Calculation of the system

This article inevitably mixes Chinese and English to avoid some issues, which is also a kind of helpless linguistic corruption.

In the tech circle, no one can avoid Moore's Law. The saying is well-known: the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 to 24 months, and computing power follows suit. Although this is just an empirical formula, it has actually shaped the world for the past fifty years. Computers are getting faster, smartphones are becoming smarter, and AI can even write articles, all thanks to the support of Moore's Law.

Sometimes I wonder if society has similar laws? Not transistors, but us humans. How we organize, how we make decisions, how we handle complex problems, is there a kind of "computing power" that is being upgraded? The more I think about it, the more I feel there is—this thing is Democracy.

Democracy is not a bunch of empty words, but a mechanism, a machine. It can aggregate the information and judgments of millions of people, and then produce a result. It is slow, noisy, and chaotic, but it is the "supercomputer" of society.

Democracy is actually a distributed computer

You can think of it this way: when a person votes, speaks, or expresses an opinion, it's like a CPU executing an instruction. A single instruction doesn’t mean much, but when millions or tens of millions come together, the entire society completes a large-scale computation.

Autocracy is more like a standalone machine. All decisions are centralized on one CPU, reacting quickly. To build highways and undertake projects, just a few people can give the nod to proceed. On the surface, the efficiency is high, but once this CPU crashes, the entire State goes blue screen. Historically, we have seen too many such stories.

Democracy is a distributed system. It has many nodes, high latency, and often gets noisy, but the system is not easy to crash. If something goes wrong in one place, other places can still hold up. The more complex society becomes, the more this distributed architecture is needed.

A fresh example: PolyMarket. It is a prediction market platform where users can buy shares of "yes" or "no" to wager on whether a certain event will occur in the future. For instance, "Will the US enter a recession in 2025?" The price of the shares reflects the perceived probability of the event occurring. As new information emerges, prices move instantly, and the market continuously adjusts.

It's like a small distributed computer: different people place bets with different information, and the final market price is a synthesized result. It's not perfect, but often more reliable than expert predictions.

The trend of the winning probabilities for Trump, Biden, and Harris on Polymarket during the 2024 US presidential election accurately predicted the results

This is the "computing power of Democracy": not relying on a few geniuses brainstorming, but on countless ordinary people continuously inputting and correcting, synthesizing a judgment that is closer to reality.

This machine certainly has its faults.

Some people might say: Then why do we often see the Democracy society in such a mess? The parliament is in chaos, the government is shut down, elections turn into dog fights; how does this resemble a "supercomputer"?

It's actually like the first time you look at the running logs of a distributed computer; the screen is full of errors, delays, and conflicts. To an outsider, it looks chaotic, but an insider knows this is the norm for the system. The benefit of distribution is not that it has no problems, but that it can continue to operate despite the issues.

However, to get back to the point, this "Democracy Computer" does have its own limitations:

• Information noise: Everyone can voice their opinions, with fake news and junk comments flying everywhere, leading to a decrease in the signal-to-noise ratio.
• Polarization: Nodes do not communicate with each other, but instead insult each other, wasting computing power on internal strife.
• Short-termism: Driven by elections, everyone is chasing immediate benefits, and no one is willing to pay for long-term issues.
• Asymmetry: Some people have a lot of data, while others only look at gossip news, resulting in a significant gap in input quality.

So the issue is not that "Democracy is useless," but rather "how to make good use of computing power." To improve quality, we need to enhance algorithms—such as faster fact-checking, smoother communication channels, and more reasonable incentive mechanisms.

AI is here, we need to think clearly about how this machine will be played out.

Now the key question arises: Is AI actually accelerating the computing power of Democracy, or is it replacing it?

If AI is used to help everyone filter information, predict policy outcomes, and provide multi-faceted analysis, then it becomes an accelerator of Democracy. The Democracy machine was originally noisy, but now it has a smart assistant that can help eliminate a lot of noise.

But if AI is controlled by a few people, it becomes dangerous. It could turn into a super monopoly, siphoning off computing power and creating a seemingly efficient new Autocracy that lacks error correction capabilities.

So the key to the future is not whether AI can surpass Democracy, but whether we can make AI a part of Democracy. Open source, transparency, and decentralization allow different groups to use it, rather than being monopolized by only a few institutions.

In the end, the computing power of Democracy is not perfect; it is slow, chaotic, and often disappointing. But it has an irreplaceable characteristic: fault tolerance. It allows for mistakes, allows for corrections, and allows for coexistence of diversity. In a complex world, fault tolerance is more important than speed.

Whoever can effectively converge the judgments of more people will go further. The Moore's Law may have its limits, but the computing power of Democracy will always have room for growth as long as human society continues to become more complex.

Full text with illustrations｜Loop. This is an animated short film directed by Argentine director Pablo Polledri. It uses abstract and repetitive visual language to depict a mechanized, institutionalized society: people operate like gears, repeating the same actions day after day until they are broken by "love"......