The more people have to all independently agree that something is the right thing to do, the harder a lone nutter has to work to get a nutty thing done in the face of common sense.
It's certainly no silver bullet - bad actors have historically taken charge of companies, industries, governments, even entire countries and carried out insane and/or malicious policies with terrible results; a process which is demonstrably ongoing in huge chunks of the world right now.
But having at least some checks and balances on power generally works out better than having none at all.
>The more people have to all independently agree that something is the right thing to do, the harder....
It is for anything to get done.
I mean come on... This is giving the world access to the internet. They have worked on "Cloaking" the devices to ensure they are not interfering with astronomy, have utilized materials that are sure to burn up in the atmosphere, have contributed code to NASA to be able to track these objects.
What happened to people that they are so cynical nowadays? Is it just me, or does everyone just hate everything nowadays? Any kind of technological advances/ Space fairing adventure is met with criticism like this.
To the OP's comment, "How can one man controls so much?" Because without that man, this wouldn't exist for another 10-15 years. Also, "Control" here is "We don't want our satellites used for offensive operations and WAR...." This is the exact kind of man i would like to be in control of such resources.
It all sounds great, doesn't it? Benevolent dictators are great right up until they aren't. Putin was super popular when he was first elected; he stabilised the Russian economy and made life hugely better for most. Then he made himself a little echo chamber of yes-men and eventually came to believe his own propaganda; look where we are now. Certainly he's getting something done, but it is no good thing. Might things have turned out differently if he didn't have completely uncontested control?
Britain's first-past-the-post voting system is designed to create strong governments that can get things done. They certainly got things done: after parting ways with their biggest trading partner, a decade of mismanagement by increasingly brazen kleptocrats has completely tanked the economy. Might things have turned out differently if extremists couldn't unilaterally make enormous changes to a population's way of life?
Meanwhile, well, Trump. Aren’t we glad the system checked him from turning the most hare-brained of his ideas into reality?
Perhaps this is unfair; examples from politics are like shooting fish in a barrel. Let's look at super intelligent businessmen.
Just recently, a maverick who thought he was smarter than everyone else built a super innovative submarine. Might that story have had a different outcome if he'd had some sanity checks from someone whose opinion he actually respected?
Another one founded a cryptocurrency exchange and a trading firm, and decided he was smarter than everyone else and so it was fine for him to just quietly make huge bets using other people's money. Might that have had a different outcome if he wasn't given unconditional access to a $65bn credit line with no oversight? He's still claiming he did nothing wrong and is an effective altruist to boot. It's for the courts now.
Musk himself hasn't the best track record here; just look at Twitter. Musk's other holdings have teams of people whose full time job is to interact with Musk, translating his proclamations into sensible things; with Twitter, however, we get to see the man unfiltered. It's quite a sight.
There’s risk/reward to consider here. Experiments are good; change is risk, and no change for the better can happen without risking change for the worse. But if your experiment is of globally significant scale with potentially global consequences, maybe running it by some people willing to honestly speak their mind first isn’t such a terrible plan?
Because those people can be held accountable for their actions. e.g. if the US military decided to decommission GPS tomorrow morning the democratically elected government would be able to force them to change track.
Moreover these institutions are set up to make it very difficult for one single person to make a unilateral decision. Which is a good thing.
This would work if governments were empowered on a granular level, but they aren't. If you've decided (Republican|Democrat)s are evil then you'll always vote for the same party, and there is no accountability.
> Which describes some voters but certainly not all. You'll notice power changes quite often in the US, clearly some voters are changing their minds.
But not on individual issues like this, unless they are extremely important to many voters, and highly party-aligned (e.g. abortion). You vote for one party or the other, each of which having 1000s of positions like this.
> In any case, what's the endpoint of this argument? Democracy isn't worth it because voters can get polarized?
The endpoint is not thinking that democracy as it stands can reign a lot of things in, unless they become the issue for an election. Not every issue can become the battleground of an election, but there are alternatives to fighting.
It's certainly no silver bullet - bad actors have historically taken charge of companies, industries, governments, even entire countries and carried out insane and/or malicious policies with terrible results; a process which is demonstrably ongoing in huge chunks of the world right now.
But having at least some checks and balances on power generally works out better than having none at all.