Hello, Dear friends on Everything List,
so, it's been half a year since my last post. What's new? :-) I've got a 10
year story to tell, but, in short: *Seeking for knowledge, resources, and
love; one world's dream, intercultural understanding, and safe arrival
of technological singularity, I am creating a public
self-explanatory, inter-lingual, financial, programmable, hierarchical
think-tank:* https://infty.xyz [The Infinity Project]. Anyone's welcome to
join, just send an e-mail to [email protected] and I'll send you an invite.
Would you like to know the story, here it goes:
---
*BACKGROUND PROBLEMS:*
*Problem 1 -- The Knowledge Acquisition*
In 2005, due to the lack of resources my mother's second husband was
telling me to go get a job. However, *I strongly disliked the idea of 'work
for money'. I highly liked the idea of 'work for ideas'*, so I started
viewing all things as subject of making rather than subject of receiving
for money. Like many, I knew that things are made in factories
semi-automatically, so, instead of thinking how to make money for a living,
I got absorbed into thinking how to automate the production of everything
what I need for living. For that, I needed knowledge.
Seeing how Wikipedia had around 2003 organized the world's semantic
knowledge suggested that we could do the same with the procedural knowledge
as well, and *here*(goo.gl/ve2YKT) is my initial idea.
I spent much time thinking how to extract and represent the procedural
knowledge. Large amount of which is the hidden "know-how”, which I wanted
to make widely available. So, during both my undergraduate mathematics
studies, as well as in the further occupations, I continued to think how to
do it in such a way as to make it easily accessible to both children and
adults.
The extraction of such knowledge alone presents a challenge: we could try
to obtain it by reverse-engineering things recursively breaking down every
thing into its components and asking what tools were used to manufacture
them, and breaking down each of the tools into their components, and
repeating so until the tool='*ancient stone tool*'. However, it would
require enormous amount of time. So, I asked myself -- how to document all
the mankind's creation in the process of making in such a way as to
maximize its educational value, i.e., how to make everyone easily
understand the work breakdown structures of all technology?
The presenting the procedural knowledge is also a challenge: there is no
universal way to describe how to make something, because every person’s
situation and desired outcome is different. I mean, a simple question like
'How to make a car?' has ~(7x10^9)^2 (Cartesian product of initial states
and desired states of every person, if all of them want it) of possible
answers. It becomes unfeasible to cover them all. So, how do we share the
knowledge of how to make a car?
Fortunately, people are good at copying and modifying, and we can explain
how to manufacture things by using the conventional units, drawings and the
laws of physics, and to answer the question 'How a specific car was made?'
is possible by simply sharing the exact story. Every specific company has a
story how they built what they built, so the answer to a question of how it
was made is unique and existing. Moreover, every time someone does a
project, it is generally decomposed into milestones along the way,
producing some understandable work breakdown structure, we just need a way
to collect them and share.
This was the keyhole for me to start creating the desired knowledge
representation, and long ago, I started an initiative to assemble a wiki of
such decompositions like in this existing *wiki*(goo.gl/rhO7ML). You can
look at an *example*(goo.gl/tZQfnS) there on how the Space Shuttle Columbia
was made.
*By creating Infinity Project, I am trying to represent the procedural
knowledge openly in public, so everyone can know how to make things they
see, even without money.*
*Problem 2 -- The Entry Barrier*
In 2001, when I got the permanent internet at home, I found a place called
'Halfbakery.com'. It was and still is an active community of innovators,
where people actively criticize and dissect ideas, and have fun in the
process. I was hooked since the first days of using it, and the number of
new ideas was increasing over the years. So it was nice that we can discuss
ideas, but I wanted to make a living from working on some of them, however
I had no resources for that.
And although after many years now we already have systems like KickStarter,
IndieGogo and others, but we have to spend much time and money to create
attractive prototypes, convincing professional videos, and the marketing
campaigns to present ideas to the crowd of laymen.
Unfortunately, ideas, no matter how brilliant, usually don't make it into
crowd-funding platforms without prototypes, and when people generally are
one or less salaries away from being broke without a job, they simply
cannot afford to invest the time to making the prototype. The last time I
tried to make a prototype, I had to quit my PhD studies to focus on it, and
just for one *idea*(goo.gl/5FNvRC). Consider someone who has hundreds of
ideas that they want to realize, and they have a problem.
The problem is that *ideas without prototypes don’t get funded on
KickStarter or Indiegogo*, because investing people who come there are
visual, instant-gratification driven individuals. Therefore, the ideas
(unlike prototypes) must be evaluated and funded by different kind of
people -- people who read books, who can imagine, and who need no pictures
to visualize ideas. It is a different kind of crowd, the crowd like on
*Halfbakery.com,
LessWrong.com, EverythingList*, where people like to talk about concepts.
The fact that such communities exist suggested that what we are lacking are
the opportunities to easily share resources in our conversations online,
and thus, the *idea*(goo.gl/0hRkAp) of transactions inside comments was
born. The idea evolved into what people could use to direct and manage the
cash flows right from within their comments by programmable transaction
generators.
*So, by creating Infinity Project, I am trying to create the conditions for
people to make a living from working on ideas they love, without the
marketing barrier.*
*Problem 3 -- The Being Together*
Ever since I started looking for a girlfriend, I knew that we would break
up unless we share the same goals. I looked for someone with whom we could
engage in science and create together, and with whom the creation be
expression of our love. I needed someone who loves science and mathematics
and programming, because I viewed them as probably the only viable means to
achieve anything of true significance.
However, whenever I would find a girlfriend, who said she was interested in
science, or mathematics, it was often that she would not want to talk about
it, mainly because the day of work would make her tired of thinking about
it, and made her just want to rest or do something else after it. Moreover,
the non-disclosure agreements and company policies prevented her from
sharing inside information with the outside.
Such situation did not look good. The time of my best friends, which they
would love to spend ideating and working on new exciting systems and
inventions is bought up by corporations which don’t readily share the joy
with outside. Moreover, those who had families, had almost no time for
friends at all, because after the day of work, they have their family time
instead.
Wishing more stimulating creative engagement, I saw one way -- to create an
opportunity to free my friends by enabling them to work directly in society
without the middle-men like corporations -- making mankind into one family.
*So, by creating Infinity Project, I am trying to create the conditions to
allow all of my friends to quit their jobs, and start working on what they
love, and be together.*
*FOREGROUND PROBLEMS:*
*Problem 1 -- Defining world’s goal*
As a teenager, I thought selfishly - how to get everyone work on my goal?
The solution was clear - come up with the goal that everyone wants to
realize, in that case, it would be logical for everyone to cooperate on it
(more precisely, it would make sense for everyone to cooperate, if the
thing that everyone wants the most is easier to get by cooperation than for
any subset of people to get it on their own). I thought of it for a long
while.
If we want the world’s goal to be a good one, we have to define the
criterion to separate “Good” from “Evil”, and I came up with such
criterion, specifically, *“Good” is to create conditions for the World to
exist, while “Bad” is to destroy the World*, where the “World” is defined
as the Everything (universe, multiverse,...) as a whole, as well as
everything as its every no matter how small or large entity (a human, an
ant, a cell,...).
The criterion suggested, that the ideal is to create the conditions, where
every entity can exist in the full expression of what it is. I later came
up with a more specific, formulation - *to create the conditions where
everything that anyone truly wishes would come true*, which should
theoretically be possible without a conflict, because the wording “truly
wishes” implies the necessity to extend one’s consciousness up to the *global
identity*(goo.gl/uEZgow) to verify that what one thinks one wants is truly
the thing that one wants. For a simple example, if there was a “wise
cancer” (or wise growth), it would consider if it truly wants to grow as
much as to kill its host. I think, if we had more open communication
between the cells, they could inform each other better, and be aware of the
contradiction their *true wish* (just like we are hopefully are aware in
the case of CO2 emissions.)
By creating Infinity Project, I am trying to define a de-facto world’s goal
by creating the conditions that allow people to openly pursue what they
truly want.
*Problem 2 -- Creating friendly A.I.*
Every large organization today is effectively creating AI-augmented
corporations and states.
However, corporations and states have been observed to conduct unethically,
and not benevolently to people. There is no guarantee of responsibility,
sentience and friendliness of a corporation or a state in general.
Moreover, it is not entirely clear what particular goal is a particular
corporation’s automated business decision-making systems are driven by.
We run a risk, that if some single corporation comes up with (or evolves) a
strong A.I. that is better at survival than others, it outcompetes all
others, and spreads.
So, instead of secretly doing one’s own personal or corporate system to
achieve its goals, I think, for the sake of creating a friendly A.I., it
could be much better to develop a public, open-source, risk management and
planning system that’s acceptable, understood, and desired by all.
*By creating Infinity Project, I am trying to create an open risk
management system, which, extended with the statistical learning and
recommendation systems on its data, could work as a friendly, open,
non-hidden, self-explanatory A.I. system that optimizes the returns
globally for the world, and not just for some closed organization.*
*Problem 3 -- Global language barrier*
Today, the world still has no common human language, and it lacks
cross-talk between the people in different countries who are interested in
the same topics. Currently, there does not seem to be a common system
focused on general problem-solving, that supports concept and topic mapping
across multiple languages.
*By creating Infinity Project, I am trying to create a place where people
to cross the language barrier, when talking about problems and their
solutions.*
*DESIGN OF THE INFINITY PROJECT*
*World(X)=Dream*
*F(X)=Y*
To address the *B.1 (background problem 1)*, I came up with the hierarchy
of content types that could explain to all how things are made.
Specifically, I observed that everything that was ever made by people, was
driven by people’s *work to satisfy their needs*, and that everything that
was ever constructed, could be broken down to the following decomposition:
Need
____Goal
________Idea
____________Plan
________________Step
____________________Task
________________________Work
*Explanation:*
1. Whenever someone wants something, they conceptualize it in terms of
some concept, which refers to some asset Y. *Need in Infinity represents
such concept definition.*
2. Whenever someone says that they want something, they specify
conditions for the assets they refer to, e.g., 0 < Y < 2. *Goal in Infinity
represents such conditions.*
3. Whenever someone comes up with an idea to get what they want, they
effectively had come up with some principle to influence the world F by
some hypothetical actions X, to satisfy the goal’s inequality by equality
F(X)=Y. *Idea in Infinity represents such a solution.*
4. Whenever someone comes up with a plan, what they did, is they came
up with a concrete set of actions using some technology to realize the
hypothetical actions X as ordered set (x1, x2,..., xN). *Plan in Infinity
represents such a decomposition.*
5. Whenever someone comes up with a milestone xM, what they did, is
they had just set out to take some amount of resources and convert into
some highly likely corresponding deliverable yM. *Step in Infinity
represents such an assumption.*
6. Whenever someone comes up with a task in a milestone, what they just
did, is set out to do some concrete action Z to approach yM . *Task in
Infinity represents such a prototype of action.*
7. Whenever someone actually tries to do some work to get a task done,
what they just did, is produced an attempt z’ for the task. *Work in
Infinity represents such a task attempt.*
On the Infinity Project, we simply have content types for each of these
categories, believing that, if people can publicly see the decompositions
of work this way, it will be natural for them to understand how making of
anything was a piece of math to solve *F(X)=Y*, and to understand how it
was done by looking at the decompositions.
To address the *B.2 (background problem 2)*, I came up with an idea that
people could control their money by making them part of their speech in
comments. Specifically, I was fed up with the fact that we just get buns on
Halfbakery, and not the real money, so I first came up with this *idea*(
goo.gl/0hRkAp), and then extended it to the idea of programmable
transaction generator within comments.
If 20 friends can set up transaction generators that send 100 EUR per month
for some friend to do something, e.g., work on some project, then one could
easily get 2000 EUR/month for a living. The transaction generators would
solve the problem of long-term income to work on long-term projects.
To address the *B.3 (background problem 3)*, I tried to make the system
open to everyone, so that, once society starts working this way, we don’t
have closed corporations and families, and my dear friends can actually
share their work in open. To assure that contribution record is not
tinkered with by people who have access to database, I am thinking of
applying blockchain technologies, to make the record of someone making some
contribution, public and permanent, so that everyone can verify that some
work was done by someone.
To address the *F.1 (foreground problem 1)*, I tried to make the system
public and transparent. I plan to open-source the project, and make open
APIs, so that everyone can fix the issues along the way.
To address the *F.2 (foreground problem 2)*, I plan to apply statistical
and A.I. technologies for data generated by the people in a completely
transparent way, so that everyone could investigate what we are optimizing,
using what algorithms, and what for, and compute global risk down to the
probability distributions of every asset concerning every goal.
To address the *F.3 (foreground problem 3)*, I started defining the
people’s needs in terms of concepts rather than words by using an
interlingual concept map, the *OmegaWiki*(goo.gl/G4HJBD) and (soon)
*WikiData*(goo.gl/yG3J7). All the content types have their “Language”
field, so a user who is writing a new entry can semi-automatically choose
the language, in which it is written. This allows to bring together
speakers of different languages interested in the same topics to the same
ground.
*THE INTEGRATION WITH THE MODERN WORLD*
*The Ownership Model*
Aiming to motivate all to cooperate on defining and pursuing mankind’s
common goal, and survival of the project itself, I was trying to create a
maximally fair and transparent share model for the Infinity Project. The
current idea is to adopt the following model, tied to the nature of
Infinity Project.
*The Unofficial Legal Statements About The Project*
Infinity Project is a public risk management and funding system, which
implements possibilities for its users to formally give time estimates,
claim actually used time, and transfer money inside the user comments:
1. Any user can voluntarily include the hours expected to spend on
something, by including {?hours}, where hours is a decimal number. This is
called .hours_assumed, and represents the estimate of a commenter, of how
much time the thing mentioned in the comment would take.
2. Any user can voluntarily include the hours actually spent on doing
something, by including {hours}, where hours is a decimal number. This is
called .hours_claimed, and represents the statement of the commenter about
the task s/he is referring to in a comment that he or she actually had
spent the written number of hours for working on content item.
3. Any user can transfer money on a comment that has non-zero
.hours_assumed or .hours_claimed of Infinity Project by clicking on the
payment button. The donated money represents the average number of hours
that the donated money would buy, based on official *average hourly
earnings*(goo.gl/NxcMmA) of all employees in private sector in the United
States. It is stored in attribute .hours_donated, and denoted by letter ħ.
For example, currently, donated $10 would be stored as 0.03985652 ħ, up to
8 decimal rounded spaces.
4. If any comment has both the .hours_claimed and .hours_donated larger
than zero, then the .hours_matched is computed by taking twice the maximum
of the absolute value of the two, and is denoted by ḥ. For example, if we
have claimed 1.5 hour, and someone sent us 200$ (which is currently equal
to 7.971303 ħ), then the hours matched = 2 x min{1.5, 7.971303} = 3.0 ḥ. As
long as the hours and money are added to projects, the .hours_matched is
increasing. People who donate money and people who claim hours of work own
the generated ḥ equally, i.e., 1 ħ + 1 h = 2 ḥ.
5. Ownership of ḥ gives the rights to part of revenue. For example, if
people had built a mobile phone factory, then they own part of its
production. However, as the number of contributions is increasing, original
share ḥ generated decreases. This is fair share by many standards, except
for risk-reward ratio.
To solve the risk-reward problem and boost the motivation of the lazy users
of the Infinity Project to participate, the project introduces three types
of equity: *hyper-equity*, *super-equity*, *plain-equity* for the creators
of Goals, Ideas and Plans respectively:
1. Anyone who defines a problem (*Goal*) on Infinity Project, gets
hyper-equity, which allows the user to own a fixed percentage of all the
future ḥ that will be generated from ideas, projects, steps, tasks, and
works below that specific goal. The user can set a small custom
hyper-equity per problem when creating a Goal, e.g., from [0.01%] to
[0.1%]. This small percentage is small, because hyper-equity is very
powerful -- it derives its share from the projects derived from the
problem, based on all ideas that people had come up to solve it.
2. Anyone who suggests a solution (*Idea*) on Infinity Project, gets
super-equity, which allows the user to own a fixed percentage of all the
future ḥ that will be generated from all projects that are derived from
his/her idea. The user currently will be able to choose small super-equity
per idea, e.g., from [0.1%] to [1%]. This percentage is much larger to
encourage people to share them. A simple idea, like that of a vaccine, can
save large number of people, and therefore, is worth rewarding, even if
ideator takes larger percentage.
3. Anyone who starts a project (*Plan*) on Infinity Project, gets
plain-equity , which allows the user to own a fixed, non-decreasing
percentage of ḥ of her/his project, as the total number of ḥ keeps
increasing. The plain-equity can be set freely by the project initiator
creator.
The Plain-Equity pertaining to projects (Plan) is currently shareable by
adding friends as members of a Plan.
This way, by using the Plain-Equity, we integrate with the modern world
company share model. When creating a company to work with the Infinity
Project, we suggest establishing a company, that has special type of shares
(like A-Series), which makes up a small amount (e.g., 10%) of total shares
of a company, and use legal statements to bind them with the Plain-Equity,
defined under your Plan in Infinity Project while leaving the rest of the
shares (e.g., 90%) to be shared among all the future contributors by their
ḥ contribution.
---
So, here's the story and thoughts so far. :)
Any ideas or help in the above pursuits would be very welcome!
You can visit the project page itself on: https://infty.xyz/plan/2/detail/
:)
Thanks!
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