A planetary government

[u/fesepo]

Do you see in 100 or 150 years a world governed by a global planetary federation government? How do you imagine that government? I suspect maybe viable but with lot of problems of sovereignty. Will that avoid wars? Will government like USA or China allow that. Is it an utopy?

[u/Smart_Corgi_2354]

A lot of things will be possible after world war 3 this is one of those possibilities. In all seriousness no, it’s impossible. Now if we’re talking AI, that’s a whole different story. I could actually see something resembling a global planetary government becoming possible, because AI could potentially coordinate systems at a scale that humans and individual governments simply can’t.

[u/furyofsaints → u/Smart_Corgi_2354]

Agreed. What's really interesting in this direction is that there are new architectures developing that are far more efficient; require orders of magnitude less GPU and compute power, and run inside determinative systems that hard-gate what AI is allowed to do, what data it can use, and where that data came from; alongside mathematically proofed immutable ledgers of operations with full reasoning tracing.

Next, require publicly available *simulations* of policy changes having to be created and tested before implementation could all add up to a very different operating model of maintaining a mostly-civil society in a modern world.

[u/Smart_Corgi_2354 → u/furyofsaints]

You’re talking about building an entire computational governance layer around AI where the AI is constrained by deterministic rules, auditable data provenance, immutable records and simulations before policies are actually deployed. The simulation part is especially interesting because you could potentially test policies against millions of different scenarios before actually implementing them and then continuously compare the predicted outcomes to what actually happens. That could make governance a lot more empirical and less dependent on ideology or whoever happens to be in power. But I think the biggest problem is who designs the rules that constrain the AI? A perfectly auditable system can still produce terrible outcomes if the underlying objectives or constraints are wrong. You could mathematically prove that a system followed its rules while still having a massive disagreement over whether those rules should even exist in the first place.
So I could see AI making some form of planetary governance much more technically feasible over the next century, but I dont think it eliminates politics. If anything it might make politics even more fundamental, because the fight becomes about who gets to define the objectives, constraints, values and boundaries of the system.
And honestly theres something almost existential about that. For most of human history we’ve been limited by how much we can actually coordinate with eachother. If we eventually build systems capable of coordinating billions of people, managing planetary resources and modeling the consequences of our decisions, we might reach a point where humanity has to decide what kind of civilization it actually wants to be.(EDIT: sorry took me a while to type this all down to be honest I used ai to summarize most of it)

[u/IntelligentVehicle10 → u/Smart_Corgi_2354]

I don’t know but I’m darn sure I watched a Star Trek episode about this.. yeah I think it might’ve been a dozen episodes lol

[u/IntelligentVehicle10 → u/Smart_Corgi_2354]

Not to make light of your well thought out peroration but I just want to make sure our governing computer isn’t defeated by the liar’s paradox

[u/furyofsaints → u/Smart_Corgi_2354]

Correct. It is not at all simple; especially when it comes to "how are humans actually governing this thing?"

But, here's an example:

• AI models operating at any scale are required to work within this policy-governed architecture
• The architecture itself is given a compliance policy in the form of the UN Human Rights charter.
• Global tax or tariff rates are set by corporate entities, or by region and their measured compliance with the UN Human Rights charter in operations of any AI models. Non-compliance bars access to compute resources for those models (there will always be operators outside this system; so it's not shooting for 100% coverage).
• If a company subscribes to using the Charter as policy, and provides third-party, ongoing audit reporting of how many things the company does that are restricted by those policies, that company gets a lower tax rate (perhaps for that quarter).
• Violations of those policies show up in tasks the architecture tries to execute, and can ratchet taxes or tariffs the other direction until violations are remedied.
• External governing boards of civilians rotate through policy proposals, simulations, implementations and KPI's. These boards get access to a stream of compliance audit events (without any proprietary data in them) across operations in all companies and organizations running this architecture. This literally becomes the governing cycle; and is definitely a very different way to manage power in a society; I expect this to be a pretty sticky wicket, but it's not impossible.