CoIn (Collective Intelligence) strives to be the most effective, efficient, and fair governance system, inspired by issues we face, politics, science, religions, common sense, and our experiences of life in a globalizing world.
Issues, among others, include Earth’s inhabitability (climate change, pollution, demography, ecological footprint), poverty (access to food, shelter, healthcare, education), aggression (terror, wars, weapons – including weapons of mass destruction, crime, despotism), unequal opportunities (discrimination, extreme income / wealth gaps, vulnerable groups), poor governance (legitimacy), pandemics, diseases of civilization, robots taking over jobs…
Throughout history, we got better and better in cumulating and developing our knowledge. Formal institutions (like religious organizations, states, governments, political parties, corporations, legal entities) played an important role in unifying people in different locations, with different cultural and social backgrounds, despite the challenges of communication.
In the recent decades, humanity overcame some of these challenges. Technologies that enable us to replace formal institutions with direct communication are widely used, just think about social media. The next step is to apply the same technologies to governance.
CoIn determines the basic rules of a such system. It consists of individuals, with equal rights, obligations, and opportunities. Decisions are made by the impacted individuals (following the principle of subsidiarity). Individuals form communities as they wish, and they are free to change any decisions they made (including their membership in communities) at any time.
CoIn uses a natural balancing mechanism that aims to find the optimal answers to policy questions (acknowledging that there may not be such answers, or they may vary among communities, locations, over time, etc.). Here are some examples:
– Everyone has a job: decision making. Money is “printed” in a way that all activities (even what you do outside the system, if endorsed by others) are awarded. Anonymity provides unbiased feedback. Sharing your ideas is awarded in line with their popularity, while assessing others’ ideas is rewarded based on the number of such assessments. From the many ideas, which ones do you assess? – It is up to you. Expectation: people will feel safe and balanced, have a peace of mind, and these increase their creativity and motivation to contribute, help them find ways to practice and develop all their skills.
– Everyone has an impact on the determination of their own compensation: how much performance matters (from a safe, but less motivating universal basic income to a competitive, but potentially lower salary), how much of their money should be spent on public services (from self-sufficiency to a “welfare state”). Expectation: each community will find their “Pareto-optimal” balances.
– Wealth gap is reduced: Land is not private property; money cannot be inherited. Expectation: people will be motivated to earn more, but only until they can meaningfully spend their earnings during their lifetime (while they will have to worry less about the economic security of future generations).
– Environmental impact is under control: To start and maintain a project, the only rule is that public needs to be convinced about its sustainability. Expectation: ecological footprint will be kept within a reasonable range and monitored constantly, people will be motivated to run or invest in innovative projects (there is no tax, so they can keep all profit). CoIn replaces all complex political, social, economic systems with a simple set of rules, by aggregating the most valuable information: all people’s opinions.