The absurdity of technocracy

Punch was a satirical magazine first published in Victorian London. It had a long and noble history of poking fun at... well, just about every fashionable idea of the day. Anyone who pricked the public's conscious probably found themselves lampooned within its pages.

Charles Babbage - inventor of the first mechanical computer - found himself starring in a few articles. Here's a scan of one from 1844 (extracted text follows)

Returning to the new Houses of Parliament, we must again protest against the money lavished upon them.

For what business, we ask, has been effected in the present session that might not have been as efficiently transacted in a sentry - box? Wherefore, then, these costly buildings for men to do nothing in? Why, indeed, should we have Members of Parliament at all, when sure we are that MR. BABBAGE would construct a legislating machine, which, in the hands of SIR ROBERT PEEL, would fully answer all the purposes of living senators?

We are serious. We therefore propose that, at the next election, every gentleman desirous of affixing M.P. to his name should, on his election, send his proxy machine to the House of Commons, setting the instrument at "Aye" and "No," as MR. BABBAGE will instruct him, on certain questions, and suffering the Ministry to take their divisions accordingly. The result of the present session convinces us that the "business of the country" will be got through quite as well as by the present mode; with this advantage, that the machines may be put anywhere.

While it is mildly amusing that people have always been complaining about the cost of the Houses of Parliament, I think there's a deeper and more interesting story here.

Firstly is the nature of distributed work. As we saw during lockdown - it's perfectly possible for people to work remotely. MPs were able to debate and vote from home. You can argue whether that's a good thing. But it is undoubtedly a thing which happened. There were infrastructure costs - buying laptops, broadband, teaching people how to use equipment - but that is surely nothing compared to the cost of physically maintaining the crumbling building.

But, more interesting, is that over a hundred-and-fifty years ago people were taking the piss out of the idea of a Technocracy. The idea that one man could build a machine which would always give the correct answer to any political question was as laughable then as it is now.

Wouldn't it be amazing if we could compute the correct answers to complex policy questions?

Sadly, we have the small matter of the messy nature of reality to deal with.

There is bias in the way we collect data. There are biases in the way we store, process, and validate data. The algorithms we use are flawed. And even the questions we ask of data reveal the limitations of our imaginations.

Babbage himself had this to say on the subject:

On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864), ch. 5 "Difference Engine No. 1"

It doesn't matter how perfect our computer code is - it will always have to deal with imperfect inputs made by imperfect people.