Anarchism, Athenians and A.I.

Panels from V for Vendetta. Art by David Lloyd.

In 2016 well-known British writer and journalist Dominic Wells interviewed Alan Moore.
Wells wrote: I recently spent six hours with Alan Moore. I wrote this feature about it. But the total interview transcript ran to 30,000 words. So, on my blog, in daily instalments, I’m going to be posting the edited highlights – as far as possible, all in Moore’s own words.
You can read them all at the following links.

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 

Part 7 - Part 8 - Part 9 - Part 10 - Part 11

Selected excerpts below.

Alan Moore: [...] I’m an anarchist. I don’t believe in democracy, and I think that this [Moore is referring to Brexit] shows the massive flaws. If you’re going to have democracy in an ill-informed, massive population you’re always going to get shit like this. That is my opinion.
“And, I’ve often said, you cannot have democracy and Rupert Murdoch on the same planet. It’s like, how’s that going to work? The only way that democracy would work is if we were to adopt the Athenian direct democracy system.
“Now, I’m not championing the Athenians: they kept slaves, they weren’t perfect. But if they had got an issue that affected the whole country, they would appoint by lottery a jury, of say 50 people, from all walks of life, probably actually except the slaves, but the principle is: you’ve got a decision of national importance to be made, you have 50 people, then you have two people giving the pros and the cons, like in a court. Two experts explaining thoroughly the reasons for and against. Then you let them vote, then immediately you dissolve the jury; they dissolve back into the normal population.
“So straight away you remove the possibility of an administration voting for extra perks, pay rises, because they are not going to be the administration, it’s in their interests to vote for what is best for the broad mass of the population which they will be returning into. That would work.
“People have said, ‘oh well, direct democracy is just endless referendums’. No. You don’t need to ask everybody in the country, as long as you’ve got a representative section. That would work, and that would be a form of democracy that anarchists could vote for, because it would not be about appointing leaders. So, that is what I would favour. [...]

 

[...] there is a traffic system in Hong Kong at the moment. It’s called a ‘niche A.I.’ This is not a full artificial intelligence, in that it is not aware, it’s not going to take over the world and send Arnie back in time. There aren’t self-aware machines, perhaps there never will be.
“What it is, is a very smart computer which knows everything about its particular niche – its niche being the Hong Kong traffic system. It knows where the work gangs are, it knows where there’s flaws being reported and it knows the quickest way to sort out these flaws with the least energy and man-hours. The Hong Kong traffic system works much better than it ever has done, and that is, I would imagine, quite a complicated system. So, niche A.I.s – why not? To work out all these things which don’t need votes or opinions.
“Leaders are never going to legislate for their own obsolescence. But unless we’re going to have a Weimar revolution, and we replace one power structure with another that will be as bad or worse, which never works… unless we do that, then we have to find a way around these people. I would argue that with technology being as it is at the moment, we have the means to do that. We can go round them. We can set up structures of our own.
“Let’s go back to those small communities. Let’s connect up those small communities, because we can do these days], and we perhaps have them all manage to buy a niche A.I, something like that. [...]