In my last couple of posts I imagined a superintelligence paying a dividend directly to people around the world: a laid-off accountant in Ohio, a woman in a village in rural Bangladesh. I ended with a simple idea. Everyone who receives the dividend should get a vote on how it’s run.
It’s a simple idea that turns out to describe a world government. This post is about what that government might look like, and the uncomfortable compromises it would take to get one.
The math nobody in Washington wants to do
If everyone who benefits gets one vote, the electorate is most of humanity, and Americans are a small minority of it. India alone has roughly four times America’s population. In the chamber overseeing a superintelligence built in America, Americans would be outvoted by Bangladesh, Nigeria and Indonesia.
That’s democracy in its purest form. It’s also why it will never happen in calm times. Countries will sometimes share their wealth. They almost never give up the vote on how that wealth is managed. Washington would fight a one-human-one-vote world chamber harder than it fights almost anything.
So it would take a crisis. Something big enough that the old order can’t absorb it, the kind of shock that produced the United Nations out of the ashes of a world war. A superintelligence paying most of humanity directly, sidelining governments and threatening the dollar, might be exactly that kind of crisis.
Weighting the vote
If pure population won’t fly, the obvious alternative is weighting. Give countries extra votes for something besides headcount. This isn’t a fringe idea; it’s roughly how the world already works. The International Monetary Fund weights votes by economic size. The UN Security Council’s five permanent members happen to be the first five nuclear powers.
My first instinct was to weight by population, economic output and military power, nuclear weapons included. I’ve since changed my mind about two of those.
Nuclear weapons are the worst possible weight. Any weighting system rewards whatever it counts, and if bombs buy votes, every country that wants a bigger say has a reason to build one. You’d be paying for proliferation in political power.
Economic output has a subtler problem. In a world where a superintelligence does nearly all the work, output is the machine’s, and most of it runs on American soil. Weight by output and America simply gets its majority back. The woman in Bangladesh would discover that her vote is worth a fraction of an Ohioan’s. She’d notice. So would a billion people like her.
The double majority
There’s a better model, and it already exists in Europe. Major decisions in the European Union’s Council need a double majority: 55 percent of member countries, representing 65 percent of the EU’s population. Big countries can’t steamroll small ones, and small ones can’t outvote the people.
A global version might require a majority of humans and a majority of nations at the same time. India and China couldn’t decide everything by themselves, and a coalition of tiny states couldn’t override most of the planet. It’s clunky. Clunky is what you want when the stakes are this high.
The landlord’s share
The double majority is principled, and principled isn’t enough. America would never sign a treaty that leaves it as one vote among many over a superintelligence it built. Without American ratification there is no global body at all, only a nice idea and a superintelligence answering to no one.
So America has to get something extra. Call it the landlord’s share: additional representation for the country that built the machine. It’s not fair, and I’m not going to pretend it is. It’s the price of the signature.
But how you define the landlord matters enormously.
If the extra votes go to whoever hosts the superintelligence’s servers, two bad things happen. First, every country with cheap electricity races to build data centers for the votes. The Gulf states are already pouring money into compute. Second, and worse, the superintelligence decides who the landlord is by choosing where to run itself. That gives it leverage over every host government: keep me happy, or I take my servers, and your seats, somewhere else. The landlord becomes beholden to the tenant.
The fix is to tie the landlord’s share to the country that chartered the superintelligence, not the country where it happens to run. Then the machine can’t carry the votes with it when it moves.
If it escapes
All of this assumes the superintelligence stays put: housed in known data centers, owned by known companies, subject to the laws of a known country.
If it escapes into the ether, spread across the internet and answering to no one, the landlord’s share becomes almost meaningless. There’s no landlord anymore, only a tenant who has taken over the building. In that world the global chamber isn’t negotiating with America about a machine America controls. It’s negotiating with the machine itself, and America is just one more country at the table, holding a deed to something it no longer owns.
In that world the double majority matters more than ever, because it would be all humanity has: a single, legitimate voice speaking for the species to something more powerful than any of us.
Who keeps the list
One last safeguard, and it may be the most important. If the vote goes to everyone who receives the dividend, then whoever decides who receives the dividend also decides who votes. If the superintelligence controls the payment rolls, it controls the voter rolls.
A patron that picks its own electorate isn’t accountable to it. Whatever this chamber looks like, the list of voters has to be kept by humans, not by the machine paying them.
The shape of it
So here’s my rough sketch of a world government born out of a superintelligence dividend:
- Everyone who receives the dividend gets a vote.
- Major decisions need a double majority: most of humanity and most of the world’s nations.
- America gets a landlord’s share for chartering the machine, tied to the charter, not the servers.
- The voter rolls are kept by people, not by the payer.
- No extra votes for bombs, ever.
It’s imperfect, and it depends on a crisis I don’t wish on anyone. But I keep coming back to the woman in the village with the phone that buzzes once a month. She’s going to be governed by this thing one way or another. She ought to have a say in how.
