Cyber Republic: Reinventing Democracy in the Age of Intelligent Machines

by George Zarkadakis, Don Tapscott (Foreword)

How to make liberal democracies more inclusive and the digital economy more a guide for the coming Fourth Industrial Revolution. Around the world, liberal democracies are in crisis. Citizens have lost faith in their government; right-wing nationalist movements frame the political debate. At the same time, economic inequality is increasing dramatically; digital technologies have created a new class of super-rich entrepreneurs. Automation threatens to transform the free economy into a zero-sum game in which capital wins and labor loses. But is this digital dystopia inevitable? In Cyber Republic , George Zarkadakis presents an alternative, outlining a plan for using technology to make liberal democracies more inclusive and the digital economy more equitable. Cyber Republic is no less than a guide for the coming Fourth Industrial Revolution. Zarkadakis, an expert on technology and management, explains how artificial intelligence, together with intelligent robotics, sophisticated sensors, communication networks, and big data, will fundamentally reshape the global economy; a new “intelligent machine age” will force us to adopt new forms of economic and political organization. He envisions a future liberal democracy in which intelligent machines facilitate citizen assemblies, helping to extend citizen rights, and blockchains and cryptoeconomics enable new forms of democratic governance and business collaboration. Moreover, the same technologies can be applied to scientific research and technological innovation. We need not fear automation, Zarkadakis argues; in a postwork future, intelligent machines can collaborate with humans to achieve the human goals of inclusivity and equality.

Genres: Politics, Society, Technology, Nonfiction

176 pages, Hardcover

Published September 22, 2020

Reviews

[Dimitrios Mistriotis]

Για το ελληνόφωνο κοινό, συνέντευξη/συζήτηση με τον συγγραφέα εδώ podcast: www.fetareport.gr/podcast/86/
και video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_O4_G...

> Καλωσορίζουμε τον -κυρίως- συγγραφέα αλλά όχι μόνο Γιώργο Ζαρκαδάκη να μας παρουσιάσει το τελευταίο του βιβλίο το οποίο διαβάστηκε μονορούφι και συνίσταται ανεπιφύλακτα. Συζητάμε για το που βρισκόμαστε, πως φτάσαμε εκεί και κάποιες από τις προτάσεις του Γιώργου μέσα από το βιβλίο του χωρίς να τις αναφέρουμε όλες έτσι ώστε να έχετε ένα παραπάνω κίνητρο να το διαβάσετε.

> Πυκνή συζήτηση που μάλλον χρειάζεται πάνω από μία ακροάσεις.

[Ernesto · Rating 3 out of 5]

Will it be possible to save the Republic (meaning the Liberal democracy and institutions that’s existed after WWII using new technologies?
Zarkadakis seems to say yes, but after reading his books I have more doubts the certainties.

[Groucho42 · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was sent a copy by MIT Press. I really wanted to like this book, but it is a noble failure. The goal of the author is to talk about how technology can help preserve democracy, but it's too scattered and his arguments don't really come together to support the point.

The one good point is his early focus on the need to understand how the nature of and need for work is changing based on the pervasiveness of technology. That could have been a book on its own. This isn't like earlier technological revolutions, such as the invention of the automobile, where some jobs went away and new jobs were created. Jobs are going away, and many are never being replaced.

His main problem comes with his description of his "new" paradigm of democracy. "Citizen Assemblies" are a group of people chosen to evaluate issues and vote on whether or not they should be implemented. That's new? It's what Congress, state legislatures, city boards, and so many other governmental organizations do. They are people supposedly chosen to represent the average person, study an issue, and then make a decision based on what they learn.

While Zarkadakis does talk about the power of artificial intelligence (AI), he then waves his hands about how AI could help to improve selection rather than be used by governments and corporations to restrict and bias selection. Much is needed in government action and regulation before these systems can be trusted to help democracy.

Then there's the chapter on blockchain. It overplays the positive while underplaying the negative. Distributed ledgers aren't going away, but they aren't the panacea presented. Take the one major example of blockchain, bitcoin, and the problem the author never mentioned. Blockchain relies on consensus, a majority of entities agreeing. However, the vast majority of bitcoin servers are in China. While bitcoin hasn't reached the importance that would create a governmental interference, it's clear that China could, if it wished, control bitcoin. Before blockchain could be involved in preserving democracy, we must understand how it, like AI, can be used by totalitarian regimes to prevent freedom.

Yes, technology should be able to help preserve democracy. However, this book seems to be throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks. It floats a number of ideas, ignores flaws, and doesn't create a consistent whole that shows a workable way forward.

[Manuela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cyber Republic, by George Zarkadarias, manages in a short book to explain a bit about our current world situation, with the challenges liberal democracies are facing with the advent AI and to present his idea for a future liberal democracy that would help solving the problems brought by the 4ht Industrial Revolution.

The author makes a great job explaining difficult concepts in an interesting yet simple way. I struggled a little to go through the part he explains blockchain, but I believe that is more of a personal issue of me not being very interested in the subject "cryptocurrencies" itself. The first half of the book he takes the time to really go over the concepts and current overview of the liberal democracies, which I can definitely appreciate as it helped me understand his proposal. Second half he focused on the Cyber Rebublic itself, showing its main principles, foundations, importance, challenges and the best way to go with implementing. He takes the time to show examples and studies to explain his reasoning, making it easier for us to see where it was coming from

I received an ARC of this book to read through NetGalley in exchange for a fair review

[Nick · Rating 2 out of 5]

AI is coming, and it's going to change our relationship to government. How exactly? We don't know.

This serves as the basis for the author's book, which spends much of its time engaging in speculation while presenting a less-than-accurate depiction of American politics and technology.

There's ambitious but ambiguous ideas like using blockchain, but the author goes off into tangents while straying further from reality and technical possibility. They seem to touch on each subject so lightly they fail to consider any downsides to their ideas.

One thing the author gets right is that it's important to have discussions on how AI can be used or abused in the future of nations. However, I did not find this book to be a good work on this discussion.

[Gedi௨]

PRO+
+ analysis of politics, technology, and economy in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution
+ «Citizen assemblies need to become a new liberal institution, embedded in the policy decision making at every level of government.»
+ «The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated how important it is for democracies to get citizen consent to draconian measures that directly impact their lives»
+ “Ordinary citizens ought to have a voice in reaching a consensus on the optimal solutions and strategies, and take the risk, as well as the responsibility, for implementing those solutions without the need for top-down enforcement or coercion.”

[Anthony Zacharzewski · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bites off far more than it can chew.

[Eduardo Oliveira · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting read from an excellent writer and AI 'guru' but a bit utopic and hard to follow when it comes down to blockchain issues.

[V · Rating 2 out of 5]

I approached this book interested on what the societal consequences will be with the new emerging AI technologies (part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution).

The book attempts to address a big problems in modern society: there is a loss in trust in democracy (page 4). One of the causes is the increasing economic inequality. The other is the distance from people and their political representatives - the principal agent problem.
The book tries to come up with a vision to tackle these issues, which have their own limitations, can help solve the issues mentioned.

Zarkadakis does a good analysis of what the main challenge of AI are:
* Automation of oppression, resulting from algorithms that learn from biased datasets - citing Algorithms of Opression, by Safiya Umoja Noble
* Modulation of content around personal views, creating Filter Bubbles
* Cultural differences on ethical implementations of technologies - citing an IEEE study on the matter
* The dominance of big tech that can lead up to feudalisation of society
* The surveillance culture with massive data collection, adored both by authoritarian regimes and big tech (obligatory reference to Surveillance Capitalism, from Shoshana Zuboff)
To address these, Zarkadakis proposes a framework for a democratization of AI, supported in three systems: data marketplaces - for secure and transparent data exchange -, decentralised computing and a decentralised marketplace for AI models, applications and tools.

Outside of the democratization of AI, which has mostly to do with governance, the author does not propose much - just a reference to some cybernetics principles, which seem outdated these days.

Another stepping stone for a Cyber Republic mentioned is the concept of Data Trusts - entities that citizens chose to hold their personal data and ensure that such asset is shared only with external entities that they want, and rewarding them accordingly. Transferring the benefits of holding data from big tech to the citizens.

Against the principal agent problem Zarkadakis presents the Meeting of Minds, a framework for consulting with the public, which has had very positive results in different democratic contextes like South Korea. All in the direction of diminishing the knowledge inequality between experts and the public. The author was presonaly involved in one of these assemblies in the past. He establishes many parallels with the citizens assemblies of Ancient Greece, and also invokes their reincarnations during the Occupy Wall Street Movement, on the fallout of the 2008 crisis. Similar movements were seen in Greece on the fallout of the same crisis - and during the infamous Troika period that Greeks hold no fond memories of.

Other technological solutions proposed are all based on Web 3.0 paradigm, where participants on economic platforms can have a say on how the running of the platform. Something that flows on today's cyber-punk discourse, and also popular with anarchist ideals, pretty present on Greece's political spectrum these days.

My overall opinion of the book is that it does a great analysis of the issues that society currently faces on the awakening on the Forth Industrial Revolution. When it comes to solutions, the author is not so great. He mentions multiple great ideas that can help us improve our society - The Meeting of Minds, Data Trusts, AI Democratization - none of which are their own. His addition in terms of solution is an idealistic conjunction of these multiple technologies, of which I am most skeptic. I admit my own shortsightedness can be the reason why I am not so found of them, but neither the parallel between social contracts and smart blockchain contracts - where the rigidity of the second can lead to unintended consequences (cobra effect) -, or the cybernetic approach to AI - which to me sounds dated - sound very promising.

[Grace Lam · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very ambitious attempt to draw a connection among many issues the world is facing: 4th industrial revolution driven by AI and what it means to the future of work; the challenge to democracy driven by the simultaneous rise of populistic and authoritarian governments; the increasing income inequality after the global financial crisis, and more. They seem to be very different issues and Zarkadakis is making a courageous attempt to connect the dots, by answering the question: How is democracy going to look like when AI increasingly replace labor, and how to use this technology to "solve the knowledge and wealth asymmetries"?

Zarkadakis proposed a few interesting ideas: "civil assemblies" driven by individual participation, AI development which focuses on complementing human activities instead of replacing them, and the use of decentralized blockchain to incentivize public's participation and redistributing wealth. These models are unique in elevating the technology discussion to the public policy level, and allow us to envision a future where technology advancement not only improves efficiency and saves cost, but also helps preserve democracy and create a better society. These ideas are also thought-provoking as I don't think many people have tried to connect the concepts of technology and democracy together.

Nevertheless, I almost feel like these ideologies are very far away from reality - it is great to imagine the endless possibilities brought by new technologies like blockchain and AI, yet from a practical perspective, it does not seem like something that can be achieved in the next decade, especially given the current political landscape and the lack of focus of technologies in the political arena.

One thing I didn't enjoy as much - perhaps a personal preference - is the tendency of Zarkadakis to explain every single concept and the related history in detail. I am probably more interested to learn about his original idea and proposal, than to learn about the history and concepts of democracy, AI, and blockchain (which should be quite familiar to readers who are attracted by the introduction of the book). I remember that it is probably halfway through the book when his actual proposal is finally introduced - and I was like, man, what a longer-than-expected introduction to the core message of the book! But again, I imagine that some readers would appreciate the thorough background before getting to the meat of the book.

Finally, on a personal note, thank you for standing against authoritarianism and giving a shoutout to my hometown, Hong Kong, toward the end of the book. As was said in the book - let's take hope and inspiration from those who filled the streets of Hong Kong, and think about how we can best leverage these new technologies, to continue striving for liberty, democracy and freedom for all.

Thank you to NetGalley for an advanced reading copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.