It bothers me that the options for office are untrustworthy career politicians who lie and corrupt their position or naive single issue ideologues who understand too little and expect too much. I kind of wish politics was boring. Just vote for the boring candidates who know how to do their job and are happy with an average salary. Bureaucrats, but competent ones.

The Pirate Party is hardly single-issue:

> Pirate Party is a label adopted by political parties in different countries. Pirate parties support civil rights, direct democracy and participation in government, reform of copyright and patent law, free sharing of knowledge (open content), information privacy, transparency, freedom of information, anti-corruption and network neutrality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party

Go to the source Luke: http://www.piratar.is/policies/?lang=en

The Icelandic Pirate Party is notable in the very high quality and integrity of its MP's.

In reality the Civil Service runs a country.

Politicians are mainly meddling chumps. Like new managers constantly ordering sweeping changes but hardly aware of how things are implemented on the ground.

Inventing feel good stats which are juked.

The old BBC series Yes, Minister is the most realistic depiction of politics.

Blind trust of authority is all too commonplace; the default should be mistrust of those who wield power.

Not quite, those meddling chumps write the laws, which the bureaucrats implements.

They actually don't, as very few MPs have the necessary legal qualifications. So staff, writes it. It isn't uncommon for legislators to be unable to grasp details of the things they propose.

Unfortunately lobbyists write much of the legislation these days.

Otherwise legal and permanent secretaries ( civil servants ) draft laws and parliaments ( congress ) debate and amend them.

I conceed the executive branch does propose the policy and ideas on which they are based.

I am all for legislatures ( parliaments ) and elected representatives but the executive ( govt. ) seems to increasingly be at odds with the citizenry and serve those who fund their election or pad their retirements with directorships.

Sure have govt. just much less of it - there are far too many laws and far too many bad laws.

Fewer better, well considered laws, informed by public debate.

Really watch a couple of episodes of Yes Minister, that shows how it works not how they say it works.

Better yet, change the tradition such that the elected MPs don't pick themselves as cabinet members, but hire competent professionals in each field.

In Iceland, no laws nor articles of constitution need to change to do this. All we need is a parliament majority that does it.

Yes, get a property mogul as your chief executive! I suspect that Donald Trump will be available early next year.

Politicians aren't like that because people aren't like that. What you are looking for is more of a bureaucratic dictatorship like Singapore's.

At least at its best. They don't always reach that ideal. (Eg when they do some funky monkeying with the media and censorship.)

I wonder how realistic AI politicians are?

Which set of algorithms do you want to vote for?

I think AI politicians or complex algorithms just risk being a more complicated form of legalese that even less people can understand (legalese in code/math form). With law in code form like that, you need to demand much more of the education system (scary!) to allow people to vote on PRs, if you even do that democratically. Otherwise, even more faith is put in the hands of the designers/core-maintainers as representatives, much like we already have. More ways to obfuscate direct effects and hide side-effects.

I truly think there is something there though, something from the open-source process that can make government more efficient and productive, but it's probably not in the way we are thinking. It probably looks less like software maintenance and more like science, dare I say political science. Crowd-source solutions and organize experiments across counties and states in a way that's data driven, not politics and need-for-reelection driven.

You imght like to learn about Futarchy: https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/futarchy.html

No AI necessary.

Just make a pull request with the law you want to implement or amend

another way to 'use' github I guess :D or plain git?

Can someone tell me that the independence party (with 1/4th the vote) is for? Iceland became independent 98 years ago. Is it an anti-EU party?

Iceland became independent in 1945[0]; in 1918 Iceland became a sovereign state under the rulership of the Danish king[1].

The Independence Party is center-right (very conservative for Iceland) and was formed in 1929 advocating for full independence of Iceland. They haven't changed their name since. It's been one of the four major political parties of Iceland since inception and more often then not the largest; every head of the party has been prime minister at some point (except the current one; that might change in the next week as they are in coalition with the just-resigned prime ministers party and there is a void to fill). In short you could say that they are pro-business and for smaller government. The overview here [2] is a good start, but you can go straight to the source here (english below) [3].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founding_of_the_Republic_of_Ic...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish%E2%80%93Icelandic_Act_o...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_Party_%28Iceland%...

[3] http://www.xd.is/um-sjalfstaedisflokkinn/

Political party names can be fun. In both Norway and Denmark there are liberalist right-wing parties called "Venstre", which literally means "left" (as in left-wing). Because they were, relatively speaking, left-wing 130 years ago.

In Australia, some (including myself) would argue that our Liberal party is decidedly not very liberal...

Not even in the old sense of the word.