If you actually read the proposed socioeconomic transition models you
will find out that inflation/demurrage is actually part of some while
others propose to use money only in order to do business with a
democratic central bank where inflation is no problem at all and yet
others suggest not to use money at all.
Today we have some of the brightest people who get almost no funding at
all and many mediocre people get all the cake because they are most
ruthless and come up with new shameful ways to suck out even more money
from the system. If we continue the competitive paradigm some will get
rich by destroying everything they can get away with (externalizing
costs) and there will be only losers left in the end ... while at the
same time we create more and more irrelevant entropy/information
disordering society (irrelevant jobs, bureaucracy, poverty, destruction
of the biosphere, etc. can all be seen as irrelevant entropy) It is not
the good people who accumulate most of the wealth or the most
sustainable and efficient ideas but the ones resulting in the highest
profits ...
Also if you had just a glimpse of how much resources, energy,
brainpower, etc. we are wasting because of our competitive framework it
would become quite clear that in a cooperative environment we would have
much more of everything to be applied to the most promising projects and
endeavours. In a cooperative culture people would not come up with
thousands of irrelevant business plans, ideas and products in order to
make even more money but those who care would try to make things more
efficient, sustainable and practical. Also like 75% of all people would
be liberated from their current framework based jobs and can start to
contribute meaningful things to society. In a cooperative society there
would not bee 100 brands of cars but maybe 20 different types of
cars/projects everyone with sufficient skills and knowledge could work
on. Also funding AGI would be no problem - even if you gave one
supercomputer to every AGI project but stopped wasting stuff through
planned and intrinsic obsolescence and the need for cyclic consumption
we would be hundred times better of than today in terms of
sustainability and resource efficiency.
The idea that we need leaders and asymmetries of purchasing power,
influence, etc. created those tarpits that led to the collapse of Rome
... and it is exactly what is happening today ... money acts as some
sort of confirmation bias for the old norm ... relevant new ideas have
little influence because they do not result in more influence in the
outdated paradigm.
"The breakdown of civilizations is not caused by loss of control over
the environment, over the human environment, or attacks from outside.
Rather, ironically, societies that develop great expertise in problem
solving become incapable of solving new problems by overdeveloping their
structures for solving old ones." -- Arnold J. Toynbee
On 01/14/2013 07:39 AM, Steve Richfield 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.
-------------------------------------------
AGI
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