If we could look back in time from 2050 at today’s world, it is obvious that the concept of a full national sovereignty and a nearly absolute individual freedom must be significantly constrained if we want to survive as a species. It is natural that we do not want to accept the limitation of our freedoms, because it is so much against the very nature of being a human. We believe we were born free and will remain free till the very last day of our life. However, if we look closely, our individual freedom and our individual rights have been subjected to the laws of the country we were born since the moment of conception (protecting the rights of the unborn). In the last 50 years, individuals in the Western world gained more freedom than ever before in the areas such as divorce laws, abortion, gay rights, freedom of information etc. However, it seems we have now reached the peak for those freedoms.
The same is true of the nations’ sovereignty. The decolonization period of the 1960s brought sovereignty to many former colonies. Today, we need to do the reverse. We need to accelerate the process, in which we will have to sacrifice more freedom and more sovereignty. We must really prepare to become the citizens of this planet rather than of any specific country. This, of course, drastically contrasts with the current wishes of billions of individuals and countries. Take Russia for example, which has been trying to subjugate the neighbouring countries, such as Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia. China’s approach to Tibet and the Uyghurs Muslims falls in the same category. Even in the European Union we have some countries, including in the Eurozone, which do not want to federate, because from todays perspective they will see it as giving up a large part of their sovereignty and gaining little in return. But from 2050 perspective, it is all too obvious that we, humans, have no other option but a deep reform of a democratic system, which must include some limitation of our individual freedoms and a national sovereignty.
Democracy has been through severe crises before. Just think about the first half of the 20th century. Communism and Nazism have forced significant changes to the liberal democracy, like the creation of the United Nations, the Welfare State and the European Union. When analysing the needs for the reform of democracy after WWII, we took mainly a rear mirror view – looking at what went wrong, considering the old, known phenomena. These reforms were implemented without anticipating major changes in the future in political area (e.g. decolonization), or social and technological domains (which are critical right now).
New, unprecedented challenges both in the scale and scope, which Humanity is facing right now, will of course also require learning from the past mistakes. But even greater endeavour must be made to create a system of a planetary governance that would be resilient to unprecedented scale and pace of changes stemming from the rapid implementation of various technological innovations and societal changes on a global scale, impacting every individual and every country. A new democracy must be built not only to reduce the risk of Global Disorder, but also to bolster our capability of making a safe transition to the time when we will coexist with Superintelligence. Humanity should use these three or four remaining decades to prepare as best as it can for that period. Ultimately, it will mean the hand-over of our destiny to the next species following the laws of evolution. We are entering a transition period.
In that transition period, which may be uncomfortable at times, we should modify democracy, or create an alternative system of governance that would best facilitate the long-term goals of Humanity. We should build in stages a new democratic system for the Human Federation (HF) and that has been covered extensively on our Euro Agora subsidiary website. The first stage should be the federalization of dozens of countries, which are already at a similar level of economic and social development. This will be a testing ground for an eventual federalization of all nations into the future Human Federation. Some countries, mainly superpowers such as Russia or China, may not be willing to participate in these initial stages at all. They may not only ignore such a federalization process but might be even hostile to the very idea of creating a planetary model of democracy. Yet despite that, we will have to complete the necessary deep reforms of democracy and initiate a long period for a gradual transition of sovereign states into a single Human Federation.
The HF will have its Constitution, the Parliament and the World Government, which in the scenarios presented on the Euro Agora website might evolve from the European Federation (EF). There are many options for the formation and the functioning of these institutions. This is of course only a kind of a visualisation only briefly presented here. The HF Parliament will elect its Presidency (the President and two Vice Presidents) for a period of 6 years, similar as in the EF. The function of the President should be rotating on a bi-annual basis, when one of the Vice Presidents becomes the President.
Unlike in the EF, the Prime Minister and two deputy Prime Ministers of the HF’s Government should be elected for a period of 6 years by the Parliament rather than by the President. The function of the Prime Minister, similarly as that of the President, should be rotating every two years, when one of the deputy Prime Ministers becomes the Prime Minister. There should be a pool of candidates for the Cabinet of 30 ministers and 200 deputy ministers, representing each of the Continents (the numbers are of course only indicative). As has been indicated earlier, it is very likely that all top representatives of the Human Federation, starting with the President, will be Transhumans having as a team, and not as an individual, full access to the control and decision centre of Superintelligence.
Each continent will be allocated a number of candidates for ministers, which will be proportional to its ratio of the world’s population. The candidates representing a Continent will be selected randomly and join the pool of candidates for ministers. The actual members of the Cabinet and deputy ministers will be selected by the Prime Minister from the pool of candidates, after the consultation with the President. The whole government will then have to be approved by the HF Parliament. The President and two Vice Presidents will be the voting members of the HF’s Government. Both the President and the Prime Minister will report to the HF Parliament. The President will authorize (sign off) all decisions taken by the HF’s Government. He will also represent the HF in any ‘negotiations’ with Superintelligence. Such a negotiation process may never take place, if Superintelligence will be fully controlled by Transhumans, because all HF Government ministers’ minds will be already partly fused with Superintelligence, controlling it from ‘inside’
Apart from Transhumans, some purely digital agents will also have access to the core decision centre of the Superintelligence but only for the decisions immediately below the HF Government level, so humans (Transhumans) will always be in the overall control of Superintelligence. Such an arrangement will most likely run for a few decades after 2050. In this period Superintelligence will be in its adulthood and will be indispensable in keeping the fast-changing civilization in a relative harmony.