Sustainability is an information issue to be dealt with judicious use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT), to break two informational-type of constraints, one logistical and one technological, towards meeting the daily operational requirements of the around 200 democracies that elected public officials run in most existing countries and states. The logistical constraint occurs because most humans live in the area of the world, in the Global South, where there is no easily accesible formal information on how to use public resources efficiently. They do not receive printed monthly billing, meaning that systemic poverty of The Global South can be traced down to a billing problem. More precisely: A massive global billing bottleneck is the sociotechnical (but not the fundamental) cause of most global poverty. In regards to the technological constraint, most humans are oblivious to the mechanism that would enable them to influence public decisions. Both sociotechnical processes, effective billing systems and influencing public decisions, require the existence of postal services that are adequate for those tasks.

Equipped with a clearer view of what lies ahead, the network has also found that sustainability ultimately depends upon Best Democratic Practice; the application of the right techniques through the technological interface that some sectors, that is, some residents of successful countries use nowadays for exercising their democratic power. The correct use of this technological interface needs to be optimized, scaled up, and then systematized globally so that human society can streamline its collective intelligence and eliminate the constraints to sustainable development.

Although citizens are usually unaware of best practice, the only countries in which citizens employ Best Democratic Practice today are developed countries, which generally benefit from the existence of adequate postal services: precisely one of the key factors that makes them rich and developed. Once that sociotechnical platform becomes scaled up to the rest of the globe, such communication processes will allow the synergistic interaction between the constituent and legislative functions of the state, which in System of Systems parlance, is run by elected  officials through a Legislative System of Systems. Of course, rich countries are more advanced in this aspect than poor countries.

In practical terms, constituent-legislator communication, or the lack of it, is an issue that can create situations akin to the virtual representation scenario that brought about revolutionary acrimony two centuries ago between the British Empire and its American colonies. It´s also a matter of correcting the situation of representation without constituent-legislator communication in the Global South, and of some but not enough -and not systematic enough, communication between constituents and their legislators in developed countries.

Using phrases like "right techniques," "correct use," and "correcting the situation," has connotations of someone having made a mistake. True to form, human society has been living the consequences of sociotechnical global human error (GHE). This means that what is usually called the human condition, including conflict, crime, poverty, deaths from treatable diseases, industrial underdevelopment and environmental degradation, etcetra, are results of collective human error on a global scale: a bona fide Sociotechnical Global Human Error (GHE).  

To eliminate such collective human error constituents must become fully aware that they own the decisions made by their legislators, and they must assume ownership by eliminating their technological constraints. Each constituent can do this by carrying out the sociotechnical task of articulating the conflict-relevant information he or she owns and communicating it to the relevant legislator through the teledemocratic infrastructure. From the Systems of Systems perspective, a national teledemocratic infrastructure consists of the complete infrastructure of a national postal service, including existing old post or royal roads, and the Internet, when those communication channels are used to communicate with legislators. The habitat is sure to improve now that AI forms part of the digital public infrastructure. 

More on the Logistical Constraint:

It's no coincidence that the Internet offers business advantages that have brought accelerated growth to the sector. Not so with postal services, which have been termed as slow and old-fashioned. Postal services of the Global South have suffered from indifference and inattention to the point that because of the lack of Global South postal infrastructure, Global South postal services have become inadequate  for satisfying basic institutional needs, such as serving as a transport medium for municipal, utility, and housing-authority billing systems.

Because they are the weakest link in the supply chain for mobilizing local resources, the network has identified developing-country postal services as creators of the logistical constraints that have stymied most efforts that have been made to somehow deal with the shantytown and favela-slum issue of the Global South. The giant billing bottlenecks of the Global South come alive and stymie institutional development because without adequate postal services, households cannot receive monthly bills for the consumption of basic public services or to pay rent for social housing punctually. If Global South households do not handle that information, they have no way of knowing how to control their use of services, nor can they compensate the service provider for the consumption of the service or pay the agreed price for subsidized housing. On the other hand, if beneficiaries are somehow aware of their obligations, the lack of economic and formal methods of communication -in the form of adequate postal services- makes it impractical to create and enforce sanctions for late or no payments.

At the end, the public-service customer and/or public-housing tenant can waste the service (leave lights on all day and night without concern, or not worry about faucet or other water leaks, etcetera, etcetera.) and live rent-free. Concurrently, the service provider does not maintain its infrastructure for lack of funds, whilst having to rely on subsidies to avoid becoming bankrupt due to lack of income, and the public housing administrating body cannot build enough public housing to meet the demand. The same goes for other local authorities -such as municipalities- that cannot bill for property and other taxes, and therefore, e.g. cannot offer police protection or develop or service the infrastructure. There is no social safety net at all, bringing the homeless closer and closer to jumping at the opportunity of invading public lands to build shacks as the only alternative available to have a roof over their heads.

So it is unfortunate that at the beginning of the 21st. century, Global South postal services are inadequate for improving tax and other revenue that would help in the process of financing basic public services, and the upgrading of the nowadays crumbling public infrastructure, including the construction of affordable housing, and in general just stopping the whole favela-urbanism abomination of human civilization and human dignity. It is also unfortunate that inadequate postal services make it impractical for people to communicate formally with their representatives in government, also making inadequate postal services the harbingers of the lack of legislative accountability in the Global South.

As part of protracted efforts to obtain results, Global South governments and ODA donor countries have been following the reductionist script of the international development community, and have been providing blanket subsidies without end. So it is also regrettable that those subsidies have had the unintended consequence of making the overall Global South public-service and infrastructure sector a giant favela-urbanism incubator for mismanagement, systematic corruption, and emergent poverty while draining away or redirecting resources that are otherwise critical for health and educational concerns.

In that context, favela-urbanism poverty can be viewed as a measure of entropy caused by the dispersion and loss of ODA, but mainly local, resources as the lack of effective billing systems impedes the growth of the tax base and hinders the development of the whole national financial system. In general, the effect that lack of effective billing systems has upon the size of the tax base, and then on the favela-slum producing logic Professor Pieterse lays out in his UN-Habitat video, affects national fiscal and monetary policy and percolates through the whole national economy as the low investment and productivity, and low income typical of emergent economies.

The Oxford Dictionaries define entropy as lack of order or predictability, or a gradual decline into disorder, and The Global SoS Network has found that the quality of postal services, in turn, is related to a precise level of entropy in democracy. This looks like a coinciding set of results from using Physics PhD. Eliyahu M. Goldratt's Theory of Constraints (TOC), and Management Guru Peter Drucker's views that if you can measure a variable and control it, you can manage it.

From the Complex Adaptive System of Systems (CASoS) perspective, the dramatic implication of this concurrence is that Global Poverty, conflict, etc. are attractors of democratic systems in which the agents of the systems -humans- cannot adapt or learn because they cannot use the right channels to resolve inter-agent conflict, so they descend towards the attractors. Another case in point is the faulty logistics interaction between the component of the SoS impeding the agents -again, humans- either from investing or from having sufficient income to maintain a certain standard of living. There is another attractor there: Emergent productivity is limited to a fraction of productivity in developed countries. A good example of this situation is Chile, an OECD country that hosts an inadequate postal service. Despite having been recognized as a very well-managed country, Chile has a fraction of the labour productivity of European and other OECD countries. As if underlining the Chilean productivity gap, the Santiago Times, a local English-language news outlet has reported that between 2011 and 2018, the number of Chilean favela slums doubled in size. Another good example is the US Territory of Puerto Rico, whose national productivity level is about one third of that of the US mainland. In  Puerto Rico, an incomplete postal infrastrucrure impedes the US Postal Service from providing adequate postal services to the whole island. The predictable  results include problematic public services and high levels of poverty.

Aside from its usefulness for conceptual learning, the whole attractor perspective could become mostly irrelevant because controlling and eliminating favela-urbanism poverty in the Global South calls for a strategic thrust that will generate a system reaction from which it cannot recover.  Benchmarking and regulating the quality of Global South postal services will reduce entropy on one side. On the other side, the benchmarking act will be the key ingredient for breaking, that is, eliminating, the forementioned logistical constraint.

It was thus an auspicious beginning when the President of the Russian Federation, Mr. Vladimir Putin, decreed Russian Post a strategic enterprise: He triggered a powerful tectonic shift in the economic paradigm of the emerging world by realigning it and then ushering the entry of postal services into the realm of best practice for mobilizing local resources required for the development and upkeeping of the built environment.

Once the presently faulty Russian Legislative System of Systems breaks its constraints (which the network is proposing with the use of AI through the Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), not just for Russia but for all democracies in all countries), it will -under Russian law- become capable of resolving emergent conflict in a Win-Win manner. Thus, Mr. Putin´s visionary intervention could yet help streamline the tectonic motions of the sociocultural forces of the world. The result will be the creation of AI-driven teledemocratic mailstreams through  individual constituents, and self-organized constituent work teams, will streamline the approach to local, regional, national and global challenges as they determine the systematic and environment-friendly:

  Image of suffering Latin American children: © Benetton Group S.p.A.; with Adequate Technology? caption by Globalsosnet

A Systems Engineering Design Process for Eliminating the overbearing

Sociotechnical Global Human Error (GHE)

Further operations research The Global SoS Network has carried out indicates that the streamlining of collective intelligence, that is, systematic constituent-legislator communication, is Best Democratic Practice (BDP) because it helps create solid national sociotechnical platforms. From that vantage point, human society can eliminate the overbearing collective human error that corrodes society into creating emergent conflict, into spreading industrial underdevelopment, and into overflowing the planet with poverty, thereby blocking human society from meeting the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

The sociotechnical platform is solid because it ensures broad public participation in decision making. By promoting strong institutions, BDP is intrinsically embedded within SDG 16. Thus it is to great avail that Inter-Parliamentary Union Secretary-General, Martin Chungong, said "Goal 16 is the powerhouse from which all other action will follow," and Mr. Chungong may have made a fitting remark. Article 21-1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.” Operations research will show how many constitutions written of modified after the creation of Article 21-1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights have clauses that call for systematic constituent-legislator communication.

Operations research also has, in turn, led to a CASoS Engineering Design Process with a Theory of Change  that aligns the projected results of the teledemocratic processes that will emerge around the world, with appropriate entry-level targets of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Very importantly, the versatility of the network's  Technology Roadmap for Meeting the SDGs allows the use of the minimax principle as a viewfinder that will help identify which SDG Targets will help:

• Break the technological constraint, in order to maximize the effect that the usual minimal yearly gains in agricultural and labour productivity will have on:
  • inducing sustainable economic growth on a global basis; and
  • accelerating the overall process that will eradicate Global Poverty, and
• Break the logistical constraint, in order to minimize the cost of eradicating favela-slum urbanism in the Global South.

In addiiton to acting upon the dozen or so of rhe network's country-project sketches, and by pursuing the network's Technology Roadmap, which contains a globlal PAR cycle, practically any underdeveloped or developed nation can leverage short-term results towards placing all of the SDGs on track by 2030 at a fraction of the projected cost. In addition to a drastic reduction of waste in all countries, ODA outlays will be redirected so that there will be no need to meet SDG Target 17.2, which calls for developed countries to commit a minimum of 0.7 % of their GNP for Official Development Assistance. Instead, the main cost will likely be for the biggest affordable-housing and infrastructure construction project in history, which can be delivered through conventional -albeit greatly magnified, financing venues.

To the uninitiated, placing the SDGs on track still looks like an untenable proposition. For example, temperature records were broken in the years 2014, 2015 and 2016; 2024 being the hottest year in human history. Furthermore, Dr. James Hansen, who is a Columbia University Adjunt Professor, and was NASA's top climate scientist, has stated that a tipping point was reached in April 2008. And although Dr. Hansen has managed to somehow modify his worrisome landmark, in some quarters the jury is still out as to whether the unprecedented continuous increase of global temperature constitutes the first manifestation of catastrophic climate change, or just a fluke.

Either way, it could be said that were BDP not to be given priority, it is highly likely that the SDGs will run the same luck as the Millennium Development Goals, which offered less than stellar results. Considering the stochastic underpinnings of human affairs, the eventual outcome could be the end of the capacity of the ecosphere to sustain human civilization as we know it.

MIT Professor Thomas Malone does state that in the end, we will probably make choices that save the Earth. This means that focusing the collective intelligence towards the meeting of habitat SDGs 13 and 14, should be given the highest priority. And considering that the UN weather agency found 2016 to be the hottest year ever -a record that was broken by a significant margin in 2023- the Affordable and Clean Energy-seeking SDG 7 should pioneer the way towards sustainability.

 

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Influencing The Machinery of Government:

Solving the $30 trillion

Sociotechical Global Human Error (GHE) problem.

The conceptual framework contained in this webpage helps visualize the diminishing returns of the the zero-sum-game mindset residing in traditional political processes, in which some people and social groups use personal points of view as weapons for clashes of opinion, and where they 'hunt' for legislative resource-allocating power.

 

Such antagonism helps bring up yet another reason for viewing partisan politics a form of art. The results of political processes cannot usually be predicted with accuracy -probably excepting either of two  doomsday scenarios, which would have human society suffer the consequences of the unsolved overbearing GHE problem: 

• The Runaway Greenhouse Effect, or 
• The stark realization of eventually having rocket and nuclear engineers press various switches and turn the keys that will unleash Assured Global Destruction (AGD) along with its corollary, Nuclear Winter; a literal Armageddon (also AGD) for all humans.

 

"Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds" The Unofficial Postman's Motto, engraved on the James A. Farley Post-Office building façade, Midtown Manhattan, NYC. Written by Herodotus paraphrasing Xenophon, in Histories, during the Medic Wars circa 500 BC, Persian Empire in what is now Iran. As translated by George Herbert Palmer (1842-1933).

 

If the machinery of government is to deliver predictable results consistently, then starting from school age, the population should learn and know how to 'operate' it correctly, thus eliminating the GHE that has had an enormous global cost for human society. This brings importance to know-what, know-why and know-who. Macroergonomically speaking, citizens should acquire tacit and explicit knowledge of the task at hand, as they meet the stress-releasing operational needs of the mechanisms that make the overall democratic system work in their behalf. There should be no doubt that there is work involved. Democracy is always a work in progress in need of tending, but the GHE has impeded most citizens of the world from carrying out the task. And although the task is intermittent, it is also eternal.

Fortunately, early 21st. century technical progress allows for the use of teledemocratic  collective-intelligence techniques, making it convenient for citizens to carry out the essential tending task.

 

The Method and the Tools

In favour of streamlining the collective intelligence and place the SDGs on track in a cost effective way and on time, CASoS methods engineering prescribes that whenever constituents around the world identify a conflict that affects them, they would first self-organize. By employing their role as stakeholders in voluntary ad-hoc Best Democratic Practice (BDP) teams for resolving the conflict at hand, they would meet to deliberate with family members, friends, neighbours, co-workers or peers, or even with new acquaintances. It is at this time that AI comes in handy for insights into the immediate problem, and in spite of the scarily complicated, hi-tech and expensive-sounding names, the streamlining of collective intelligence is refreshingly simple, very convenient, and surprisingly economic. And not to worry, each citizen is perfectly capable of going it alone.

 

Either way, once constituents have formed an opinion on a subject, or agreed on a suggestion regarding constituent conflict, they would interact individually -in a formal way- with the legislative function of their Legislative System of Systems. To interact formally, they would use at least four tools to initiate a simple three-step communication method. The tools are:

 

a pen, a sheet of paper, an envelope, and a postage stamp. 

The method consists of writing periodic letters to the pertinent legislator, having them delivered, and obtaining feedback through each subsequent reply from the contacted legislator. Of course, it is a lot simpler to make a telephone call or to send an email message to a legislator, and they are effective in their own right. However, the more formal method is posted paper mail because it is personally undersigned by the constituent, an event that makes the written message  official, something that cannot always be said about other methods of constituent-legislator communication, including the . case of town meetings with legislators anywhere in the world, which may or may not be formal. In addition, when a legislator writes a reply, the legislator writes it on posted paper mail using his/her official parliamentary letterhead. 

 

It could be said that telephone calls, email messages, even personal visits to town meetings or to legislator's offices form part of Best Democratic Practice, but the undersigned letter, which is a formal communication method that originates an individual reply, is the linchpin that officializes the whole constituent-legislator communication initiative.

At this point it becomes easier to visualize a supply chain of systematic constituent-legislator communication that can benefit from AI-generated insights into constituent conflict and recommendation for its resolution. This process helps systematize the input of information to the legislative function of government in a manner that promotes efficiency and reduces waste, resulting in much lower costs for the daily operation of the MoG, machinery of government.

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Some national and other legislatures, as well as a few NGOs, usually promote BDP under the motifs of 'Write to Your Legislator' and 'Write to Your Member of Parliament. While social and political scientists may deal with the psychological aspects of the know-why and know-who, CASoS methods engineering and business-system analysis techniques are the way to go for the know-what and know-how of keeping the task simple, convenient and economic, while maintaining transparent communication between the contacting constituent and the responding legislator. No one wants legislative offices flooded with handwritten and typed or printed constituent correspondence.

To a certain degree, and depending on variables such as intrinsic motivation, technical capacity and stress, it is likely that neither will constitents be interested in exercising their democratic power as a regular course of action if it involves any protocol, rite or complex password routine beyond writing and posting an undersigned letter to the pertinent legislator. Teledemocratic communication need not and should not contain any overt or hidden stressors for citizens because according to sociotechnical theory, the daily social and technical operational aspects of democracies need to be balanced and optimized. If there is any unbalance, then changes should be made to the technical system to obtain joint optimization between the social and technical aspects of the system. In other words, constituent-legislator communication has to be simple and convenient.

How can people and computers be connected so that -collectively- they can act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before? MIT Center for Collective Intelligence

By opening a conduit through which each constituent can channel and then release civic stress, the streamlining of collective intelligence creates teledemocratic communication processes that feature total social inclusion. With the proper arrangements, all adult cognizant -literate or illiterate- residents of a country or nation can influence, and ultimately establish, the outcome of public policy for the good of all stakeholders, and of the environment. 
Once constituents have established such processes, then the same constituents, now in their role as workers, will feel more empowered on the job, at work. This level of job satisfaction will translate into workers having more meaningful experiences when carrying out their tasks, thus having stronger feelings for participating in task improvement and task simplification activities. This will result in more horizontal organizations accompanied by more quality and productivity. From then on, increased trust in the objectives of management will cause the emergence of unity of purpose at work, the resulting boost in quality and productivity will also boost wages and eventually, the global standard of living.    

"The Constraints to Sustainability...   ...get smaller each time a postal worker delivers a formal reply from a legislator to a constituent. Constituents comprise the world's most powerful social groups, and teledemocratic techniques make self-organized but informal constituent work teams the most versatile of next-generation social networks."  Starting from the thresholds of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, constituents systematically consider AI-generated advice in order to help form their own qualified opinions, then communicate -to their legislators- their points of view and suggestions about best practices for resolving constituent conflict. When AI helps constituents carry out these activities in a convenient manner, there is continuous improvement in the effectivenss of democratic processes. Continuous improvement, in turn, spurs technical progress towards optimizing symbiotic human-computer coevolution. Such coevolution will have a positive side effect: human intelligence amplification, IA, which will equip humans with improved problem-solving capacity for better decision making and enhanced creative and innovative capabilities. By employing Dr. W. Edward Demings' philosophy, for continuous improvement of democratic processes, millions of constituents acting as agents and legislators as nodes of national neural networks, teledemocratic activities gradually harmonize the sociotechnical ascent of society through the  Kardashev Scale of sustainable development. As a natural consequence, the AI-driven streamlining of collective intelligence helps human society transcend from a dangerous global situation created by an overbearing Global Human Error that  resembles a "Law of the Jungle" scenario.  At the beginning of the 21st. Century, around 200 countries are vying for power and influence through competing alliances and rivalries of differing types. Sometimes, and in spite of the heroic efforts of the UN, the faulty and sometimes dangerous structural fractures between those alliances emerge into open conflict as historical trends seem to inexorably push towards the Self-Destruction Hypothesis. One of the various solutions to the Fermi Paradox states that human society has not detected other civilizations because intelligent civilizations may usually develop the technological means to destroy themselves before developing the capacity to prevent their self-destruction.  Gathering from current events, the answer to whether human society will experience a narrow escape and avoid going the way of the dinosaurs, will emerge only after society implemets large-scale changes that would help it pass through Robert Hanson´s Great Filter. Nonetheless, until human society develops the capacity to avoid self-destruction, the unthinkable alternative offers a potent and unmatched sense of urgency to the elimination of the Global Human Error, GHE. This requires participatory collaborative intelligence processes, introduced above as Best Democratic Practice processes, that will eliminate the existing technological and logistical constraints that impede the meeting of the SDGs.  Indeed, the vision along with the shared principles and commitments that the document "Transforming our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development" lays out indicates that meeting the SDGs is best practice for sustainability. The collaboration afforded by Best Democratic Practice will employ the adaptive capacity of the system, that is, the adaptive capacity created by the interconnections of most constituents (the agents) with most legislators (the hubs), to become fine-tuned specifically for the Win-Win resolution of constituent conflict. So in essence, there is a new approach when constituents routinely communicate constituent conflict to their legislators because then, they are intervening into all types of conflict before it transforms into problems that can get out of control.  Another key emergent result of such a configuration, which represents examples of what MIT's Professor Malone calls superminds, will foster unity of purpose across all cultural, economic, and environmental spheres of human activity. This brings to mind Meta Corp's CEO Mark Zuckerberg's vision of superintelligence, which will continuously generate small but incremental improvements in quality, industrial productivity, creativity and innovation capabilities, and well-being for all. In the future, human society will view historical events as occurrring during or after the eras of Global Human Error (DGHE), or AGHE.  Image: © Trinidad & Tobago Postal Corporation

Deducing that the logistics of transporting teledemocratic information require the existence of postal technology that is adequate for the task, the focused collective intelligence of constituents now creates nationwide teledemocratic mailstreams towards the legislatures. Subsequently,  legislators will use traditional parliamentarian procedures in order to resolve constituent conflict in the forums human society has designed for that specific undertaking.

The task of legislatures to allocate resources to the executive function of government, so deliberation with much better informed perspectives will in effect result in the allocation of resources with much less or no legislative adversariness at all. Improved constituent data will result in a more managerial and systematic approach, not the partisan mentality where the gain of one individual, group, or nation is perceived as a loss to another individual, group, or nation. This empowerment is not a devolution of responsibility, because citizens have always held it. Rather, it is the devolution of authority to constituents for the more efficient, and much more effective, resolution of constituent conflict, meaning that the overall quality of public decision-making will improve systematically.

Constituent Conflict from the Systems Perspective: It is important to keep in mind that for the network, constituents are the agents of the system. Thus constituent conflict could represent any aspect of the civic domain:  from neighbour's squabbles over fences to unfilled potholes or bothersome graffitti or troublesome police interactions, to inadequate housing, or crime, education, unemployment or homelessness, corruption or burdersome traditions, inadequate medical care, unsatisfying wages or high cost of living, inefficient public services of any kind, relationships between the facets of myriad social groups, or any environmental problem.

Constituent conflict is essentially any stressful civic life situation that causes any level of distress to a citizen who, in turn, would redirect his/her stress as a response upon his/her role as a constituent. The constituent, in turn, acts in order to have the legisative system resolve the conflict -which would reduce and even dissipate such stress. When a constituent acts, the constituent communicates the troublesome situation in writing to the relevant legislator, and receives a reply. The constituent will rightly assume that the legislator will do the utmost necessary in order to have the legislative system resolve the stated constituent conflict.

What will Motivate Legislators and Constituents out of their Comfort Zones? It is the desire for reelection that will motivate the legislator to answer each letter from a constituent, and to take the steps required so that the legisltive system will direct and focus its resources towards the resolution of a stated constituent conflict.

In the case of constituents, several factors come into play. Firslty, the allure of AI and LLM training is encompassing society's insatiable need for information. When it becomes convenient for a constitutent to have AI to present one of the constituent's life conflicts, tidily laid out, along with a succint suggested and effective solution in a letter-sized format, the constituent will carry out the task of contacting his/her legislaor. This is especially true if it is convenient for the constituent to have the message delivered to someone who has the power and authority to do something about it on the constituents's behalf. If AI helps make the task an easy one, the constituent will probably take the step of editing, signing and sending such a letter. Paraphrasing Dr. Edward Deming, the father of quality assurance,  people will act when they know that someone cares. 

Secondly, when a society acquires the capacity to carry out such a procedure for all its citizens, it will create teledemocratic streams of information to legislators, which in effect streamlines collective intelligence.

AI as a driver of Change: Altogether, AI becomes a game changer because it allows for short-term resolution of what today look like intractable social and geopolitical challenges. On a longer term, human society will note how legislative systems steer themselves towards being on track towards meeting all the SDGs. In business, once business managers note improved government efficiency and effectiveness in resolving constituent conflict, they become more motivated to invest in more technology for increased productivity and sustainability. This would take the form of more efficient machinery and methods that will help make small gains in labour productivity and wellbeing. The complex-adaptive result is that improved government performance brings about improved incomes and improved quality of life as the standard of living improves, meaning that everyone involved, and the environment, win.

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For the Global South, in addition to serving as a medium for constituent-legislator communication, adequate postal services allow for institutional focusing of adaptive capacity in order to address pressing social needs. As the expressed need for adequate postal services helps create a 'climate for change,' it serves as motivator for the rollout of municipal, utility and affordable housing billing systems wherever needed, which is in most countries at the beginning of the 21st century. The resulting income streams are key for the lupkeep of public infrastructure necessary for meeting social needs such as quality education and medical services, and for all-important trade.

The Internet is a very convenient venue for establishing teledemocratic processes, and technichal progress has made it practical for most people to have and use a smartphone. This means that artificial intelligence can be used to help constituents to be better informed when contacting their legislators. Nowadays the decreasing cost of access to information, for example, through cellphones, makes it more practical to complement the benefits of AI with the cost of  a few stationery items and that of family mailboxes, which are usually made of low-cost sheetmetal. Home letterboxes only need a key and lock, require no periodic expenses, and practically never need maintenance.

In the case of electronic-only billing in Global-South cases of utilities and affordable-housing schemes, there are psychological, legal, and various other issues, such as the matter of the lack of formality, deference of the public servant to citizens, and the perception that electronic SMS and e-mail billing systems just do not have the necessary etiquette. For example, if a family receives only electronic billing from utilities and tax authorities, the question could arise that if the matter is not important enough for the sender to take the trouble of printing a formal bill, then, Why should the payer feel that it is so important to pay up?

The key to sustainability is in configuring Information and Communications Technology (ICT), postal services, cellular-phone information along with the Internet, in a way that facilitates judicious use of artificial intelligence. When social groups such as constituents use AI-driven teledemocratic methods, then collective intelligence acquires the capacity to regulate the activities of the Public Sector System in benefit of the common good, and of the environment, while helping to steadily increase the level of productivity.

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