Democracy is dead, long live scientific sentimentocracy

As political unrest spills across the globe, could science have the answer? Democracy is dead, long live scientific sentimentocracy says Russ Swan… at the very least it could put the odd politician out of a job

It seems obvious that the great democratic experiment has failed. In its short existence (just a few decades, by any sensible measure) it has achieved nothing except propel humanity to the edge of several cliffs at the same time. That would be an amusing and remarkable trick, if this were some sort of circus act, but it's a bit more important than that.

It will be sad to see democracy go because, for a short period, it looked promising. Governments worked to make life better for the people.

Now we see only division, rancour, and the obsession of intellectually-deficient politicians with putting self before party, party before country, and dogma before everything else.

Where do we go from here? We've recently flirted with government by referendum – a referocracy if you like – but that has proved totally unsatisfactory. Whatever side of the arguments you are on, regarding Europe and the status of the still-just-about-united Kingdom, it's obvious that referenda have only hardened pre-existing divisions. The losers are furious, and that in turn makes the winners even more furious.

It wouldn’t be a great leap to extend AI technology to government, to create a cryptodemocratic sentimentocracy

What do you say we restore absolute monarchy? This would win favour with certain sections of society – not necessarily the sections we might want to decide our governance, but that is sort of the point. Monarchy needs no popular mandate, even though it might actually win some approval. Paradox.

Vote to lose your vote, sheeple. You know you want to.

Science has the answer! Another option is dictatorship. We already have a situation where the 'will of the people' and what's actually good for the country are deliberately and cynically manipulated by those seeking to claim or retain power. It is sometimes said that the best form of government is a benign dictatorship, but can there really be such a thing? If we were running an experiment to investigate the assumption that power corrupts, we would by now have closed the lab notebook and written-up the conclusions. Yes. Yes it does.

Great news everybody! Science has an answer, which I'm calling sentimentocracy. This is a continuous stealthy assessment of the national mood, used to guide policy and make decisions. The input is the biggest of big data, being the social media output of the great unwashed, scraped in real time to provide an array of continuously-updated scores.

Social posts are captured, parsed through semantic filters, and processed by advanced artificial intelligence. Using this tool, all decisions are guaranteed to be popular – and what could be more democratic than that?

What's more, the true will of the people can not only be measured, it can be predicted via a steady flow of carefully-phrased hints delivered through existing media channels.

"Bong! The headlines at six o'clock: a leaked memo suggests the government is considering whether the ladybird or the stag beetle should be adopted as the official national insect. Cabinet divisions over the war in [insert applicable country or region] are deepening, and meanwhile backbenchers are calling for the reintroduction of capital punishment and the reinstatement of the half-crown coin."

Instantly, banks of computers begin crunching the keywords in millions of tweets, grams, and other social posts. High-level algorithms apply interpretive logic to the expressions of delight, dismay, or bafflement, and statistical regression analysis produces a series of numerical outputs.

By the seven o'clock bulletin, the leaked proposals have been tweaked, a new set of scores produced, and policy made.

It’s already happening Sounds a bit far-fetched? This process, called sentiment analysis, is already happening. You might think your tweets are seen only by your few dozen followers, but you are already and unwittingly playing a part in this new form of cryptodemocracy.

Advertisers apply sentiment analysis to campaigns, to discover how many people really hate that new jingle or believe that this month's unrepeatable sale has genuine bargains. In parallel with sports league tables, teams are ranked by the love their supporters express.

It wouldn’t be a great leap to extend this technology to government, to create a cryptodemocratic sentimentocracy.

There are a few problems to overcome, not least of which is the inevitable tendency of complex systems to simply fall over.

But let's look on the bright side. It could automate the entire process of politics, making every one of the self-serving bastards redundant. So it wouldn’t be all bad.

Russ Swan