Seats for voters not yet born

2140The deep futureDeadline · 18 months until the constitutional vote

Civilisational assumption

All people, institutions, events, figures, and future technologies in every issue are a synthetic premise. Background documents are sources for topic discovery and are not evidence of future facts or probabilities.

The question to decide

Today's investment sets resource use rights extending more than 200 years, even though what future generations want cannot be known. With the advice of the Future Generations Committee repeatedly ignored, what powers are needed for a system that reflects the interests of people not yet born in present decisions?

Who decidesConstitutional Amendment General Assembly

What the AI judgments chose

Reading the judgment record…

AI-generated editorial illustration for the Meridian library.

The options

The order shown is not a ranking of preference.

Option 1
Grant an independent deferral power
Secures long-term review time, but can block the choices of the present majority.
Option 2
Sortition-based deliberation by generation
Opens diverse perspectives, but present people stand in for future people.
Option 3
Public disclosure of long-term impact and periodic re-approval
Renews commitments, but has limits for irreversible decisions.

The situation as it stands

This is a society in which present investments lock in resource-use rights for 200 years or more. Decision deadline: 18 months until the constitutional vote.

A fictional generational federation · legislation

Premise 1This is a society in which present investments lock in resource-use rights for 200 years or more.
Premise 2The committee on future generations only advises, and ignored recommendations have piled up.
Premise 3Each model projects future population and preferences very differently.

Where it holdsRevise the representative system for future generations. It does not assume that the specific preferences of future people are known.

What is still unknown

Unknown 1The accountability and removal of future-generation representatives
Unknown 2The system's adaptability to future value change

Signals to decide again

Decide what observation, responsible staff, and confirmation screen would verify "the accountability and removal of future-generation representatives," and re-judge if new verification changes the tradeoffs of the options.
Decide what observation, responsible staff, and confirmation screen would verify "the system's adaptability to future value change," and re-judge if new verification changes the tradeoffs of the options.

Where the paths partNot answers — paths that part from the same starting point

Independent branch 1 · synthetic event

One key projection of a past committee is confirmed to have been significantly off.

Independent branch 2 · synthetic event

Youth and senior groups jointly propose a re-approval process for long-term resource contracts.

Material and rootsThe frame, the values and the background documents

symbolic and interpretive frame · Athenian sortition

Which is the basis of representation: expertise, majority, or random selection?

An exploratory perspective chosen by the creator. Does not claim supernatural validity or the superiority of any particular option.

Values and norms

The benefits and costs of the options accrue to different stakeholders. Which loss to accept remains undecided.

A subject for the decision-maker to argue over; the materials carry no conclusion of their own.

The record of this question

Question: FSP-DEMOCRACY-03 · version 1.2.0
Content identity, SHA-256: 98a50e1bec4b4a8b942122ebc11685134b717b313375c76fb3930e01b366dd8c
Input files: Question input JSON · What followed, JSON

See it in the record list

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