Re: Risks of competitive message routing (was Re: [agi] Let's face it, this is just dumb.)
On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 9:57 PM, Matt Mahoney [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- On Fri, 10/3/08, Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: You seem to misunderstand the notion of a Global Brain, see http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/GBRAIFAQ.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_brain You are right. That is exactly what I am proposing. It's too bad you missed the Global Brain 0 workshop that Francis Heylighen and I organized in Brussels in 2001 ... Some larger follow-up Global Brain conferences were planned, but Francis and I both got distracted by other things It would be an exaggeration to say that any real collective conclusions were arrived at, during the workshop, but it was certainly interesting... I am open to alternative suggestions. Well, what I suggested in my 2002 book Creating Internet Intelligence was essentially a global brain based on a hybrid model: -- a human-plus-computer-network global brain along the lines of what you and Heylighen suggest coupled with -- a superhuman AI mind, that interacts with and is coupled with this global brain To use a simplistic metaphor, -- the superhuman AI mind at the center of the hybrid global brain would provide an overall goal system and attentional-focus, and -- the human-plus-computer-network portion of the hybrid global brain would serve as a sort of unconscious for the hybrid global brain... This is one way that humans may come to, en masse, interact with superhuman non-human AI Anyway this was a fun line of thinking but since that point I diverted myself more towards the creation of the superhuman-AI component At the time I had a lot of ideas about how to modify Internet infrastructure so as to make it more copacetic to the emergence of a human-plus-computer-network, collective-intelligence type global brain. I think many of those ideas could have worked, but they are not the direction the development of the Net worked, and obviously I (like you) lack the influence to nudge the Net-masters in that direction. Keeping a build-a-superhuman-AI project moving is not easy either, but it's a more tractable task... -- Ben G --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=114414975-3c8e69 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: Risks of competitive message routing (was Re: [agi] Let's face it, this is just dumb.)
Hi, CMR (my proposal) has no centralized control (global brain). It is a competitive market in which information has negative value. The environment is a peer-to-peer network where peers receive messages in natural language, cache a copy, and route them to appropriate experts based on content. You seem to misunderstand the notion of a Global Brain, see http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/GBRAIFAQ.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_brain It does not require centralized control, but is in fact more focused on emergent dynamical control mechanisms. I believe that CMR is initially friendly in the sense that a market is friendly. Which is to say: dangerous, volatile, hard to predict ... and often not friendly at all!!! A market is the most efficient way to satisfy the collective goals of its participants. It is fair, but not benevolent. I believe this is an extremely oversimplistic and dangerous view of economics ;-) Traditional economic theory which argues that free markets are optimally efficient, is based on a patently false assumption of infinitely rational economic actors.This assumption is **particularly** poor when the economic actors are largely **humans**, who are highly nonrational. As a single isolated example, note that in the US right now, many people are withdrawing their $$ from banks even if they have less than $100K in their accounts ... even though the government insures bank accounts up to $100K. What are they doing? Insuring themselves against a total collapse of the US economic system? If so they should be buying gold with their $$, but only a few of them are doing that. People are in large part emotional not rational actors, and for this reason pure free-markets involving humans are far from the most efficient way to satisfy the collective goals of a set of humans. Anyway a deep discussion of economics would likely be too big of a digression, though it may be pertinent insofar as it's a metaphor for the internal dynamics of an AGI ... (for instance Eric Baum, who is a fairly hardcore libertarian politically, is in favor of free markets as a model for credit assignment in AI systems ... and OpenCog/NCE contains an economic attention allocation component...) ben g --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=114414975-3c8e69 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: Risks of competitive message routing (was Re: [agi] Let's face it, this is just dumb.)
--- On Fri, 10/3/08, Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: You seem to misunderstand the notion of a Global Brain, see http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/GBRAIFAQ.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_brain You are right. That is exactly what I am proposing. I believe that CMR is initially friendly in the sense that a market is friendly. Which is to say: dangerous, volatile, hard to predict ... and often not friendly at all!!! I am open to alternative suggestions. A market is the most efficient way to satisfy the collective goals of its participants. It is fair, but not benevolent. I believe this is an extremely oversimplistic and dangerous view of economics ;-) Traditional economic theory which argues that free markets are optimally efficient, is based on a patently false assumption of infinitely rational economic actors. This assumption is **particularly** poor when the economic actors are largely **humans**, who are highly nonrational. I think that CMR will make markets more rational. Humans will have more access to information, which will enable them to make more rational decisions. I believe that AGI will result in pervasive public surveillance of everyone. All of your movements, communication, and financial transactions will be public and instantly accessible to anyone. We will demand it, and AGI will make it cheap. Sure you could have secrets, but nobody will hire you, loan you money, or buy or sell you anything without knowing everything about you. Anyway a deep discussion of economics would likely be too big of a digression, though it may be pertinent insofar as it's a metaphor for the internal dynamics of an AGI ... (for instance Eric Baum, who is a fairly hardcore libertarian politically, is in favor of free markets as a model for credit assignment in AI systems ... and OpenCog/NCE contains an economic attention allocation component...) Economics is not a metaphor, but is central to the design of distributed AGI. There are hard problems that need to be solved. Economic systems have positive feedback loops such as speculative investment that are unstable and can crash. AGI and instant communication can lead to events where most of the world's wealth can disappear in a wave of panic selling traveling at the speed of light. I don't believe that competition for resources and a market where information has negative value has positive feedback loops, but it is something that needs to be studied. My concern is that trust networks are unstable. They may lead to monopolies, and rare but catastrophic failures when a peer with high reputation decides to cheat. This is not just a problem for CMR, but any AGI where knowledge comes from many people. How do you know which information to trust? -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=114414975-3c8e69 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Risks of competitive message routing (was Re: [agi] Let's face it, this is just dumb.)
--- On Thu, 10/2/08, Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: OTOH a global brain coordinating humans and narrow-AI's can **also** be quite dangerous ... and arguably more so, because it's **definitely** very unpredictable in almost every aspect ... whereas a system with a dual hierarchical/heterarchical structure and a well-defined goal system, may perhaps be predictable in certain important aspects, if it is designed with this sort of predictability in mind... CMR (my proposal) has no centralized control (global brain). It is a competitive market in which information has negative value. The environment is a peer-to-peer network where peers receive messages in natural language, cache a copy, and route them to appropriate experts based on content. Peers have incomplete knowledge of the network, so messages may need to be routed via multiple hops through redundant paths to multiple experts. Each message identifies the sender and time sent. The receiver is responsible for authenticating the sender, e.g. by password and registration via an encrypted channel. The sender is a peer, not tied to a human. A human may manage multiple identities and be anonymous. Peer owners can set their own policies with regard to which messages to keep, route, or discard. Initially, peers can be simple. When a peer receives a message, it matches terms to words in its cache, and forwards the message to the authors identified in the headers of the cached matches. A peer's domain of expertise is simply those messages posted by the author which are kept permanently in the cache. Peers can be more intelligent than this, of course. For example, they may match messages with attached pictures or video based on content. The network's behavior can only be predicted in terms of market incentives. The network is hostile. Peers may be flooded with spam, so they will need some intelligence to decide which messages to route and which to discard. Resource owners (humans) compete for attention, which requires resources (storage and bandwidth) on other people's peers. Peers (or their owners) thus have an incentive to provide useful information so that they can sell advertising and are not blocked. Peers have an incentive to protect their reputations by preventing their identities from being forged. Thus, they have an incentive to keep passwords secret by e.g. registering with each neighbor using a different password. I believe that CMR is initially friendly in the sense that a market is friendly. A market is the most efficient way to satisfy the collective goals of its participants. It is fair, but not benevolent. There is an incentive to cheat, but also an incentive to protect one's reputation by being honest. There is an incentive for peers to become more intelligent, as measured by earnings. Peers need to be selective in routing messages or else they will be exploited by spammers. Likewise, spammers have an incentive to outsmart weaker peers. I believe that CMR becomes more dangerous as peers get smarter. We will rely on peers with high reputations to sort truth from lies and to rank the reputations of other peers. The problem is that we have to train these machines, for example, by clicking the spam button. But when machines are smarter than us, we can no longer make that distinction. I believe that eventually we will no longer know what our computers are doing as they acquire all available resources. Although CMR is a specific proposal, I think it is clear that the internet is headed in this direction, even if it is not adopted as I described. We already depend on trust networks, like Google rankings alongside sponsored links, seller ratings on eBay, etc. Intelligent machines in any form will have to compete in this environment. -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=114414975-3c8e69 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
