Retired librarian, interested in digital democracy.
What would we call a system of government in which citizens vote for principles and policies instead of people and political parties? I would like to run software on my smartphone to help build an open source and decentralized global platform on which such a government could be constituted. Some of my favorite principles are in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Earth Charter
There does need to be a mechanism to keep the human in the loop to correct the knowledge base by people who have the underlying knowledge. Perhaps notification needs to be sent to people who have previously viewed the incorrect information when a correction is made.
Did you even try diffy.chat to test how factually correct it is and how well it cites its sources? How good does it have to be to be useful? How bad does it have to be to be useless?
The language model for diffy.chat has been trained not to respond from its own learned parameters, but to use the Diffbot external knowledge base. Each sentence or paragraph in a Diffy response has a link to the source of the information.
A good recent book is The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. They describe a number of early societies that were organized without hierarchies, and argue that hierarchy is not necessary for organized societies today.
For the future, I want to help bring about system level change in addition to the things I can do in my personal life. There is too much power concentrated in the hands of too few people. I would like to run software on my smartphone to help build an open source and decentralized global platform for digital democracy.
The front of my house faces southwest. On a sunny afternoon, when it is freezing outside, my house is well enough insulated that the sunlight entering through my front windows and storm door can raise the temperature inside by several degrees Fahrenheit. By closing the prime front door, and covering my windows with insulated plugs, it takes several hours to lose those degrees of heat.
I would like to see a real-time census of humanity, with measures for health and well-being for everyone who is alive right now, and with updates on births and deaths worldwide recorded each day. If we make sure everyone has an adequate standard of living, the number of people will take care of itself.
They succeeded in getting attention. Look at all the comments posted here. The issue needs attention. The issue also needs fact checking. I was pleased with fact checking I got from diffy.chat about the wildfires in LA County. Maybe fact checking bots should be included in online discussion forums.
I would be in favor of a diffy.chat online bot that could contribute real-time fact checking, as long as it identified itself each time it responded to a post.
Maybe 2025 will bring an open source and decentralized global platform that can fact check, merge, deduplicate, and aggregate multiple online discussion forums into a shared graph representation that will be able to report on which topics are being discussed by the most people, what sentiment is expressed about proposed solutions to problems, and how that sentiment changes over time. It could become a form of collective terrestrial intelligence, CTI.
Peak Oil will be solved by the same actions that are needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; transition to solar, batteries, and EVs.
I’ll just address one point, the mining of minerals for solar panels. The lifetime for solar panels is at least 20 years. As soon as fossil fuels are burned, more fossil fuels need to be mined. First Solar claims to already have technology for recycling their panels that recovers 90% of the materials.
Points and responses like this are probably being repeated many times in different social and news media as well as in everyday conversations. IMHO, a top priority for humanity is building a global platform to merge these various forums, fact check and deduplicate claims, and aggregate sentiment expressed towards proposed solutions, to strengthen the signal out of all of the noise. This platform could become a form of collective terrestrial intelligence, which is desperately needed.