Blogs Are the Light

Sunday, September 11, 2005

Playboy interviews Gates

Bill Gates reflects on the impact of technology on Democracy

Gates shares some of my concerns about educated leaders and how Democracy should work. Later in the article, he talks about the importance of education.

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GATES: Say the President is making a speech. Everybody in the nation gets to push little buttons to say yea or nay, and gathering all that information so it can be displayed within a second or two is tricky. But it's all within the state of the art. You don't have to be a dreamer to know that the technology will not limit the construction of the information highway.
PLAYBOY: How will being able to respond directly to the president alter our system of government?
GATES: The idea of representative democracy will change. Today, we claim we don't use direct democracy because it would be impractical to poll everybody on every issue. The truth is that we use representative democracy because we want to get an above-average group to think through problems and make choices that, in the short term, might not be obvious, even if they are to everybody's benefit over the long term.
PLAYBOY: Do you agree?
GATES: Yes. When making choices, or setting policies about the economy, education or medicine, society is best served by electing people who are particularly hardworking, intelligent and interested in long-term thinking.
PLAYBOY: You're giving our current elected officials a lot of credit.
GATES: What we have may be less than ideal, but it's still better than direct democracy. Anyway, we'll no longer be able to hide behind the excuse that we don't have the technology to gather the opinions.

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