Each person is their own Czar. One person has the power to change all at any moment in their own slice of the multiverse.
John From: Azn A [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Saturday, March 29, 2014 3:32 AM To: AGI Subject: Re: [agi] MindOntology Lol, I'm not a Neo-Reactionary. I don't believe in monarchs and all that nonsense. However, I do believe that strong central control can get things done :) On Sat, Mar 29, 2014 at 12:25 AM, Ben Goertzel <[email protected]> wrote: Uh oh... the Invasion of the AGI List by the Neo-Reactionaries has begun !!! The modern track record of monarchs per se is not so great, but the success of Asian economies in recent decades does seem to speak to the strengths of non-stupid strong central state control in fostering technological progress... -- Ben G On Sat, Mar 29, 2014 at 3:22 PM, Azn A <[email protected]> wrote: Coolness, but what exactly do I have to gain by sharing my ideas? :) What do you have to offer me? After talking to a number of people, I believe that the only hope for the future is that the system can get a Czar (as in me) - an Unincentivized Incentivizer, someone who controls the entire system while standing outside of it. This isn't just about a better Web. It's about restructuring our civilization - a shift to a new social order for the betterment of humanity. I'm tried of waiting around for things to get done. Play time is over. >From slatestarcodex: There is an extraordinarily useful pattern of refactored agency in which you view humans as basically actors playing roles determined by their incentives. Anyone who strays even slightly from their role is outcompeted and replaced by an understudy who will do better. That means the final state of a system is determined entirely by its initial state and the dance of incentives inside of it. If a system has perverse incentives, it's not going to magically fix itself; no one inside the system has an incentive to do that. The end user of the system - the student or consumer - is already part of the incentive flow, so they're not going to be helpful. The only hope is that the system can get a Czar - an Unincentivized Incentivizer, someone who controls the entire system while standing outside of it. For example, take the problems with the scientific community, which my friends in Berkeley often discuss. There's lots of publication bias, statistics are done in a confusing and misleading way out of sheer inertia, and replications often happen very late or not at all. And sometimes someone will say something like "I can't believe people are too dumb to fix Science. All we would have to do is require early registration of studies to avoid publication bias, turn this new and powerful statistical technique into the new standard, and accord higher status to scientists who do replication experiments. It would be really simple and it would vastly increase scientific progress. I must just be smarter than all existing scientists, since I'm able to think of this and they aren't." And I answer "Well, yeah, that would work for the Science Czar. He could just make a Science Decree that everyone has to use the right statistics, and make another Science Decree that everyone must accord replications higher status. And since we all follow the Science Czar's Science Decrees, it would all work perfectly!" Why exactly am I being so sarcastic? Because things that work from a czar's-eye view don't work from within the system. No individual scientist has an incentive to unilaterally switch to the new statistical technique for her own research, since it would make her research less likely to produce earth-shattering results and since it would just confuse all the other scientists. They just have an incentive to want everybody else to do it, at which point they would follow along. Likewise, no journal has the incentive to unilaterally demand early registration, since that just means everyone who forgot to early register their studies would switch to their competitors' journals. And since the system is only made of individual scientists and individual journals, no one is ever going to switch and science will stay exactly as it is. I use this "czar" terminology a lot. Like when people talk about reforming the education system, I point out that right now students' incentive is to go to the most prestigious college they can get into so employers will hire them, employers' incentive is to get students from the most prestigious college they can so that they can defend their decision to their boss if it goes wrong, and colleges' incentive is to do whatever it takes to get more prestige, as measured in US News and World Report rankings. Does this lead to huge waste and poor education? Yes. Could an Education Czar notice this and make some Education Decrees that lead to a vastly more efficient system? Easily! But since there's no Education Czar everybody is just going to follow their own incentives, which have nothing to do with education or efficiency. A standard liberal democratic government is not an Unincentivized Incentivizer. Government officials are beholden to the electorate and to their campaign donors, and they need to worry about being outcompeted by the other party. They, too, are slaves to their incentives. The obvious solution to corporate welfare is "end corporate welfare". A three year old could think of it. But anyone who tried would get outcompeted by powerful corporate interests backing the campaigns of their opponents, or outcompeted by other states that still have corporate welfare and use it to send businesses and jobs their way. It's obvious from outside the system, and completely impossible from the inside. It would appear we need some kind of a Government Czar. Everyone realizes our current model of government is screwed up and corrupt. We keep electing fresh new Washington Outsiders who promise with bright eyes to unupscrew and decorruptify it. And then they keep being exactly as screwed up and corrupt as the last group, because if you hire a new actor to play the same role, the lines are still going to come out exactly the same. Want reform? The lines to "Act V: An Attempt To Reform The System" are already written and have been delivered dozens of times already. How is changing the actors and actresses going to help? A Czar could actually get stuff done. Imperial Decree 1: End all corporate welfare. Imperial Decree 2: Close all tax loopholes. Imperial Decree 3: Health care system that doesn't suck. You get the idea. Would the Czar be corrupt and greedy and tyrannical? Yes, probably. Let's say he decided to use our tax money to build himself a mansion ten times bigger than the Palace of Versailles. The Internet suggests that building Versailles today would cost somewhere between $200M and $1B, so let's dectuple the high range of that estimate and say the Czar built himself a $10 billion dollar palace. And he wants it plated in solid gold, so that's another $10 billion. Fine. Corporate welfare is $200B per year. If the Czar were to tell us "I am going to take your tax money and spend it on a giant palace ten times the size of Versailles covered in solid gold", the proper response would be "Great, but what are we going to do with the other $180 billion dollars you're saving us?" In the democratic system, the incentive is always for the country to become more progressive, because progressivism is the appeal to the lowest common denominator. There may be reversals, false starts, and Reagan Revolutions, but over the course of centuries democracy means inevitable creeping progress. As Mencius Moldbug says, "Cthulhu swims slowly, but he always swims left." A Czar, free from these incentives, would be able to take the best of progressivism and leave the rest behind. On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 11:11 PM, Duncan Murray <[email protected]> wrote: Thanks for the detailed email, and yes I'd be happy to help work on mapping information. Do you have a link to your Upper Ontology (or work in general - looks interesting). I still want to have a look at all the current data - it is surprising that there are so many around. Thanks, Duncan On Sat, Mar 29, 2014 at 3:04 PM, Azn A <[email protected]> wrote: That's cute Duncan. However, you've missed our Upper Level Ontology which is almost spot on to the true requirements to implement a unified database. We're only missing the AI side but that's a side argument for the rationality to implement a different/more unified base/core referential integrity system that is more towards the unified field theory but that's not a requirement until you want a conceptual processing environment for a brain like processor/agent.. Anyway, if you're interested in mapping human information to a format that an AI can read (or in the short term - normal automation software) I might be interested.. We're working on a new Web (the Concept Web) separable from the previous Web layer that is computable by machines. OWL / RDF are not sufficient. In Web 1.0 and 2.0 we were linking documents, e.g. web documents, files. What is different with OWL / RDF is that we also link structured data, from relational databases, from RDF databases. But we are still in the data level. OWL is supposed to bridge the gap between programming and semantic relations, in practise this has never been achieved! Web 3.0 has to be differentiated from the current web, it has to create a distinct layer on top of the existing linked data layer with its own referencing scheme (from WWW to GGG) that can be resolved with the current URI scheme. This will have its own way to define and handle terms, concepts, relations, axioms, rules, the structural components of an ontology. I envision a new Web consisting of maybe 35 Web platforms (as the new Web will be one giant database) covering local knowledge to science. Once phase 1 is completed (destruction of the old fragmented Web), I plan to roll out a science Web platform that directs AGI research. The system (something like IBM waston but much more powerful) will request scientists, etc to conduct detailed research to discover unknown facts about analyzed Systems. The system would then conduct detailed research to discover new facts about Systems and put these facts into the database by itself, even without interaction with Scientists. That's the kind of thing that would get AGI moving forward if done right. That would also lead to a revolution in science (http://science.kqed.org/quest/2011/09/26/the-open-science-movement/) where Scientists, professional and amateur would have secure profiles and could publish ideas quickly and be on record as the first to come up with something long before they could get a paper out for peer review. The pressure to publish here would come not from the science greats but from the fringe. If some group of amateurs starts using their collective brains to start mapping out ideas in your area of expertise, you better get all of your work out in the daylight or they will steal your thunder. Any ideas you post to someone else' page are there on record, so your part is known to all. In the past you could have one genius pushing our understanding because a lot wasn't known. Today, progress is a lot more incremental and departmental ... One guy spends 5 years and through trial and error he makes a small discovery. It takes time before other researches integrate his discovery into their thought and put it to use because everything is too fragmented and fucked up. The possibilities are endless here. ~Azn A On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 8:41 AM, Duncan Murray <[email protected]> wrote: Thanks for that - I am doing a review on all the upper ontologies I can find relating to or which might benefit AI development and wanted include the OpenCog definitions. (http://www.acutesoftware.com.au/aikif/ontology.html) I have written a Python script to export the MindOntology pages into a CSV file. The code is - https://github.com/acutesoftware/AIKIF/blob/master/AI/ontology/createMindOnt ology.py and the CSV file is - https://github.com/acutesoftware/AIKIF/blob/master/AI/ontology/mindOntology. csv Feel free to use the code, or the CSV file in OpenCog, as I would love to be able to contribute to this project. Cheers, Duncan On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 11:35 AM, Ben Goertzel <[email protected]> wrote: I believe I created that, way back when, directly as a set of wiki pages... ben g On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 6:42 PM, Duncan Murray <[email protected]> wrote: Hi all! I have been reading this group for a while now and am interested in mapping human information to a format that an AI can read (or in the short term - normal automation software). I was wondering if the MindOntology (http://wiki.opencog.org/w/MindOntology) is available as a single dataset (OWL / RDF / text), or is the source currently the set of wiki pages? 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