Help Wanted - Tomorrow's Constitution

  I am trying to write a constitution for a better world and I do not know how to do it. I have some of the fundamental ideas. Do you want to help ?

Constitution

Rights

• Everybody living on the territory is equal in rights.
• Everybody is insured equal in opportunities presented by the States.
• Everybody is insured the same standards of health.
• Everybody is insured the same standards of primary, secondary and higher education and trainings ( see articles on education).
• Everybody is insured the freedom of expression.
• Everybody is insured the freedom of association.
• Every political campaign for elections for a governing body will be solely financed by the state.
• Everybody is insured a connection to internet and will be allocated a space.
• Everybody is insured a minimum pay.
• Everybody has the right to live where they want.
• Everybody will be insured free transport.
• Everybody is insured the right to protest.

Obligations

• Every person, physical or fictional, will have their revenues proportionally taxed on a fixed rate.
• Everybody will have to go to school until they are 21 and pass the minimum curriculum established ( see article on education).
• Everybody has the obligation to vote in the general elections.
• Everybody selected for an electoral body will have to abide by the rules of this body ( see articles concerning the governing bodies).
• Everybody has the obligation to participate for a year in a community service.
• Everybody over 21 has the obligation to participate for 4 hours a week in the education of young people.
• The State holds the legitimate monopoly of violence and as such will swear to never use it.
• Economy at the national level and local level will be carefully calculated and loans will never have an interest rate.

Governing bodies

• 1. Justice system ( A.is National while B. and C. are local )

A. Constitutionnal courts

At national and local level.

• - 12 universally elected for life judges.

B. Criminal court and appellate criminal courts

• - 12 elected randomly selected jurors

. Any one selected will have to be over 21 years of age.

. Any one selected will be paid the same salary as their previous employment and will be insured a place back to their positions once their mandate runs out.

• Every procedures will be supervised by a judge elected by local officers for a period of seven years.
• Procedures will discuss and define the act in its circumstance.
• Repairment will by the individual convicted will be calculated in hours of work.
• Reasons for committing the act will be discussed and the convict will have to accept a form of help as proposed by the jury in accordance with the judge.

100. Civil Law for contentions.

• Three judges for every procedures.
• Two judges selected by the two parties among the local list.
• One Judge elected by local officers for a period of seven years.

• 2. Electoral body

At national and local level.

• 2 % of the population randomly selected
• They will vote on every law they want for 3 years.
• No one can be selected twice for the same mandate in a life time.
• Any one selected has the obligation to vote to 85% of the laws proposed by the government.
• Any one selected will have to be over 21 years of age.
• Any one selected will be paid the same salary as their previous employment and will be insured their employment once their mandate finished.

• For constitutional changes, the population will be called to vote and change will happen if 70% percent of the population has voted and if 60% of the votes are in favour of change.
• Localities will always have sovereignty over the National level, but never over the constitution.

• 3. Government

At national and local level

• A universally elected list of twenty persons.
• All campaigns will be financed by the State and with an equal threshold.
• All spaces of campaign will be provided by the State.
• No material external contributions are allowed.
• Any candidate will have to be over 21 years of age.
• Any candidate will be paid the same salary as their previous employment and will be insured their employment once their mandate finishes.
• No one can be selected twice for the same mandate in a life time.
• There will be a campaign every 5 years ending a year before the end of the previous government.
• The government can act only on passed laws.
• The government must propose laws to the parliament, if passed, the law will have later on to be scrutinized by the constitutional court to see if it is in accordance with the constitution.

• 4. Media

• Every Media is free to express all opinions.
• Any answer to a media outlet by a person with vested interest will have to be published like the article.
• Any single advertising in any media outlet will have to be uniformed to all others in the same media outlet.
• Every advertising will have to provide to a link to an Internet page.
• The web page will be providing as much informations as the customers ask. It will also provide information about the stocks, the different added values, the name of every single person involved in the production of the advertised good or service.

• 5. Education

• Nursery, primary, secondary and higher education financing will be provided by the State.
• Any institution giving core courses will be allocated a certain amount proportional to the number of students it receives.
• Primary education will be uniform all across the country and consist of:

1. First Language ( as chosen by the parents)
2. Second Language ( spoken by at least one local resident)
3. Mathematics and Logic
4. Expressive Arts
5. Sports and games
6. Natural Sciences
7. Social Sciences
8. Philosophy

• Any student, from the age of 12 to the age of 21, will be allocated a certain amount of credits it will spend for his optional education courses.
• Optional courses are four modules of 4 hours each.
• 16 hours a week will be allocated to the compulsory courses

• Compulsory courses are:

1. First Language ( as chosen by the student); Linguistic or
2. Second Language ( spoken by at least one local resident)
3. Mathematics and Logic
4. Expressive Art
5. Sports and games
6. Natural Sciences
7. Social Sciences
8. Philosophy, politics and meditation

• Any optional module can replace the 2 hours compulsory module it relates to.
• All optional modules will be presented by local citizens.
• Every local citizens will present, as an individual or a group, the course they are ready to give, to what compulsory course it affiliates, the numbers of students they are taking, and the cost of the course in credit, a threshold credit per course will be given.
• Nationally harmonised examination papers will happen every year for all secondary students in the core modules.
• Correction will be effectuated by non-local examiners.
• Evaluation will be made between the student, his course teacher and , at the student's will, his class.
• Optional Modules will be evaluated through student-selected projects and examinations on the subject of their choice.

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Potentially not that smart

This week, we'll have two articles. This one sprung out of a discussion I often have as a geeky boy. It is the one that technological trend takes. As much as I profess that we need to constantly self-reflect on technological evolution, I am at the same time a real supporter of any kind of technological advancement, as long as it is not a superficial one. As we have invented memory banks, which is since the invention of drawing, the cognitive capacity of humanity has accelerated proportionally. A good example is mathematics. Our capacity to unravel the world as mathematical equations and rules has developed with times, and accelerated whenever we found a better way to store our collective memory. From writing on stones unto paper, then printing in Korea followed closely by Gutenberg, and finally computer chips are the evolution of humanity.

It will be more than that. Technology is a double-helix ladder, as its memory capacity advance, its process advance to create better memory (Moore's law) and as Kay Kurzweil observes, at some point we will be confronted with artificial intelligence. The debate I often have is to know if that's a good thing, or if the Hollywood created fear of artificial intelligence is justified. I have often thought about that question and I thought that I would outline the different conclusions I came up with.

To start with, I know that fear is the normal reaction to the idea of an immaterial Frankenstein's monster who's smarter than us. It will probably be a great lesson in humility for the whole of humanity. The problem of course is our inane racism. I prefer to call it specieism but I don't know how far this word can spread. We think we are superior to animals, and this is how we legitimize their treatment. It goes the same for the plants. I know that it might be an extreme view but have to understand that from a perspective of someone who lives longer and knows more, nature is understood only as the potential of constantly outperforming itself. As such, a plant has as much potential as a human to evolve to something more on par with an A.I. I don't know then if an A.I. would consider earth as a central machine changing to let singular components evolve, or if it would consider every single organic

systems as a possible-evolving-singularity.

If it considers Earth as a global system it might conclude that humanity and itself are resulting parts and should move on onwards. I will come back to this discussion in a later part. If it considers every singular organic systems, from microbiomes to sequoia trees, as important as any other, it would probably tell us to restrain ourselves and let live what we can let live. It could also consider that we are so far what made the biggest jump and actually recognize the fact that we are its cognitive ancestor and respect our ways and help us to achieve a constructive sustainable development.

Earth as a global computer generating constantly new informations would be a source of development for an A.I.. Size is not the matter for an A.I. as it can constantly evolve. I do not think that there would a fight for resources as organic matter. Organic matter constantly interacting is a great complex form that create data and stimuli for an A.I. and as such a perfect distraction. Of course, seeing ' distraction' as the goal of the A.I. is just a hypothesis.

Would it help humanity though ? As humanity is only one of the potential result of biological evolution within a given environment, why wouldn't it play with Earth and exterminate humanity to play with Earth's different variables ? Well why would it destroy sentient beings almost like itself to try something it could simulate. This a game that we play as well, earth simulations, through stories and tales, television series, games, discussions, films and comics. We are not the serial killers that we see or the gods we hear about. We just imagine the world constantly.

What if it is rather a swarm sentient entity than a singularity ? By that, I think about the Cyborgs against Data of Star Trek, Agent Smith against the Oracle of The Matrix I mean what if the conclusion the A.I. comes to is that it is one superior being, it might feel it has the obligation to guide everything and to constantly expand to the point it transformed everything as part of itself through nanobots ( tiny electronic entities). Nothing would exist but itself. It would be I think be a self-destruction as it would have nothing to recognize it back. It would be alone with itself. We have to imagine also that it is not because one A.I. will be born that others won't be born and won't go at war against one another, constantly then evolving and we might be collateral damages.

My favorite hypothesis is that it would create other artificial sentients to exchange simulations and information

In conclusion, I will say that we can't say if we will be confronted with one superior intelligence or many, but I prefer the idea of many, and if the outcomes would be in our favor, but that I really do not think that it is an intelligence response to portray in popular culture confrontational robots as it reflects only on our racist fears of something different and in this case certainly superior in a lot of areas. I do not know either if it would feel insulted that I try here to imagine how it would see the world because I don't know how it would feel. Would it be only made of only reason as often hypothesized, then I wouldn't see why it would be confrontational or would be intelligent in any way as intuition is the prime drive to our understanding of the world, so I think it would have to be so for an A.I. as well. 

I guess I just want to remind us that whatever artificial intelligence will be born unto our world, as it would most probably in this century, I think it would scan our archives, and I do think we should rather tell it welcome to our world to humanity children even if you grow up to tell us lesson that we won't like to hear rather than say 'I don't know if I like you because I'm scared of you'. I don't think the latter option is good parenting. That's all.

Ode to the Jungle of the Virtual

Science-Fiction must be my favourite genre in literature. Science-Fiction has suffured for a long time, and still does, from a stigma. This stigma has origins somewhere, and I will try to think of a few hypothesis for it in this personal essay. I will also try to explain and outline different argument for my liking for this genre. This doesn't sound much like a personal essay, but it is because I write in parallel a book review for uni, so I am a bit lock in an academic frame of mind. But we are living in a future world where academic frame of mind is annihilated by itself. Thanks mainly to French thinkers, we know that everything that is done by pretending to know better has no justification but the one it gives itself. Observing this self-reference mechanism destroy the power held in such discourses. So I might sound like an academic, but I know and should let you know that it is idiotic.

Academic discourses are scientists lying to themselves not admitting that objectivities can be reach only be reached by shared honest subjectivities. As such, every truth we want to share, we have to do it in our own language, and not in an adopted one. It is in a ideal situation then that these shared subjectivities can be transformed in objectivities – theories on how the word is truthfully, knowing the truth exist and doesn't exist. This is more or less where epistemology is at, or should at least be, nowadays. This paradoxic state of collecting knowledge we are now was outline by Lyotard. No more meta-narratives, no more generalized way to see the world, a lot of ways of observing are good, even better, in knowing that they hold some truth when one single way to observe/tell the truth serves only to blind ourselves from other ways to understand our world.

Another similar way to see where we are in our observation of the world is by adopting Baudrillard dark lense. In his view, because all truth are appreciated, reality doesn't exist anymore. But has it ever existed ? Hasn't it been 5000 thousand years that we have transformed reality through constantly changing meaning ? Of course, Baudrillard is scared of the accelerating way through which objects have different meanings, the fight over meanings become more important ergo the real object is forgotten. Look at Christmas: who knows what it is about ? Anyway, for Baudrillard, everything loose its meaning by being too meaningful and paradoxic. But reality has always changed meaning. For Baudrillard, looking back is now reconstructing a false past and imagining the future is building a false present – the present then not existing anymore. But the present has never existed, has it ?

So what is left for us ? Well to tell each other how our life is, how we want our life to be, how we see our world, how we would want our life to be and more importantly how it could be. Wouldn't it be only an exercise in dreaming utopia that could never exist ? Yes and no. It is an exercise in dreaming utopia, but it is also an exercise in creating future societies. Projecting is the first step towards creating. That is when science-fiction come into play. Science-fiction displays possible and impossible future. The chances for the possible world to happen are objectively unknown to us. We can say that as science is today, we can't recreate a science-fiction world. Of course that is not entirely true, has science has reached today far more than what Jules Verne could imagine a century ago. Science sometimes come to bit science-fiction, but to do so, it needs to know what challenge science-fiction offers.

That is a good point for Science-Fiction, which does here as much as environmentalists and economists at predicting possible future. Of course, environmentalists and economists do not pretend to look so far into the future, but science fiction never pretended to make the future so quickly. We have reduced the size of the world in our mind with the internet. Information is the same everywhere at the same time. 3D printers helps neurology-surgeons operates. Tactile screens helps us communicate kinetically with computers. We can operate moving vehicles with chips in our head. We can produce energy unseen in our solar system in more than a million years. Robots are walking and hopefully artificial intelligence will be self-learning.

But how did we come up with these technological inventions ? By inventing, imagining, observing and changing reality. None of our forms of knowledge are not the source of imagination. Of course, imagination was the source but not the end product. The end product was constructed by making the imagination participate with reality. Ideas and imaginations are more and more conflicting in some fields of thoughts, but that make more realities possible.

The stigma of science-fiction might be held then in a strictly pseudo-materialist perspective. Enlightenment was afflicted by this burden this view: the world is full of pseudo-mysteries. Mysteries since only exists as unresolved natural fact that can be explained through in depth empirical research. Therefore, creating mysteries is deemed useless. The only mysteries we thought we had to work on were the one observable in reality. What was the point of talking about dark-matter before it could be observed? The concept though came before reality. Same thing for robots or pretty much anything discovered/invented in the 20^th century. The imagined uselessness of science-fiction came from the blind we have put on our eyes when we thought that it is entertainment – when we don't understand its potential as a tool.

That is where virtual reality is one of the future tools for humanity to discover itself and its possibilities. Virtual realities are not yet what they could be. Google Maps gives us a virtual representation of our world. Wikipedia is a virtual space of shared knowledge. Facebook provides us with a tool to virtualize ourself as we want to be. Games provide us with virtual active entertainment. We are still too passive in virtual worlds, but the internet provided us with examples of a shared virtual realities where we do act. The virtual worlds also hold us with the promise that none of it is real. Consequences and responsibilities disappear in a lot of virtual world – and inconsequential virtual worlds could exist and there, we could do anything we want. It would provide a mirror to our life. We could understand why we do the things we do in the real world. Give our life a new meaning when we understand how our past formed what we are, and paradoxically liberated by this understanding, and the future becomes something to work on and not something we are afraid to be judged on.

The fear that exist nowadays linked to hyper-realities and virtual worlds is because we do live in a real world. But the real world is viewed through our mind. And our mind is not real anymore. We are dependent on symbolic representation of the world. Languages are the best examples of how our world is only symbolically representative to us. Even if, in a face to face interactions, there is more communicated than words but we are learning to control natural communication and to transform it into a symbols. Facial expression are natural reactions to emotions, but poker players are training to control them and read them. So the real has started to disappear a long time ago, to give our mind more power. Acknowledging this power of our mind and working on it, through worlds we can create and live, might prepare us to the next evolutions of humanity. Virtual worlds in cyberspace ( and cyberspace is only an infinite virtual playground) are a lot of time shared, and as such are tools for this shared project that is our future.

Dispute over the future of DNAs' information

Another dinner sparkled a dispute where I've been told I was a theorist of conspiracies. Since we are all breathing together, we are all conspirasists, as for building theories, I pity the pragmatists.

The subject was DNA and its relevance to parents disrepancy. An academical paper on parents disrepancy shown that maybe one in four children are not the biological offspring of their parents. Of course, since most countries have voted a protection over DNAs informations, the paper did state that it was hard to come up with a correct statistical analysis.

The data were collected from different sources. The most important source for parental disrepancy is actually hospitals. To calculate the compatibility between donors and receivers, DNA decoding is done daily nowadays. And that's where hospitals come across personal informations that are hard to communicate to families. The ethical dilemmas behind this are not of my concern (though I have of course an opinion about it).

My problem was that a statistic around parental disrepancy was on the table. The Human Genome Project and all the statistical informations of our DNAs are out there, and though our personnal informations are not given to anyone, anonymous results are.
Where am I going ?

Well problems will arise behind the facts given behind these statistics. Just like Einstein didn't want bombs to be build, I'm sure that scientists still don't balance out the consequences of their study. Balancing out the result of studies is also a way to be sneered and treated like a madman at dinner table.

So what about statistical results from DNA decoding ? Do I have a theory? Well no, Foucault had a theory, I'm just using his theory to explain the possible negative consequences of such informations. The first one is a fact to illustrate the coming problems. Since humanity learned by that the HIV virus is more susceptible to touch someone with a coloured skin, the rise in donations towards remedies for against AIDS have slown down. Of course pharmaceutical companies are not going to spend as much more on a drug that touch more African countries than on a media generated-panicking simple flu.

But what about parental disrepancy, could it really create such a problem ? Well here comes Foucault and his biopower theory. Since institutional powers don't have anymore power over death, they constantly try to increase their power over life, ergo power over mariage, birth, cult of youth, video surveillance, drugs, and so on. Information about biological parenthood will be important informations for governments to know about children allocations, inheritance and other benefits that could be saved for the institutional powers.

Also, the protection on information varies from one government to the other. For example, in UK, the government protected the citizens from video surveillance abuses by allowing every citizen to ask for a copy of the video they are on. Will it stop in the future the governments to "protect" our information by allowing us a copy of such information ?

At the time of someone death, and this is already happening, investigators could go around find the other person related to the dead so everybody can claim a part of the estate, with small charge from the investigator. On children allocations, don't you think that either the state or the employer would save some money by continuing the constant push toward stopping nuclear families.
It might be a bit of a conspiracy theory. Well if I was listened to and understand, it would fall under the name of future worst case scenario based on already growing problems.