Friday, December 02, 2011

Society-wide decision making


In my policy demogogue blog, I just wrote about a new company called Blueseed that is using the seasteading model to alleviate the Silicon Valley dearth of qualified tech workers.  Please read it because it is an interesting way to game the system.  But I wanted to arouse a discussion of the HF implications.  Read a couple of the posts on Econlog for a good review of the pros and cons. 

The basic idea of seasteading is that you can create your own society by putting your floating city in international waters and creating a system of laws according to your own values.  The logistics might be tough, but imagine all the different legal systems we could try out to see how they work.  Different kinds of democracies, republics, dictatorships, religion-based governments, pure communism. 

Why is this relevant to HF? Imagine the experimental environments you could create to study decision making, organizational culture, macroergonomics, etc.  I would love to design a series of seasteaded cities with different decision making procedures, run them for a couple of years, and see how the society evolves.

Thoughts??