What if instead of political parties, presidents, prime ministers, kings, queens, armies, autocrats, and who knows what else, we turned everything over to expert systems? What if we engineered them to be faithful, for example, to one simple principle: “human beings regardless of age, gender, race, origin, religion, location, intelligence, income or wealth, should be treated equally, fairly and consistently”?
Here’s some dialogue – enabled by natural language processing (NLP) – with an expert system named “Decider” that operates from that single principle (you can imagine how it might behave if the principle was completely different – the opposite of equal and fair). The principle is supported by the data and probabilities the system collects and interprets. The “inferences”….