 Good to see you here and also the audience. Today we're going to talk about the future of technology in context of democracy, obviously, and participation as well. This is a really hot topic right now. A number of publications have talked about the crisis of democracy, even the decay of democracy. And people's willingness to vote has been diminishing over in the past years, basically. Especially the younger generations participate less and less actively in politics through elections. For some reasons, the financial crisis, or even the rise of the populist parties, did not put us in the course of any changes. And it seems that the last year has made a big difference. Brexit, the US elections, and the role of manipulation through social media have sparked a discussion on changes that are needed. So it looks like the future of democratic societies is all but self-evident. And so today, I'm really honored to be able to discuss this topic with a number of great people. So Davi Kotka, Lymur Schweiter, as well as Nikola Shea, welcome on stage once more. Davi, you're definitely an IT visionary. And also, you were previously as the chief information officer of the Estonian government. You're known for basically leading their residency program. So today is actually the third anniversary of that program. Congratulations for that. Thank you. So why did you set up the program in the first place? What did you want to do through that? As you know, I come from a great country. So this country doesn't have a complex to become a great again. So we're already great. But three years ago, we wanted to become even greater, especially bigger. So we calculated that we can grow our people's wealth faster if more and more people are connected with our economy. And as you know, in this latitude, the weather is always a slush. So we can't attract so many immigrants and people from other countries to come to our area. So you've already given up on that. Yeah, so we had to figure out something totally different. OK, we have to wait the climate change. But before that, why not to connect those people with Estonia and let's offer them services? And after three years, we can say it's there. It works. Awesome, awesome. Limar, you're the founder of a number of robotics companies, including RoboSavi and Ground Drone. And you have a ton of ideas on how the future look like where we actually can leverage those machines and build better systems. Are there some things that you don't think robots will not be replacing when you think about the work and the future of that? Yeah, the short answer is if you can do a good massage, I think you've got job security. But pretty much anything else that doesn't require humanism is going to eventually be replaced by either digital AI or physical robotics and the mix. There's always going to be a competitive situation between automation and humans. But humanism is going to be on the rise, I think, because automation will replace pretty much every form of labor that what we call today labor. All right. All right, and then Nicholas, welcome. You're the co-founder of Startup Chile as well as Accomplay. You also ran for president in Chile earlier this year, right? And through a party that you've established yourself. So not many people can see that they founded several successful startups and initiatives and ran for president. What is the red thread connecting all these projects if there is any? So, well, thank you very much for inviting me. Someone had to run, otherwise the party would have disappeared. And I was the president of the party, so I basically, I draw the shortest stick. So I ran for three months and actually was a very, the purpose of running was exactly to provide traction to the startup, which worked. I'm very proud for that because we're still around. We had elections a couple of weeks ago. We presented 15 candidates. So basically this party, it's really cool. It's like a LinkedIn for politics. So anyone just chooses to run. You upload your profile, you say who you are, what you think, what you want to do, and then we connect you to citizens. So we did that, we opened it up, and we had 15 candidates which were the most, the least likely politicians you could imagine. You know, school teachers, engineers, graphic designers. So the purpose of the party was exactly as you were saying at the beginning. We need to get involved. We need to bring in more people. Otherwise, democracy doesn't work. Yeah, involvement and participation. Yeah. Got it. All right. Hey, by the way, before we continue, if you have any questions that you would like to propose to the participants, so in spirit of direct democracy, do you suggest them? I have a screen here and I will be able to pick those questions and propose them. Actually representative democracy, no? Representative democracy. That is true. That is so true. If you were shouting that would be direct democracy, right? So before asking what, or actually, before asking what we should be doing, the question is why should we save the democratic system that we have? What is there to save and why should we do that in the first place? Well, I would argue it's that it, which should be surprising that we're asking that question. It's surprising that that is a question and we ask it all the time. And they were talking about Churchill in the next stage a while ago and basically it's the least worst of all systems. It's not perfect. And if we want to make it work, we need to participate. I think, and starting by myself and us and Chileans, we blame others. We're very comfortable blaming the establishment, the politicians, the political parties, from the crowd. And it's like, Chile is a country, I guess, similar in other countries. It's a country that's, it's controlled by the minority shareholders. And that's ridiculous. So until we don't really decide and take the leap and participate, things won't change. And I guess things would worsen. You were mentioning how participation is diminishing. In Chile, we've been going from 90% to now it's below 50 in the past election a couple of weeks. People say it's a problem. Politicians say it's a demand problem. So citizens are lazy or, you know, but citizens will say, you know, it's a supply. The offer, the quality of politicians is so bad. Why would I even wake up and go to vote? So the only way to change that is to bring more people in. So you think that the question of rescuing democracy doesn't make any sense because it's not working right now, so there is nothing to rescue that we actually need to build it. Is that what you're saying? I think we have to, I would argue that there's no democracy, there's no real democracy if you consider the possibilities of 2017. And with this, there's no critical mass. There's no clear information. There's no accountability. So all of the elements, so basically instead of we should bring democracy back. We should democratize democracy. Davi, you've been working on a number of different fixes to that. But what's your idea and thought on, like why should we fix the system in the first place? Why is democracy valuable in itself? Yeah, like it was already said, like it's the best one from the worst ones. So if you're worried that like young people don't vote anymore so much, like you can actually improve this situation with proper tools. I mean like we introduced the possibility to vote like for parliament, et cetera over internet already like 12 years ago. And what it does, it actually doesn't increase your participation, but it remains. So it doesn't decrease anymore. And it allows people who are actually outside from your country to be still part of your society. And I think that's a very powerful message because the world gets more and more global. People live like many years or study many years outside of their place of origin. We actually ran a study in the year 2000 to analyze those moves and how people feel. And it was interesting finding that even if you live in Singapore, let's say you are thin in Singapore, deep in your heart, you're still thin. And even that this all globalization and optimization goes on, the relationship between of your birthplace, especially place, not the country and yourself, that bond becomes stronger and stronger with current globalization. At least that was the outcome of the research. So people like to say that I didn't say that I'm from Spain, they say I'm from Catalonia or like I'm from Bali, I'm from United States. So that kind of relating yourself still to the, like some, let's say place to origin, that's important. And I think that's a cornerstone, whatever we talk afterwards like, that's the cornerstone that keeps this democracy alive. Exactly, and you wanna be participating in building that place where you're from. Even if you are away and you have to, you should have a possibility. And that's very sad that this thing is still the only country who offers voting over the internet, like as a normal thing. Did you have any resistance? I'm sorry. Go ahead. How do you implement e-voting? Was there a resistance from the establishment? Was there? Everything in Estonia goes with one principle, innovation through pain. Innovation? Innovation through pain. So it's always painful to somebody. Innovation is always painful to somebody. Lima, what are your thoughts on this discussion? So your question was why should we do that? So the reason that the main fear I think everybody should have is social upheaval or radicalization. And if you look at our history, we are really easily drafted into radicalization and killing and slaughter and antisocial behavior. And at the moment, the only area that is not being disrupted through technology is governance. The format that we have now in most of the Western world is a format that was invented hundreds of years ago when there were a few hundred thousand white men in with vested interests. Where today you consider countries of tens of millions of people, the representative democracy really is not fit for purpose. Now, of course it objects to change because they have a 20-year career plan versus everybody else in the world who has a three-year career path and change. Every three years you change yours. So anybody who has a long-term career path or guaranteed career path that is leaching onto the central pool of money obviously will try to retain that. You can see that clearly in the military-industrial complex in insurance business, in other things that are essentially leaching onto the central pool of money and then the enforcement of tax. We pay taxes. When you buy an iPhone, you're essentially, the government has received up to four times the value of that iPhone if you calculate in terms of taxes. So the taxes are increasing. There is more and more disconnect. The complexity of governance is becoming so difficult to get in that nobody cares anymore. So there's disconnect. And so we need to, we have the tools and it's just a matter of now understanding that if we don't strive to modernization, that there's gonna be anti-social situations. Can I follow up on that? Because I think it's key what you're saying and it's fascinating that we assume as citizens, I don't wanna use the word consumer because that's ideology steps in, but we assume that politics is the exception. Now all these rules apply for every single other industry sector environment except for politics. What rules are you talking about? Well, when he was, the politics is the only, the last sector to be disrupted. Why is that, how come we tolerate that? We would never tolerate it as a consumer. Why do we tolerate to vote for this? They have the same guy running for office again forever. We know the guy is not gonna achieve anything but we keep on voting for him. It's just ridiculous. We know how democracy works. We don't get involved. So, and the problem is ideology. So I think it's the big challenge we need to deconstruct breakdown ideology where there's such a strong bias, historic inertia, whatever, that we will continue to vote for whoever our parents told us to vote. Voting is determined by where we were born, et cetera. Part of our project or the purpose is that we need to deconstruct. We need to, there are many projects trying to just, what do we stand for? Let's agree on causes. Let's focus on the issues. That's not just ideology gets in the way and we can, rationality just disappears. So you think that the ideologies work as a barriers for direct interaction that we need, we should actually be doing regardless of where we come from. So the interaction and the discussion are the means to actually then start getting things done. Is that what you mean? Exactly. It's a poker game. We're all playing pokers. We're not showing our cards. We should expect politicians to show the cards. What do you think? What do you stand for in all these issues? How can I hold you accountable for A, B or C? But if we don't know that, there's a good friend of mine says, he's an Argentinian politician and he says, you know, the maximum of a politician is to say the least and make people think that you'll give the most. Yeah, exactly. But you're hitting the symptom, not the cause. The cause is the theater. Anybody who goes into politics inevitably becomes corrupt. Doesn't have to be corruption in terms of gaining money, but he gains power and therefore he's biased. He's got his own biases. The trick is how to remove people from power, how to create a system where people don't have this power. Exactly. You were mentioning the taxes and the size of the public sector. Now here in the Nordics, we're actually pretty happy to pay the taxes through the research and statistics. We're really happy about it to do that because we actually get something out of it as well, like a functioning welfare system. And then we're also part of the top five happiest countries in the world. So I'm challenging your thought a little bit on that. Don't you think that we're actually able to build better societies through an effective tax system where you can then also provide services to people, education, health and so forth? Yeah, the Nordic countries in Switzerland, there are some examples of where the political system does provide happiness to the constituents, but that's not, that's a rare example. And I think it has to do with education and also cultural homogeneity. You can then expect people to behave in a certain way and people who go into the system, into the political system behave in a socially acceptable way. But it's the exception. And so for the rest of us, I think there needs to be more of a technical view of things to enforce reflection of what people want. Exactly, exactly. You've been actually working a little bit. What is this voice? Something's going on. So we were talking about the challenges and you've been basically thinking about the fixes through the state asset service model. So what are the learnings that you've actually taken in the past three years from the E-Residency program in light of this earlier discussion on how can we fix those challenges? Our learnings definitely don't fix those things like you talk about. Our learnings with the E-Residency program is that we see that the world is changing and we see that the disruption will happen in government sector in the same way like it happened in music industry or in tax industry or like you name it, Airbnb Uber. So people will start buying services from governments where it's convenient, efficient, hassle-free, cheap. So that will happen. So buying for example business environment for your company, et cetera, it won't be a monopoly anymore like your own government provided to you. So it won't be this way anymore soon. So governments will start fighting, today they're fighting of physical talent who gets the best people to the country. But what we have proven is that quite soon governments will start fighting who gets the best virtual talent to do business or being connected with the community. And that will be huge. That will be a huge disruption. Do you have some statistics already from the past three years where you've seen a level of increase in say participation in elections or something like that? I mean like I see how those people actually create companies in Estonia and how those companies operate and what is the benefit for Estonia. So there's a clear economical benefit for Estonia. So there's clear economical benefit for those people. It's a win-win situation. And I mean, I can't see why other governments won't start following that like. Exactly. That sounds like a good idea for Chile. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Awesome. Hey, so in addition to, so you've had this say as a service approach to fixing some of the challenges that we're currently having and you're thinking about politics as a service, right? Yes. Is that your approach? So what is your actual like long-term goal with that? What do you aim to do? And what are the steps from now as you have the party, you're setting it up like where do you wanna be with that in the next five years? So again, going back to his point, it's interesting cause or symptom, which one is which, because I think the cause of the problem, we are the problem. So the cause of the problem is that we citizens are not participating as we should. The reason for that, you could argue, it's such an entrenched industry with the incumbents that have made it so hard for others to come in. There's so much fear for joining politics. No one around you, the second you say, the second it was surprising, before declaring I was gonna run for president, you would assume the opponents would resist and some people would criticize you. At the end, no one really cared because I was, but the biggest resistance comes from your inner circle, your family, your friends, your business partners. They say, are you crazy? What are you doing? So we need to try to eliminate, not eliminate, but diminish that fear, make it easy. So when you think politics as a service is basically let's provide the service for citizens. Let's make it easier for citizens to jump in. So start with making it easier. In Chile, to run, to start a party, you need to take 35,000 people physically to a notary public. So independent candidates won't do that. If you register as an independent candidate, you will have to compete against groups, lists of people from the same political party. You will need money of people no one wants to fund you. So if you crowd fund, crowd source, pretty much crowd everything. I think technology is going to play an enormous and extremely optimistic. I see a clear eruption of independent citizens joining the game very quickly. Got it, yes. Hey, we have a good question coming from the audience or actually a bunch of them. So let's take one of them, especially this comes first to Limar. So fake news is already influencing political discourse. How do we manage public debate with social bots and AI become powerful support for political elite? So those symptoms are today, they're a result of arbitrage. If you spend enough money, you can create a political opinion, but it's an engineering challenge and it will be fixed. Yes, it's an engineering challenge and basically we're able to fix it with the data and with the algorithms that we have. What's the timeline? Depends on who you're asking, but I think I'm looking at it from a perspective that within 10 years we may have a world war and so it needs to be taken very seriously, the whole thing. Yep, yep. And actually, so I discussed with you earlier and you had really interesting ideas on the future, how we can actually run our system with as little human participation as possible through direct algorithms that just draw the data that is needed and then draw the regulations and plan about the funds and things like that, how the funds and taxes will be spent. And this is a kind of an interesting idea now based on what you were just mentioning about the participation and the actual value of that in itself. Can you reflect a little bit on your thinking on this? Yeah, so this is thinking, I've been collecting a lot of data about what's happening around the world in this domain and it seems like an engineering solution to the issue. Assuming that the core of the challenge is actually humans in power, is how to strive towards removing people from power and utilizing technology. So for example, the ballot system is ridiculous. So of course that's easy to fix. But if you look at the public debate, you can look today at Facebook as an example where public debate or Twitter where it's being done, but imagine one that forces a structure into it. So anybody can pose an opinion or a challenge or an idea or an improvement and those are taken seriously through a system, through a series of steps and eventually budget. I think the legislation side is separate but I think the most hurting piece of this all is money. It's like I give you all my money and what do I get back in return? And it's becoming competitive now to change your residency in order to elicit better quality of life or better use of the public spending. So actually for the high net worth or people who are a high earner, the world is pretty open in terms of where you wanna live and what quality of life you want. But for the majority of the people, you're stuck and you're not empowered. But we can have, for example, using virtual reality, the public sphere could be anywhere. You don't have to have the physicality of white men sitting in a big room and shouting at each other. David, do you have any thoughts on that? I mean, arising from these points. Yeah. All right, all right, let's continue. So what do you think is the role of a third sector in participation and what is the future of that sector? Now, this is coming from the audience as well. The role of third sector. The independent sector? Basically, the third sector referring to NGOs and not the company itself is what I believe. Very important, maybe the primary role. I think so in Chile, I guess applies for other countries but basically, there's this profession of being a politician. There's this industry of political parties we're so used to as this has been going on for several centuries. And they're very clear and strict limits between sectors. I think those limits we're gonna start to blur, which I think is great. I think that the politicians have been brilliant, brilliant. They've created this sector in which they've captured Chilean politicians if there's any coincidence with other countries. But it's really hard to get in, barriers to entry are huge. You're supposed to, if you wanna be part of politics, you can't do anything else in life. So basically that eliminates the chances of other individuals, NGOs, independent sector organizations to jump in. I think many more people should jump in. It should be very clear what are your interests, where you're coming from. But if we bring in people temporarily with very clear objectives and strong accountability, then we can make politics compatible with other roles, even any other sector. Yeah, cool. Tavi, you had a point on that. Yeah, I mean, I have an additional view to this. I believe it's not so much NGOs and the nation states will remain, but there will be another layer on top of that. So let's call them virtual countries or like I'll say virtual groups. You see already them forming. I mean, like the whole fake news actually proved that they already exist in certain forms. And those borderless groups, let's say that the people who believe that the world is flat, for example, and all the vegans, if they have grouped together, I mean, those organizations, those groups, will be way more like influential and we'll start participating also, like being participating in elections and stuff where it's interesting for them. So they want to be influential. What do you think that will happen? It already happens, like you see that today they are just puppets with somebody's tools, like it was in Brexit, like case, but it will be like, I'll say, more and more organized and more and more, I'll say, dictated how they will be used, all those groups will be used, how those like communities will be used in the near future. All right, so far we were talking about basically on a national state, but when we think about the challenges that we have that we need to fix, they're very global actually, they're very global challenges. Just think about climate change, for instance. How can we fix these massive problems that are very systemic by nature through redrafting and rethinking how we actually decide about things together? Heavily difficult question. So like five years ago, I was in Washington and there was a discussion of two politicians and someone asked, you know, the deficit, the crisis is so obvious, when are you guys gonna stop borrowing money from China? And the Democrat congressman said, the minute the Chinese stop lending us money. So, you know, when you're in these strong courses, there's like, courses of inevitability. If we don't get involved, if we don't change the people, because I don't think we're gonna change the way politicians currently are making the decisions, I think part of the challenge is changing the politicians. It's so hard for them, where they come from, who they represent, to, I think, change the course of decisions. We need to bring in more people to make in the different positions. And then, you know, and that's why, you know, people like us are getting involved in politics, because exactly we need the right people in the right places, and that's not happening today. And how is the collaboration going to, yeah, go ahead, Davy. I just wanted to say, I mean, I was the CIO for four years, so I worked for the government, I was basically deputy minister, and I saw all the system very closely. And honest answer is, as long, like government officers and politicians can basically enjoy lifetime career, this system won't change. So, you have to disrupt that. And if you're able to disrupt that, then you can start building a new one that might solve those very difficult questions that you raised. Yeah, the bigger challenges. But before that, there is no motivation. Yeah, so. Do you agree on that? No. So, I think that, again, having the four-year election cycle and people in power is not going to address 30-year plans. The only guys around who address the 30-year plan are the Chinese, because they are there to stay. So the positive side of that system is that they do address, at least for their own people, they do address a 20-year plan in order to retain stability. But global warming and an inevitable financial crisis, we're looking at what's called the technology deflation. So there is an exponential devaluation of technology, which we see the quantitative easing being a method of kind of fighting the deflation. But we're on an exponential, I've seen studies that show that this is going to explode at some point. And then, with the current framework, it's going to lead to radicalization. That's the only way, OK, let's blow things up and see what happens afterwards. But I think that the way we need to address those things, in the end, data-driven decision-making is the new religion. It's a new way of sort of believing in data as a way to address this complexity. The complexity has reached a point where it's not really about people. People are influenced by what other people think about them and how they retain power. Awesome. I think we have like five seconds, but I'm still going to ask you a very quick question. What is it that you think we should do right now in order to get to the course where we should be in terms of building a proper democratic society towards the future? Do we start from Nicolas? You probably know this answer because you've been running for the president. Get involved or get out of the way? Yeah. I'm so worried. I mean, I see how this disruption happens at the moment, so I don't have a solution. I just see, I'll say, my own country can maximize the outcome of that. OK. I'm just scared. I try to see, I try to predict where the bullets will come from and run away. OK. So thank you so much for participating in this discussion. Thanks for the audience. And yes, we will start doing these things, especially I think the first one, what you were saying, Nicolas, on what needs to be done. Get involved or get out of the way, right? OK. Thank you. Thank you.