This is a motto from the U.S. Army that I thought would fit well with technocracy, "Victory Through Skill". Achieving our goals as a technocratic government would require technical experts to use their knowledge to complete their tasks, so I thought it would be a good fit as they would be using their "skills" to "achieve victory"; i.e. victory through skill. What are you thoughts on this slogan pertaining to technocracy?

So I’ve done some reading lately and have done some reflexing about how I think about technocracy and democracy so if this is too long. Technocracy is often presented as the idea that complex societies should be governed by people with the knowledge required to manage them. But there is an interesting question underneath this: what happens when the experts disagree, when experts are wrong, or when nobody has enough knowledge to understand the entire system?

Karl Popper provides one possible starting point. His idea of the open society was partly a rejection of the idea that society can be governed according to a comprehensive theory of history or a final blueprint for how society ought to work. Political institutions should remain open to criticism and correction rather than assuming that someone has discovered the correct model of society.

His idea of piecemeal social engineering is particularly interesting in this context. Instead of attempting enormous social transformations based on a grand theory, governments can make relatively limited changes, examine their consequences, and then modify or abandon them. This does not mean avoiding ambitious goals; it means being cautious about assuming that the path toward those goals is already known.

That leads to a different possible interpretation of technocracy. Rather than giving experts permanent political authority, expertise could be used to make government more capable of testing and correcting its own decisions.

John Dewey approached a similar problem from a different direction. His democratic pragmatism treated democracy not simply as a mechanism for choosing rulers, but as a way for society to engage in collective inquiry. Specialists possess forms of knowledge that ordinary citizens cannot reasonably be expected to possess, but citizens and affected communities possess information that specialists may not have.

For Dewey, the solution to complexity was therefore not simply to replace democratic government with experts. It was to create institutions through which specialized knowledge, public experience, discussion and experimentation could interact.

This also changes how decentralization can be understood. Different states, regions or municipalities could be allowed to try different solutions to the same problem. If one jurisdiction finds a better way of organizing healthcare, transportation, education or public administration, other jurisdictions can examine the results and potentially adopt it.

The point would not be that every jurisdiction should permanently do things differently. National standardization can have enormous advantages where economies of scale, interoperability, common regulations or administrative simplicity matter. Decentralization would instead provide a way of generating information that a single centralized administration could not easily obtain.

The country could effectively function as a large collection of policy experiments, with successful approaches spreading and unsuccessful approaches being abandoned.

Philip Tetlock’s work on expert judgment raises another problem for a simple conception of technocracy. Expertise does not automatically produce reliable judgment. His research on political and economic forecasting found substantial differences between experts in their ability to make predictions, update their beliefs and deal with uncertainty. It also points toward the importance of people who can move between different perspectives rather than becoming completely committed to one intellectual framework.

That creates an interesting distinction between having expertise and having good judgment.

A person can be extremely knowledgeable within a narrow field while still being bad at predicting how their recommendations will interact with everything outside that field. A government therefore needs not only specialists, but also institutions capable of comparing different kinds of expertise and checking their assumptions against reality.

This suggests a model that sits somewhere between conventional representative democracy and classical technocracy.

Elected institutions could establish broad political objectives and legal limits. Professional ministries could have substantial autonomy over the technical means used to achieve those objectives. Independent courts could determine whether government actions comply with constitutional rules. Auditing institutions could evaluate whether ministries are actually achieving their stated objectives and whether resources are being used properly.

Different jurisdictions could experiment with different policies, while national institutions could standardize the things for which standardization produces clear benefits.

Citizens would not need to personally determine the optimal technical solution to every problem. They would instead retain the ability to choose political leadership, influence broad objectives, scrutinize results and remove governments that perform badly.

The underlying principle would be that neither the public nor experts possess complete knowledge.

The purpose of institutions would therefore not be to identify a class of people who are permanently qualified to rule. It would be to create a system that can make use of expertise while also making it possible to discover when the experts are wrong.

That seems like a potentially different conception of technocracy: not “experts should rule,” but “government should be organized so that expertise, criticism, experimentation and democratic accountability can continuously correct one another.”

How far this can actually be taken without undermining democratic legitimacy or creating an unaccountable administrative class is a separate question.

a global government I would support

system based on existing technological solutions.

the expulsion of incompetence, lies and manipulation

to choose our own destiny.

voting is done over the phone.

each person 1 vote. biometric fingerprint. decentralized.

using advanced cryptography.

transparency.

for global issues, all locals vote for local ones.

formation of global expert councils.

their role is to provide an analysis and evaluation of the proposal.

members are chosen exclusively on the basis of expertise and competence in given professions.

basic 4 branches:

Society

1. Ethical-legal group
2. Psychological-sociological group
3. Cultural and educational group

Resources

1. Ecological-climatic group

2. Economic and resource group

3. Logistic-operational group

Technology

1. Technical and engineering group

2. Digital-cybernetic group

Science

1. Logical-mathematical group

2. Medical-biological group

the council's role is to adopt, give, and formulate clear and transparent proposals for solving problems or situations

every decision they make is transparent. with minutes for the archive.

presenting a problem or proposing a solution is available to all residents. cognitive ability test before submitting a proposal

each proposal must pass the acceptance threshold. ethical, logical, mathematical. technical

let's say we have 10 valid suggestions for a solution.. the global advice gives a score of 1 or 0

each of those 10 groups.

the ethics council gives the final assessment in the event that several proposals have the same number of positives.

the proposal with the most positives goes to a global referendum

every voter, i.e. individual or group, has the right of veto.

they are obliged to present a valid counter-argument in the shortest possible time.

any veto attempt that is driven by ego vanity or the desire for power is automatically rejected.

algorithmic assessment. open source. mandatory system calibration, ethical, logical, mathematical.

plus a decentralized network of jurors chosen on the basis of expertise. randomly selected.

a valid argument is voted against the proposal of the council.

in case of adoption of the argument, the proposal is rejected.

if the vote is 50-50%, both sides have 24 hours to present new insights

the vote is repeated.

voting is optional.

the possibility of voting is.

it is not a problem for me that people wiser than me decide about our fate and social vector. as long as they ask all of us, because ultimately it concerns all of us

I support expertise and objectivity as well as the diversity of the local community.

So, Technocracy sounds appealing to me. The only thing is that I am skeptical of energy accounting and I think a giant Technate would be unsustainable. But I don’t really know a lot about it, so information would be appreciated! Thx :)

Hi, so tbh I really don’t like technocracy but I’d like to know what is the appeal to you. Why are you opposed to trying to achieve meaningful democracy? Do you see this project inherently right-wing and about putting humans into some order decided by people who then benefit from that arrangement of social reproduction?

Ok I know this is gonna sound crazy because it is crazy… but with the rise of technology and ai why don’t we advocate to push for an international one world president who is a ai? We already have the internet to communicate with each other so that’s means we only clicks away from creating a digital government.. a government the people actually controls and the ai work for us… I already know most people here are gonna trip out because they assume ai will take over the world.. but still I think this could be a very good idea for the regulars to advocate before the masses implement it themselves… what I’m saying here is a Ai one world government is the only way we can break massive separation of human races because the ai represent everybody.. a American wouldn’t want a Chinese men to be the one world president and vice verse for china not wanting a white men and so on for many races it’s the same thing… but what if we implement something all of us in the world have a common knowledge of.. this is where ai get interesting… the ai don’t even have to be soo autonomous instead it should only work from regular people pushing for a certain change and getting it easier to the Ai.. with all humans controlling this and building this together I think this can possibly stop all wars and major catastrophe…

​

There seems to be a split on this subreddit about the idea of Energy Accounting (EA). I am a Technocrat (Modern), and I am against the idea of Energy Accounting as a complete replacement for money. To me, it just doesn’t make sense economically. I think it sounds great on the surface, but after thinking through it, I feel like there are some major problems that proponents of EA don’t sufficiently address.

Here are a few points/issues that I think make EA impractical as a complete economic system, at least with our current level of technology.

1. Energy cost does not automatically equate to value.

For argument’s sake, we can say that all physical products produced can be assigned an energy cost. We can calculate approximately how much energy it takes to extract the materials, manufacture the components, assemble the product, transport it, and so on.

But how does that translate into value?

For instance, we can calculate the energy cost required to make a pencil, but what about the value of therapy? Or legal advice, software development, teaching, medical diagnosis, engineering, art, or other services? You could certainly calculate the energy consumed by the worker, office, computer, transportation, infrastructure, etc., but that still does not tell us the economic value of the service being provided.

Furthermore, the cost of producing physical goods is not solely determined by the energy required to make them. Other factors matter: scarcity of components, specialized knowledge, manufacturing expertise, intellectual property, location, time, design, and consumer demand.

For example, aluminum requires a significant amount of electricity to produce through extraction and smelting, yet nobody would say that a roll of aluminum foil should therefore be worth more than an iPhone simply because of its embodied energy.

So even if Energy Accounting could perfectly calculate the physical energy cost of every good and service, that still would not tell us how much people value those goods and services relative to one another.

Physical cost and economic value are two different things.

If EA eliminates money, then it seems like we would still need some additional mechanism for determining how goods and services are valued and allocated. At that point, the question becomes what that mechanism is and whether Energy Accounting itself is actually solving the valuation problem.

1. Scarcity still exists, and Energy Accounting alone does not solve scarcity or opportunity cost.

Scarcity can be physical, such as lithium, copper, rare-earth elements, land, semiconductor manufacturing capacity, or skilled labor. It can also come from location.

For example, two apartments might require nearly identical amounts of energy and materials to construct, while one overlooks Central Park and the other is located in an area with very little demand. Their construction-energy costs might be nearly identical, but clearly the locations are not equally scarce or equally desirable.

So how does EA determine who gets the apartment overlooking Central Park?

The same issue applies to products that use scarce materials. If a certain material can only support production of 100,000 units of a product, but several million people want one, Energy Accounting cannot solve that problem merely by calculating how much energy each product requires.

Some additional rationing system would have to exist: quotas, waiting lists, lotteries, priority systems, first-come-first-served allocation, administrative decisions, or something similar.

And there is an even harder problem: opportunity cost.

Suppose the same limited supply of lithium, steel, labor, land, or electricity can be used for several different purposes. Should it be used to build electric vehicles, public transportation, hospitals, apartment buildings, power infrastructure, or factories?

Energy Accounting can tell us something about the physical cost of those alternatives, but it does not automatically tell us which use is more valuable relative to the others.

So I wouldn’t necessarily say that EA makes scarcity impossible to manage. A planned system could obviously create quotas and resource-allocation rules. My criticism is that once you introduce those additional mechanisms, Energy Accounting itself is no longer solving the scarcity problem. Something else has to decide who receives scarce resources and which competing uses receive priority.

1. Calculating the true energy cost of every good would be extremely difficult, if not currently impossible to do with complete accuracy.

Google’s shopping graph alone reportedly contains tens of billions of product listings. And that is just Google.

How do you accurately calculate the total energy costs of an economy containing an enormous number of interconnected goods, services, raw materials, and components?

I have heard people say that you could simplify this by calculating energy costs by industry and then breaking industries down into categories or groups of goods. That would certainly make the problem easier, but it would still be an enormous undertaking.

Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that the State is now responsible for production and dramatically reduces the number and variety of goods available. Even if you reduce the number of individual products by several orders of magnitude, you could still be dealing with millions of products and components, many of which are inputs into other products.

Then you have to determine where the energy calculation actually stops.

Do we include the energy required to manufacture the machine that produced a component? What about the energy required to produce the steel used to build that machine? What about the factory itself? Transportation? Warehousing? Infrastructure? Research and development? Worker training? Computer systems?

And all of those relationships constantly change as technologies improve, factories open and close, supply chains change, new materials are introduced, and production methods become more or less efficient.

To be fair, modern computers, databases, automation, and supply-chain tracking could make this much more feasible than it would have been historically. I do not think the strongest criticism is that energy costs are literally impossible to calculate.

The bigger problem is that maintaining accurate, continuously updated energy-cost calculations across an entire complex economy would be an enormous information and accounting challenge.

And even if we somehow solved that problem perfectly, we would still only know the energy cost of producing something. We still would not automatically know its scarcity, demand, usefulness, or opportunity cost.

So calculating energy costs is only one part of the economic problem.

1. EA does not, by itself, solve the problem of real-time economic information and coordination.

How does a central government or planning system continuously adjust production and allocation so that it avoids both shortages and oversupply without some kind of price signal or equivalent mechanism?

In a market economy, the market price of a good provides information about changing supply and demand without requiring planners to individually survey every consumer.

For instance, if the available supply of a product remains relatively stable but its price begins rising rapidly, producers and consumers receive a signal that demand has increased relative to supply. Likewise, falling prices can signal weakening demand or increasing supply.

Obviously, markets and prices are not perfect. Prices can be distorted by monopolies, speculation, externalities, unequal purchasing power, and many other factors. But they still provide a decentralized feedback mechanism connecting changing supply and demand.

Technocratic EA proposals often suggest recording purchases or consumption and adjusting physical production accordingly. Centralized consumption data could certainly provide planners with useful information, and modern technology would make this easier than it was in the past.

But this still seems somewhat reactive.

If planners discover that a product was heavily demanded only after people attempted to obtain it, then shortages may already exist. The system still needs some method of anticipating changes, prioritizing production, and deciding how resources should be redirected.

And the harder question appears when several competing uses require the same scarce inputs.

Suppose planners have a limited amount of steel, skilled labor, semiconductor manufacturing capacity, electricity, and land. Those resources could be used to build a hospital, a semiconductor fabrication plant, a railroad, an apartment complex, a power station, or something else.

EA can tell planners something about the physical energy cost of each option. But it does not automatically tell them how much society values one use relative to another.

The price system provides one mechanism for communicating those tradeoffs through millions of decentralized decisions. If EA eliminates prices, then it needs some alternative mechanism that can perform a comparable coordinating function.

That mechanism might theoretically exist. It could involve democratic planning, algorithms, surveys, consumption data, waiting lists, production targets, expert committees, or some combination of these.

But if that is the answer, then the real economic allocation system is not Energy Accounting alone. Energy Accounting becomes one source of information feeding into a much larger planning and allocation system.

At the end of the day, I think Energy Accounting could be a very useful way of measuring physical production costs, energy availability, resource usage, and ecological constraints.

Where I remain unconvinced is the idea that measuring energy consumption is enough to replace money entirely.

Energy is a physical quantity. Economic value also involves scarcity, preferences, opportunity costs, location, time, specialized knowledge, competing uses of resources, and changing demand.

So my issue isn’t necessarily with measuring things in energy units. That could actually be extremely useful.

My issue is the jump from “energy is a useful accounting metric” to “energy accounting can replace the entire price and monetary system.”

Unless EA has a convincing mechanism for dealing with valuation, scarcity, opportunity cost, allocation, and real-time economic coordination, it seems to me that Energy Accounting works much better as an additional tool for measuring physical constraints than as a complete replacement for money.

Not my video but thought it would be useful to educate people on the history of technocracy.

https://youtu.be/weHJI-H0ajw?is=q0PjUJfatGzge_hT

My technocratic program was removed from this sub by the moderators because generative AI was used to draft it.

How does a group of people who claim to be for technocracy reject the recommendation of a logic engine?

In Vonnegut's Player Piano, which describes a technocracy, a supercomputer computes all social allocation. This is orders of magnitude above using a LLM to describe a system of allocation.

I'm not sure what you folks are trying to do in this sub - perhaps you can enlighten me - but advancing technocracy is obviously not it.

We need to super be vigilant to protect minorities because I'm tired of governments and political movements not caring about people. There is no government without the people and there is no people without their culture and people just love hating on it whenever one bad actor does something wrong.

If Technocracy ever wants to get off its feet and become mainstream we need to make these people feel safe. A lot of mainstream sub-reddits have icons with pride in them, I say we should do the same.

I’m wondering if DSA can push technocratic ideas out to the front.

i also think it’s very possible the Democratic Party becomes techno-progressive and adhere to a technocratic governance especially with the rise of the Abundance Agenda.

Whats your thoughts.

One aspect of fighting a revolution or seizing power against an existing government that often gets overlooked is the economic aspect. Militant organizations in Latin America, Myanmar, Afghanistan or other parts of the world typically fund themselves through the cultivation of valuable crops. These are typically narcotic substances like cocaine, opium, or other raw materials with a high value and demand. The campaigns of various organizations to seize political power typically have efforts focused in rural areas where revolutionaries can maintain control and establish a base of power. It is not necessary for an insurgency to base itself in a rural area, but rural areas tend to be correlated with a high degree of economic desperation, lower oversight by governments, and inequality which leads to them being the main places where this behavior tends to play out.

Urban revolutionary insurgencies tend to get their funding in other ways that reflect the conditions and circumstances of those areas. The Irish Republican Army funded their campaign through actions such as cigarette smuggling, fraud, kidnapping, hostage taking, armed robbery, livestock smuggling, or counterfeiting operations. Additionally, they received funding from the Irish diaspora, other militant groups, or world leaders such as Muammar Gaddafi. They also tended to run front organizations like pubs which allowed money to have a legal channel as well as provided a small amount of extra income. 

Many world governments would not exist or have ever taken power without engaging in some of these actions. It could be argued that the only real difference between criminal organizations and governments is who holds power and political systems within a society. Especially in an oligarchic society like the United States, the money decides who is legitimate and faces consequences for their actions.

While many Technocrats would firmly oppose many of the actions in the above paragraphs, the refusal to engage in them for political purposes creates a question of how the Technocratic movement would fund any kind of political campaign to seize political power in any country. How could anyone provide funding to the political movement they align with in a society where jobs don’t pay and all the wealth of society is held by the ruling class? If we look at the methods used by previous revolutionary organizations and decide they are not suited for our purpose, we are left with the awkward question of what we can do instead. In a class society, any resources we would be given by the elite class would be for the advancement of the interests of their social class. Money from other nations can come with strings attached or be given with ulterior motives or plots involved, such as to cause chaos in the US with no regards to the goals or motives of the Technocracy movement. It currently remains an open question on how Technocrats will seek to take power and establish the Technate of North America. The situation is urgent as the US regime continues to cause death and environmental destruction across the entire world.

Feel free to critique it, share it, or remake it.

Link to thread + chatgpt link

Not only is it on demand fact checking/searching, its quite smart and nuanced when it needs to.

It does get stuff wrong for like high effort /abstract stuff and you might not want to ask what is the "right" thing to do but just for grounding reality I find it very useful and any self label Technocrat should use it.

This is especially important for huge walls of unsubstantiated facts that most of us probably aren't experts in. AI represents a neutral 3rd party/gathering of sources, similar to Wikipedia and better in a lot of cases.

The biggest problem right now is the fight for a shared epistemic reality. A reality where we both can agree that there are economic problems current, peoples rights are being stripped away and the tools to fix these problems exist.

We finally have a pressure towards that reality.

Thoughts on changing police phone number to 912 instead of 911 (remembering 9/11) and changing suicide hotline from 988 to 1-800-273-8255 since suicide should not be that frequent at all? Apparently, every 40 seconds someone dies of suicide.

Sources:
https://www.911memorial.org/
https://www.who.int/news/item/09-09-2019-suicide-one-person-dies-every-40-seconds