One thing I've been thinking about recently is what would happen if government was automated. We now have better automation and computational capabilities so creating a government with programmed agents instead of politicians is a legitimate possibility.

Turns out Soviet mathematicians had similar ideas

> Economic reform became a pressing need in the mid ’50s, after Stalin’s rule had left the country in shambles, the chain of supply and the agricultural sector nearing collapse and a serious risk of another major famine looming. Amidst a very rapid expansion of the techno-scientific sector, from the early successes of the Soviet space program to the first large developments of computer systems and automation, several competing proposals for economic reforms were presented that promoted the idea of a “computational solution” to the severe mismanagements of the planned economy.

> The original plan of the cybernetics approach was to implement a decentralized computational system, capable of processing feedbacks in real time and handle the simulation of complex dynamics. In terms of providing a scalable computational model, they mostly focused on Kantorovich’s linear programming, which seemed the most promising mathematical tool at the time. As we mentioned, the scalability of Kantorovich’s valuations is subtle, and we will discuss a possible more modern approach to scalability in the next section of this paper. However, the most important aspect of this proposal was the main idea of a cybernetic computational network and its role at implementing a decentralized autonomous computational mechanism for a communist economic system that would not require any centralized planning.