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By the way - I should mention that the last part about using modern technology to as organizational structure instead of decision making as part of some sort of Delphi method is originally from a 2014 interview[1] with James Burke (Connections, The Day The Universe Changed).

A few of his comments that are relevant to the use of technology with politics and society:

    We have these extraordinarily limiting constraints from a past in which we did not have
    the tools to have anything other than extraordinarily limiting constraints. But, now we
    do have the tools, and the tools are running away with us faster than the social
    institutions can keep up.
    ...
    I think countries ought to set up Departments of the Future. [...] We are on the edge of
    having the technology to be able to say, let us run a constant, dynamic, updated review
    of everything that science and technology is thinking about [...] then let us use the same
    techniques to ask the public in general, not politicians, whether they like that idea,
    whether they feel that they could live with that idea. And then, like a Delphi technique,
    re-run it until everybody stops changing their mind.
    ...
    Collate all [research laboratories and business R&D] together and process them using stuff
    like big data to see what the pattern looks like becoming, and then layering on top of that
    social media analytics to say, if this was coming, would you like it, and if not, why not?
    In other words, to have a sort of 24 hour a day referendum
The other parts of the interview are very interesting as well:

    ... it’s no longer important to teach people to be chemists or physicists or anything ‘ists
    because those jobs are gone, and if they’re not gone today they’re gone tomorrow. And unless
    we know the old tools of critical thinking and logic and such, we will not be able to handle
    what follows. So, we’re wasting our time training people to be things that will no longer
    exist in 10, 15, 20 years time.
    ...
    Every single value structure is meaningless [...] commercial society will be destroyed
    at a stroke. The trouble is the transition period [...] how we get from here to there.
    The vested interests, I mean, we’re going to have to shoot every one of them – nobody,
    nobody is going to give way to this. [...] All cultural values relate to scarcity, ultimately.
[1] http://youarenotsosmart.com/transcripts/transcript-interview...


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