligence" or "efficiency"? Does a framework exist to more clearly differentiate levels of innovation in governance technology?
Existing democracies, while seemingly superior to autocracies, are fraught with problems. As economist Robin Hanson points out, much of the wealth disparity between nations stems not from resources or national capabilities, but from the quality of policies adopted. Poorer nations (many of them democracies) have tended to more frequently adopt "foolish policies" detrimental to the majority of their populace. Even wealthy nations often implement such inefficient (Pareto-suboptimal) policies.
These policies were not merely "foolish" in hindsight. In many cases, "experts" with deep insight into the likely negative consequences of these policies existed and sounded alarms beforehand. Had society as a whole shared and understood these expert insights in advance, such detrimental policies might not have been adopted so frequently. Thus, existing forms of governance often fail because they lack mechanisms to effectively aggregate relevant expert knowledge and reflect it in policy decisions.
Are there forms of governance that more consistently heed expert opinion? Even if we could identify the optimal experts at any given moment, granting them full authority is perilous. They might prioritize self-interest over public good, or cease to be appropriate experts once in power.
Therefore, focusing on the quality of policy decisions—specifically, on what "signals" (information, proposals, insights) inform decision-making and enable policy realization—we propose a "Kardashev Scale for Democracy (or Political Parties)."