The Venus Project

This page is a seed article. You can help Issuepedia water it: make a request to expand a given page and/or donate to help give us more writing-hours!

Issues

Venus Project FAQ #52 answers the question "will there be a government?" thusly:

As to the need for government, only during the transition from a monetary based society to a cybernated high-technological resource based economy of common heritage would it be necessary to utilize the services of systems analysts, engineers, computer programmers, etc. They will not dictate the policies or have any more advantage than other people. Their job will be to carry out the restoration of the environment to near natural conditions as possible on land and in the sea. They will also economically layout the most efficient way to manage transportation, agriculture, city planning, and production. This too is always in the process of modification and updating to fit the needs of an ever-changing civilization. There are no final frontiers.

It seems clear that either they are using an unusual definition of "government", or else they haven't thought this all the way through.

Leaving aside the semantic question of whether government by algorithm is still government, the question of who will appoint the programmers is a big one (and one which they don't seem to have even noted, much less addressed).

Since there would be enormous gains to be had for a few by slipping special exceptions into the governance code (or whatever they are calling it), there will have to be some kind of public process for preventing this from happening, and the interests who stand to benefit from those special exceptions will be battling to prevent that process from functioning properly – in short, politics.

And then of course there's the larger question of deciding what overall algorithms and processes should be used to make allocation decisions. Even if every single member of society is benevolent (which they aren't), there are bound to be disagreements over what's best, and the need to change structures and fine-tune parameters over time as technology changes and society evolves – there will have to be a process by which to obtain a consensus on those changes.

Links

Reference

• Wikipedia redirects to Jacque Fresco
• Conservapedia: no information as of 2015-06-04
• RationalWiki has a more detailed critique
• SourceWatch has an uncritical stub article as of 2015-06-04