YKY...
About your proposed credits system ...
One comment I'd make is: it's not easy to estimate the pragmatic workability
of a hypothetical way of organizing peoples' efforts, via abstract logical
and economic considerations. Psychology and culture play into the matter,
in
complex ways.
This means that some things that initially seem senseless, based on
apparently logical arguments, are going to work;
and some things that initially seem sensible, based on apparently
logical arguments, are going to fail.
So a balance needs to be struck between sticking with what experience has
shown to work (even when the reasons why are not fully grokked) and trying
new
things to avoid getting stuck in old ruts.
And when evaluating a hypothetical new mode of organization, care has to
be taken to use "empathic" cognition as well as logical cognition in
assessing it,
to try to guess how the mode of organization will really work in the context
of
human social psychology.
For instance, I don't think it was obvious to hardly anyone how well the
open-
source approach to developing code, or the Wikipedia approach to developing
text, would work. Yet, though both of these have plusses and minuses, both
have worked rather well. In hindsight we can sort-of explain why these have
worked well, but these
explanations weren't given in any detail in foresight.
(In fact the philosophy
that dominated the founders of the FOSS movement was actually fairly
different from the one dominating the FOSS community today -- in the early
days there was a lot more anti-business sentiment around the FOSS
world, for instance).
On the other hand, Google's Knol, a Wikipedia competitor, was launched
based on what seemed like a logical argument -- people want to get credit
for their contributions -- and yet so far it has flailed around rather
pathetically
compared to Wikipedia, in which individuals' credit for their contributions
is
far less obvious. So, in the case of collaborative online document
production,
it seems clear that getting credit (for status or financially) has been a
*less*
effective motive than less tangible rewards coming from the feeling of
contributing to a communal knowledge store.
A related fact, which I believe I read in Freakonomics, is that lawyers are
more willing to **donate** their time to help the poor, than to offer their
time
to the poor at a discounted rate. A donation goes into one psychological
category (being helpful ... seeking moral value) whereas a reduced-rate
service goes into another category (working for money ... in which case
psychological schema involving "negotiating for the best price" become
involved).
This may relate to FOSS, in the sense that people may
psychologically place "contributing software to the world for free" in a
different category than "contributing software to the world for minimal
or highly uncertain compensation" ... the former is psychologically
classified
under "doing good things for the world" whereas the latter is
psychologically
classified under "providing services in exchange for material reward, in
which
case I need to take care to do a rational economic cost-benefit analysis."
In fact I'm going to take a leap and generalize from the above handful
of observations, and introduce the notion of "distributed cognition" into
the discussion.
There is a sense in which social groups are "mindplexes": they have
mind-ness on the collective level, as well as on the individual level.
So, something like Wikipedia or Linux can be viewed as the product of a
collective mind possessed by a group of people.
It seems that humans possess somewhat distinct motivational
subsystems keyed to individuality versus collectivity. Some situations
trigger us to act as individuals after our own personal interest, others
trigger us to act as group-members,
So, anyway, getting back to your proposed scheme of assigning credits
for open-source software work, I'll make some more concrete comments.
Recent history shows that the following three models *do* work:
1)
A regular FOSS project where there is no assignment of credits to
contributors
2)
A proprietary project where code is owned by the people who work on it,
and kept secret. In this case there is a small number of bosses who
allocate credits to contributors, bounce out folks who don't contribute
enough, etc.
3)
A FOSS project coupled with a company that makes $$ selling services
or making custom code based on the FOSS code
*Why* models 1 and 3 work so well is not obvious a priori, but history
shows that they do.
Why am I skeptical of your assignment-of-credits scheme?
I suppose the best way to put it is:
-- a FOSS project as typically conceived
triggers the "part of the collective mind" motivational subsystem of the
human brain.
-- a company w/ proprietary software ... or with service contracts ...
triggers the "seek individual advantage" motivational subsystem of the
human brain
On the other hand, offering quantitative credits for contribution to some
FOSS project seems to fully satisfy neither motivational system.
One can't get the pure feeling of contributing to the whole, because there
is this quest-for-individual-gain too tightly wrapped up in it.
On the other hand, if one rationally assesses the opportunity using one's
calculating, individual-focused, businessman's mind, it's going to seem
like a worse deal than a lot of other opportunities out there. The risk
is high in several senses: first the basic risk of technology failure, but
then also the risk that due to politics in the credit-assignment community
N years down the road, one's credits will get squashed to near zero
value by the time the project finally yields economic rewards.
I realize the above analysis is a bit "squishy" and loose, but my main
point is that the workability or otherwise of schemes for organizing humans
has a lot to do with these squishy, psychosocial factors, which are hard to
articulate and formally analyze.
I'd also note that the general reaction to your credit system among people
has not been so positive. That should tell you something. It suggests that
something about the proposal does not mesh well with humans' motivational
systems at present.
Maybe you can find some variant that works for people, I'm not going to
rule it out.
Anyway, thanks for giving me some interesting things to think about, while
I procrastinate doing some extremely boring paperwork associated with
a small government contract Novamente has ;-p
ben g
On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 5:45 AM, YKY (Yan King Yin) <
[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > As has been said previously, there have been AI projects in the past
> > which tried this credits or shares route which turned out to be very
> > unsuccessful. The problem with issuing credits is that, rightly or
> > wrongly, an expectation of short term financial reward is built up in
> > the minds of some contributors. When this expectation is not realised
> > things can become unpleasant.
>
> People who brought Lehman Brothers probably feel rather "unpleasant"
> now. But that's not a reason to abolish the stock market. "Caveat
> emptor" means "let the buyer beware".
>
> > There are additional problems with the credits idea. Under such a
> > system I suspect that as time goes on an increasing amount of effort
> > will be needlessly expended in arguments over who gets how many
> > credits and how such credits are fairly approtioned ("I did more work
> > on this than you did", "you didn't count the number of hours I spent
> > researching rather than code writing", etc), detracting from the work
> > which needs to be done.
>
> What would be a better solution? Right now, *everybody*'s work goes
> unaccounted for.
>
> > There is no incompatibility with the idea of developing software under
> > a FOSS licence, and then making money out of systems or services
> > peripheral to that. Since the construction of AGIs is likely to be a
> > long term effort the open source methodology seems appropriate, and
> > under the current economic circumstances paying programmers to work on
> > a project whose culmination may be years ahead in the future will
> > appear increasingly unattractive.
>
> It will be incompatible with some licenses; but then many newer
> licenses are friendly to business.
>
> A lot of work remains to be done in the AGI core, as well as the
> periphery. Lots of things to be built.
>
> There is no reason why a task is long term, then it shouldn't be paid
> for. Besides, my optimistic estimate of AGI is 5-10 years. Not very
> long-term at all.
>
> > Incidentally, once a true AGI is created the current software
> > development paradigm becomes obsolete anyway.
>
> This doesn't sound very logical. Food will turn into excretion anyway,
> so...?
>
> YKY
>
>
> -------------------------------------------
> agi
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--
Ben Goertzel, PhD
CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC
Director of Research, SIAI
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must be first
overcome " - Dr Samuel Johnson
-------------------------------------------
agi
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