It is a post-scarcity society, so no tragedy of the commons is possible. Demagoguery is a good point, but research shows that compulsory voting is a pretty good defence against it.

Who will enforce the compulsory vote?

I suspect that such a system would lead to scarcity. City dwellers tend to vote in a manner that ignores the needs of the rural community, but are sufficiently concentrated that in a direct democracy they completely overwhelm the voice of the rural community. You end up with the environmental needs of an invasive fish species being voted as more important than the food to feed the voting population. Think California and their reaction to the recent prolonged drought

@pojo-guy, compulsory vote is enforced by the community and the AI. I am not sure I am going to have rural/urban division considering that I am talking about a bare rock in a process of terraforming. Can you bring more relevant examples of whose interests could've been compromised?

I don't think a post scarcity society is possible. The only plausible one I've seen is James Hogan's "Voyage from Yesteryear" but that had a new planet, and good AI. Even now goods are become a smaller and smaller fraction of our economy in favour of services, but I'm paying several hundred dollars a month just for data com. Internet, phone, cell. Remember too, Twain's admonition: "Invest in Land. They aren't making it any more."

@Olga, compulsory voting was a feature of ancient Greek democracy, and Demagogues were the bane of Greek city states, as the historian Thucydides attests.

@Olga As soon as you have the interests of those who raise the food versus the interests of those who think food originates on the shelf of a grocery store, you will have a city versus rural divide. It takes ares of land to produce enough vegetables for one person, and many more acres to produce meat. On a barren rock in the midst of terraforming, scarcity is the probable state of affairs for several generations, even if the larger society is post-scarcity.

@Olga AI's make great servants, but terrible masters. By making voting mandatory, enforced by the AI (how? turret mounted lasers? withholding goods and services?), you have described a monarchy with the the AI as the real government.

@Thucydides, I agree that populism and demagogues are a problem. Unfortunately, there is no way around it. They will plague any system. But I research that I read suggests that compulsive voting tends to avoid extremes and favours more moderate positions. I cannot afford any extreme decisions. I still have a colony to build.

@pojo-guy, post-scarcity society does not imply a magical abundance of everything. It means that all basic needs are fully satisfied and people have comfortable lives. Big projects still require time to be finished, but they do not force people to tighten their belts. In a truly hi-tech world, the only reason for urban/rural divide (that I can see) is personal preferences in a living environment. Hi-tech food production does not require acres of land, more like many cubic metres of labs. But that is beyond the scope of this question.

@pojo-guy, why did you come to a conclusion that the AI is the real government? I envisioned it as a fully transparent replacement for bureaucracy (everybody can request any records at any time, except information about specific votes since I am using secret ballots) and an information gathering tool. It is like a powerful calculator...

@SherwoodBotsford, my situation is very similar to Hogan's: new planet, good AI, lots of robots. But I want to avoid sending a strong political message as he did. The main theme for my story is very different.

@Olga I'm not sure what sort of research you are reading, but the Athenians had compulsory voting. In the History of the Zelloponessian Wars, Thucydides recounts how the Athenians were swayed to massacre all the men and sell the women and children of a rebeling city state into slavery by the demagogue Cleon. 24hr later, they realized what they had done , called a new assembly and recalled the fleet. Compulsory voting neither stopped the vote for massacre or demanded a redaction.

@Thucydides, according to these papers, compulsory voting tends to reduce extreme positions. It does not guarantee that all decisions will be sane. It is a tendency, after all. There is also a tendency to vote for populists and extremists when trust in the system is low. The recent populism wave in the USA and Europe seems to support this as well.

Regarding your mobile vote idea, how can there be a modest fee when there is no monetary system? What is the minimum number of citizens a representative can have before they are no longer a representative? Your system is a good example of proxy voting, though, and requires more consideration.

@Olga if the AI has the power of coercion (i.e. the power to force people to vote), and outlasts the transient working bodies, then it is the true government. Don't under estimate the power implicit in centralized information collection and reporting (which is a database, not an AI). Whomever controls and maintains the AI controls and maintains the political system (read "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by R.A. Heinlein)

@Olga as someone who dabbles in AI professionally, I recommend taking a few courses in the field. While AI's are implemented on complex calculators they are much more than a complex calculator backed by a database and reporting system, but much less than the near-human personalities portrayed by Star Trek. They are not flawless - witness autospell fails damnyouautocorrect.com/13603/….

@pojo-guy One of Heinlein's greatest works, before he went into his 'creepy politics' period. It is a good microcosm of the politics in a space colony, where colonialists are totally dependent on the functioning of technology for their survival, and a reminder of the fact that those who control the survivalist technology control the destiny of the colony.

@pojo-guy But it does depend on weather the AI is given sentience and self-awareness or not. Without these, the AI has absolutely no 'idea' that it 'exists', or even what 'it' is. A weather forecasting model, no matter how 'intelligent', has no idea of what 'weather' is. It does not become 'weather' until a human looks at the data and interprets it. Some 'alien' being with no knowledge of earth weather could look at the same output data and have no idea of what the numbers and graphs represent.

@JustinThyme I might be to close to the subject matter, but last I checked modern AI's are composed (over simplified) of calculus point solutions in a n-dimensional array. You feed inputs into the input matrix, kick off the engine, and the equations churn until every node (neuron) has achieved a local minimum, and the results are fed to an output matrix, which is then interpreted into a final result. I recommend Andrew Ng's lectures on YouTube as a primer (start with youtube.com/watch?v=PPLop4L2eGk)

... continued ... An AI doesn't even have any "problem awareness". Your spell checker on your phone is not aware that it is spelling anything, It is simply solving a matrix of numbers for the least minima based on the inputs it was given in training. The output is interpreted by a human as a properly spelled word. There is no sentience or self awareness - in that sense they are more like @Olga 's complex calculator example.

@pojo-guy What you describe is one particular model for AI, but not the only one.But for all of the big words and fancy terms, it all boils down to a bunch of AND and OR gates responding to 'on/off' inputs from switches. Digital logic. Quantum computers show promise for specific applications, but they amount to 'best guess' solutions. They are great for weather forecasts, but I don't want a 'best guess' solution to building an airplane. Although popular press links Siri, Alexis, and Cortana to AI, really they are just very good algorithms for data retrieval.