Could an algorithm run the government?

The following question was recently posted on Quora:

“Could an algorithm run the US government? It seems many US politicians suffer from politics. If an algorithm could make decisions for them, what would it look like conceptually?”

Read the responses below:

Denis Gorodetskiy, software engineer:

Let’s fantasize a bit

Let’s set the ultimate goal for the Government Algorithm to increase the people happiness index across all the social levels, from rich to poor. The Happiness Index might include: life expectancy in years (must increase), diseases (must decrease), education rates (must improve), ecological indices, wealth.

By slightly modifying parameters of population and corporations taxations, government grants to scientific institutions, the Government Algorithm might be able to run controlled experiments in local neighborhoods to see how different fiscal parameters influence Happiness Index given the local population.

So the Government Algorithm must be really not a straightforward soulless machine. Instead, it must be evolving and nursing local communities, raising their happiness index. Free market economy, people’s mobility and the Government Algorithm might give synergistic results.

As David Zhou said, the Government Algorithm would not be able to fight crises and for that people need human leaders. But the algorithm might be able to control billions of numeric parameters with precision not achievable by any human operators.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opo... as an example of beautiful social experiment. From Wikipedia: “It is designed to target poverty by providing cash payments to families in exchange for regular school attendance, health clinic visits, and nutritional support.[2] Oportunidades is credited with decreasing poverty and improving health and educational attainment in regions in which it has been deployed”

Tom Gregory, retired engineer:

Yes, and here is a plan from A Government You Can Love

1. Develop a secure voting system to collect the will of the people (use Bitcoin encryption and security (blockchain).
2. Collect each voters’ “well being"(WB, a list of items: safety, health, wealth, justice, ...) and each item’s normalized importance (weighting) to the voter.
3. Collect each voter’s desired change in well being (“well-being change”, WBC, as a %change of weightings of WB). Some may be negative since, you may feel a cut is in order, e.g., Defense Dept. which is part of Safety.
4. Sum all voter’s #3 responses to get a priortiy of what change is needed most by the country’s voters.
5. Use the highest priority WBCs to draft laws that improve the desired well-being of the country.
6. Develop projected outcomes from enacting the law, i.e., costs and benefits to groups and individuals, and the details behind the projections. (Use IBM’s Watson + Wikipedia + Wolfram Alfa ?)
7. Use the expected outcomes to project each voter’s personal “well being change” (from the costs and benefits).
8. Use the same information to project the change in well-being on the voter’s self and his/her family, friends, and community (WBCE, well being change extended, e.g., to include helping your childrens’ future).
9. Use the voter’s WBCE to assess the law’s impact on the voter (%WBCE = WBCE / WBE x 100 )
10. Develop an algorithm that adjusts the wording of the laws until a sufficiently large percentage of voters (say 51%?) is attained(or not) for enactment. Else loop back to #3 a few times)
11. A lot of laws may be drafted that don’t get enacted, .e.g., “go to war”, give me “pork”, etc.
12. Maybe finalize with an alert to allow a changed vote before a final tally and enactment.