Noocracies and Technocracies
Noocracies are “aristocracies of the wise” (think: Plato and his Philosopher kings). Technocracies are governments in which policy and leadership are managed by those at the top of their respective relevant fields. While Noocracies and technocracies have more potential than their detractors would have you believe, they also don’t live up to the wildest hopes of their adherents.
The question as to the quality of one of these types of governments largely comes down to the efficacy with which the government is able to filter for excellence and the corruptibility of those tests. The problem of course comes with the fact that … of course those tests are corruptible and of course judgments of expertise are heavily tinted with bias. To get an example of just what a disaster such a governance structure can become, look no further than our contemporary academic bureaucracy.
Presumably, there is no system in the world today more dedicated to filtering for intellectual giants and putting them in positions of power. Despite this, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality highlights many fields of academia that have become so overwhelmed by politics that they have stopped functioning as drivers of scientific inquiry. If not dead in function, the academic bureaucracy is on its last legs, suffering from problems that would plague any noocracy—be that conflating intelligence with support of establishment ideas (thus filtering out new ideas) or defining intelligence by the amount that you work with other “intelligent” individuals (thus causing “eddies” of research focus that punish people for dedicating themselves to work on topics not currently in the spotlight).
Technocracies, where they exist in the world today, are also uniquely prone to corruption. For example, if you tap the world’s top expert on oil drilling to create policy around oil drilling … on which side of environmental concerns might they err? To what industry will this oil-specialized technocrat return after losing their government position? With whom will this technocrat be incentivized to ingratiate themselves? This isn’t an issue of corruptibility but one of common sense.
Could one create a form of “philosopher king” or an “aristocracy of experts” that was effective? We believe so, but it would require the creation of a philosopher class into which people are born rather than a meritocracy (though the class need not be heritable). This would remove the corruption of qualifying tests and disincentivize individual corruption (e.g., by removing wealth and pride from the equation, perhaps by obligating any philosopher king or aristocracy to live in isolation).
Such a system would not be terribly different from that used in the governing structure of Tibetan Buddhism, and while their efforts did create one of the better religious leaders, the Dalai Lama still lives in significant luxury. As such, where we push for some iteration of a technocracy, it would be one moderated heavily by AI to slightly-but-firmly nudge the system away from corruption and bias. (Unfortunately, a truly unbiased AI will always look biased to those who are already completely brainwashed.)