10 SCALING A POLIS

The broad outline of a Cyber Republic should have emerged by now. Many details are still missing, but the purpose of this book has been to provide a first iteration, an imperfect yet adequate paper prototype to trigger a broader discussion for an evolved system of liberal government fit for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. I have argued that such evolution is necessary to address the sense of unfairness and inequality that has gripped millions of citizens following the global financial crisis and the Great Recession, to strengthen our democratic institutions, and to prepare our societies for the impact of AI on work and wealth creation. We therefore need to find ways to clean up politics by broadening democratic participation, but also to reform free markets. With this purpose in mind, I have focused on three specific problem areas. The first is how to extend citizen rights so that we become more directly involved, and personally responsible, for policy making. I have argued in favor of using a citizen assembly model in order to complement representational democracy, and I have shown how conversational AI systems based on cybernetics can be used to solve the problem of knowledge asymmetry between experts and nonexperts. Second, I proposed to reconnect AI to its cybernetic roots, so we may avoid the existential risk of an artificial superintelligence having goals that are different from or conflict with those of humans, but also in order to unlock new economic and social value from new types of human-machine collaboration. Third, I tried to present an overview of how we could leverage web 3.0 cryptoplatforms and cryptogovernance, combined with data and AI, in order to deliver new, peer-to-peer markets that can reform capitalism, solve problems of wealth and income asymmetry, compensate for loss of income due to automation, and ultimately democratize the AI economy of the twenty-first century.