I've always said Facebook is the ultimate stygmergic system. ~PM Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2013 13:53:16 -0500 Subject: Re: [agi] On cooperation From: [email protected] To: [email protected]
Another tool of organization in a free market, in addition to competitive ownership, techniques of free cooperation, and solidarity currencies, are stigmergy-based systems, which are really taking off due to software-based approaches in this period of unprecedented low-cost association thanks to the internet. Heather Marsh's article: http://georgiebc.wordpress.com/2012/12/24/stigmergy-2/Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy Rob On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 4:27 PM, Aaron Hosford <[email protected]> wrote: I think there is a lot in common between coordinating people under a government+economic system to produce intelligent group behavior, vs. coordinating quasi-intelligent sub-agents under a control+feedback system to produce an intelligent agent. Whether you have a single algorithm coordinating countless points of data, or a large population of algorithms competing, any design sufficiently sophisticated to produce intelligence will have to coordinate multiple working parts which may not always be in agreement with each other. Ultimately, it's the Credit Assignment Problem (which sub-agent's actions at what point in time caused an arbitrary observed effect) that must be worked out to successfully implement intelligence, whether you're talking about implementing intelligent collective human behavior or intelligent software. Steve, if you think the math has to be worked out before AGI can be produced, this is the place to start. Camel, if you're going to eliminate the evils of competition in collective human behavior, this is the problem your alternative system has to solve better than the existing one. (People will always compete, because it's in their nature. It's a matter of getting them to do so constructively, as opposed to trying - and failing - to make them stop.) On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 9:39 AM, Steve Richfield <[email protected]> wrote: Camel, At present, the frontiers of knowledge are usually pushed back by people who are "out of step" with the remainder of society. Your proposal would starve them for resources, to fund other "safer" efforts. Lacking perfect decision making ability, your proposal would devolve into a gigantic mediocre committee-driven firehose of money thrown in seemingly "safe" directions. The "missing piece" appears to be the ability to value imperfect information. When you "know" something, whether "you" is a single neuron within a particular brain or a committee of many brains or something in between (like you), how much is the 100% certainty of some piece of "knowledge" to be depreciated by the vague understanding that certainty is wrong just enough to completely guide evolution and technological development, not to mention kill you if you were to completely rely on everything being true that you had never seen to be false. 100% is never 100%, and 0% is never 0%. How could you ever create and operate a committee that never completely trusted its own directions? THESE are the sorts of questions that MUST be answered for your proposal to ever succeed. They are important questions, because the innards of an AGI will never work well without having some of the answers to this question built into them, and we don't now have those answers, which is just another barrier to developing useful AGIs in the near future. Ancient Rome dealt with this my having the Senate elect their best leader to be Caesar, to make the big decisions, with the thought that if there were any problems, they could simply elect a different Caesar. Of course the elected Caesar would use his limitless power to quickly quash the possibility of his own removal, so being elected Caesar became in effect a lifelong appointment, though their lives were often artificially shortened. Also, there is a serious technical problem with the concept of a "reserve currency". If you don't have steady inflation, people tend to stash it away, so you have to keep printing more and more to keep enough money in circulation. Then, when there is some tiny glitch in the economy, like a boom, people start spending their savings, which causes inflation, so more people spend their savings, which causes more inflation, which devolves into a gigantic hyperinflation spiral. With corporations and governments now hoarding many trillions of dollars, we are now poised on the brink of a worldwide monetary collapse for just that reason. Inflation is ALWAYS there. Your choice is to have a slow controlled inflation, or save it up to have it all at once. Your economic discussion parallels some of the AGI discussions. Here is something that sounds really good, but the technology to do it isn't yet in hand, and if it were, it would probably bring on the end of modern civilization. On the other hand, there might just be a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow you now see. I suggest setting my skepticism explained above aside, and look really hard to see if you can find a way past the obvious barriers. Steve ==================== On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 10:53 AM, just camel <[email protected]> wrote: I am talking about a cooperative monetary system not some form of government!? When money is (re)designed so that people cooperate instead to constantly compete then that has nothing to do with a totalitarian state? Once we have a cooperative monetary system we can just produce whatever humanity needs based on maximum (physical) efficiency and sustainability and not based on monetary profit. Corruption, poverty and most types of crime will disappear immediately, we will have the most durable products, we will have access to everything we need without the burden of caring about maintenance work or having things repaired or serviced on a per person basis ... etc, etc, ... i don't see what a totalitatian government has to do with all of this? Actually you would need little government in a cooperative world ... problems would be solved by using a scientific approach instead of a profit oriented approach that always requires regulation and loads of bureaucracy to fight the tendency of the competitive paradigm to get away with least effort and maximum monetary profit, corruption, ecological destruction and the exploitation of people. I really don't get what you are trying to say ... there can never be cooperative governments within a competitive framework ... there can never be real trust within a competitive framework. Ultimately everyone will sell you out/take advantage of you if they have to ... and exponential growing debt will ensure that most people will sooner or later have to do exactly that. We can hit the reset button like we did in the 30es and have the same b*llshit of ecological and social destruction or rethink the destructive rules we have once chosen to impose upon ourselves. I think that if we fail to implement a cooperative society we will get closer and closer to a societal collapse unless some sort of AGI/BCI increases the overall intelligence/rationality of our society (or obsoletes humanity) and thus our ability to limit that tendency of the complex system of our society to disorder. Humanity can only deal with up to a certain level of entropy and will collapse if some threshold is reached ... and as I stated before competition is generating most of that irrelevant entropy that disorders the complex system of humanity. (as said before ... see first part of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDVtxvvRGQI ) On 01/12/2013 05:59 AM, Tim Tyler wrote: On 11/01/2013 00:38, just camel wrote: > explain how cooperation is the key to solve all socioeconomic problems and > how a non competitive monetary system is quite feasible especially with our > today's technology [...] there are hundreds of thousands of people out there > already working on implementing a cooperative monetary system. Cooperation isn't all good. Indeed, many current governments go to considerable pains to ensure that no other large cooperating enties appear within their boundaries and threaten them. That is part of the point of the antitrust laws of The United States and the Monopolies and Mergers act in the U.K. A large cooperative government is known as a "totalitarian" state: "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism The concept doesn't have a great rep. -- __________ |im |yler http://timtyler.org/ [email protected] Remove lock to reply. AGI | Archives | Modify Your Subscription AGI | Archives | Modify Your Subscription -- Full employment can be had with the stoke of a pen. Simply institute a six hour workday. That will easily create enough new jobs to bring back full employment. 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