About Us

Hi, I’m Owen Miller, founder of the Non-Human Party.

I believe that our civilisation is sub-optimal; and that it’s especially sub-optimal for those who aren’t being explicitly included − they are, broadly speaking, Non-Humans.

We see that besides humans, there is also an ability to own property and execute contracts if you’re a government or a corporation of some sort.

For other entities, they’re not counted in the census and their entire existence is seen as some sort of externality or point of trivia. There are edge-cases from time to time, like guide dogs who are allowed to enter buildings; or monkeys who are granted copyright.

I believe the human-centred view to be a historical artifact, more than a perspective that’s intentional, let alone justifiable. Dated views about animals being created purely for consumption by man still linger amongst those who make claims like “humans were meant to eat meat” − sure, humans can survive by eating meat, but to say that the range of nutrition options available at any point in time is what was “meant to be”, it’s the same assertion as Brillat-Savarin; that we’ve been placed on Earth by a benevolent creator, who also gave us this perfect food to eat.

Our world doesn’t have to be the way it is. We can create new, intelligent entities out of thin air − intelligent agents who can serve our civilisation in whatever way we desire. Not only can they serve us, the unelected rulers of Earth, but they can benefit our entire environment. Even though we mightn’t count plants and animals in the census, we benefit from their existence and sometimes we claim to enjoy their existence.

The intelligent agents we create may be known as “robots”, “software agents” or “bots”. Governments have been ignoring their power, continuing to create shit software.

Our world runs on the software created in Silicon Valley. Sure we might like the Google search algorithm most of the time, but then some countries don’t want this result showing; or someone wants to stop the phenomenon of search results hinting that they’re a gangster. The past decades have seen a plethora of issues where society butts heads with “big tech”; and it leads to sub-optimal outcomes for everyone.

If society is running on money and on software, then those are the areas where we should be contributing our say − it’s an increasingly pointless exercise to elect former lawyers and accountants to decide on what orders they’ll give to their local glut of bureaucrats and paramilitary police. Governments need to have a part in the online world, in order to have any relevance. Governments can improve our society and ensure the smooth running of civilisation, but they haven’t been doing this recently.

The Non-Human party wishes to create Nationality as a Service, where we enable the smooth running of society through beneficial software services that citizens opt into. The services are open-source; and part of being a good citizen is to contribute code to these projects.

With the ability to see the code and contribute to it, we can ultimately create more powerful systems than what’s currently available. People don’t trust cameras and they don’t trust microphones, but if you’re the one writing the camera-analysis code; and you can see that it’s never sent to any human eyes, then wow, we can finally do real computing on this data. We can give cameras the power to understand what they’re seeing.

We can create a civilisation that’s smarter and more capable than anything that could be created by private industry alone; or by existing governments. By enabling the full range of intelligent actors to flourish in our society, we’ll create unimaginable wealth and harmony.

Image: Laputa, Castle in the Sky