Essays
$100 trillion
The current financial crisis is just the latest in a long series of mis-handling of our civilization's course by our political institutions. It is hard to imagine the true cost of these mistakes, repeated because of a stubborn attachment to unproven and poorly working political principles. Politics is the least advanced academic and professional field today, having barely advanced beyond its Antiquity roots, as it continues to damage our well-being and our prosperity. $100 trillion is a very conservative and lenient estimate of how much our leaders' mistakes have cost us in the past half-century. It is sobering to imagine what could have been done with this money.
The world in 2055
What kind of society awaits humankind fifty years from now? What can we hope to achieve as our societies mature and extend beyond several physical barriers?
A communication system for popular opinion
Information technologies will allow the tools to analyze all opinions into a coherent understanding of the ideas and preoccupations of an entire society.
A scientific justification for fully open government
Secrecy in government is the major source of most major problems in modern governments. Opening our governments will push forward the greatest achievement for democracy since the American declaration of independence.
An information system for political decision-making
Decision-making is at the heart of governance, yet its mechanisms have barely changed since the beginnings of human civilization. Information technology can provide the tools to allow politicians to make better decisions.
Responsibility and competence of political power
The absence of criteria ensuring the competence of politicians partly explains the systematic inefficiency of governments. Without ensuring the competence of the most important functions of any society, sub-standard outcomes are expected.
Statement of principles of the Project for a New Political Science
The statement of principles for the Project for a New Political Science outlines its philosophical foundations and the goal it pursues.
The nature of economic capital
The nature of economic capital is a subject of bitter dispute in economics. In this essay, I defend the idea that knowledge is the nature of all economic capital, providing humans with the capacity for economic activity.
Web-based electronic voting systems
Electronic voting systems have gained a bad reputation for their reliability, integrity and usefulness. Fundamentally, they are flawed as a concent as they commit the worst mistake any technology can make: replace existing manual methods without changing their fundamental operations. Technology must never simply mechanize existing methods. Information allows to completely rewrite the rules and on the subject of elections, information technology's main benefit is the removal of both geographic and time constraints.
Books
Software development explained
Having noticed that most software development problems are rooted in misunderstanding of the development lifecycle and its accompanying complexities, I want to explain the processes and realities that form the bulk of our profession. In this book, I try to explain in plain language to anyone with no training in software development these questions and more: what is software? how is it made? why is it so hard to build? why does it go wrong? what do software developers do? what do they need to better do their job?
Currently in research phase, the book is schedueled for completion by the end of 2009.
www.Québec (French)
Tentative title for this comprehensive great society project for the province of Quebec, in which I lay out a political platform for the 21st century. Political institutions and dynamics are retought with information technologies and their transformational powers in mind. Rather than a technocratic top-down approach, information technologies target the role of citizens and how to build a truly democratic society.
The title's meaning is to emphasize the www aspects, of communications and technology, of a new Quebec, rather than old economic ideas that keep our society stagnant.
This book is a long-term project. It is already well advanced from months of full-time dedication but its completion will require more resources and effort than I can alone undertake.
La société des outils (French) — 2004
This book presents a set of evolutions for modern political and economic institutions, based on the principles of the tools society. The tools society is one in which the socioeconomic forces of a society benefit from the most efficient ways of achieving objectives beneficial to the society. It is an evolution on tested principles, focusing on the institutional weaknesses and overcoming them with the acting components of intelligence: communication and computation.
The main focus of the proposed changes is the government itself, its efficiency and usefulness. Central to the achievement of a free society is the full opening of all political decision-making processes. Based on the underlying nature of intelligence as a combination of communication and computation, it follows that larger neural networks are much more capable than limited ones. Traditionnaly, the need to place all political power in the hands of a few was not negotiable given primitive communications methods. Communications technologies can entirely remove those walls and provide the capacity to achieve truly democratic systems.
Having not found a publisher willing to market a book of political philosophy from a non-academic, I provide it here under a Creative Commons license. I only ask to be acknowledge as its author. No English version is planned.
La société des outils — PDF format
La société des outils — HTML format
Other publications
Paroles de Québécois (French): 140 posts from August 2006 to January 2007.
Richard Vallée's articles on Newsvine: I posted a few articles from July to September 2006 on the excellent social news site Newsvine.
Hive Mind: 100 posts from January to July 2006.