A world run by software

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RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

Last month, Balaji Srinivasan gave a lecture at Y Combinator's Startup School 2013 entitled "Silicon Valley's ultimate exit strategy". He describes the US as the "Microsoft of nations", and suggests in a calm, reasonable tone that Silicon Valley think seriously about seceding and starting its own (or possibly several) sovereign countries.

You can watch the full lecture here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A

Shortly after the talk, he published this piece in Wired:

http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/11/software-is-reorganizing-the-world-and-cloud-formations-could-lead-to-physical-nations/

quote:

For the first time in memory, adults in the United States under age forty are now expected to be poorer than their parents. This is the kind of grim reality that in other times and places spurred young people to look abroad for opportunity. Indeed, it is similar to the factors that once pushed millions of people to emigrate from their home countries to make their home in America. Our nation of immigrants is, tautologically, a nation of emigrants.

These emigrants, our ancestors, didn�t bear enmity towards the countries they left � quite the contrary. They weren�t �Going Galt� or being �unpatriotic� by leaving, as they often left out of sadness and melancholy, not anger. In many cases they remained homesick for the rest of their lives, leaving only because they had to, not because they wanted to.

Yet while our ancestors had America as their ultimate destination, it is not immediately obvious where those seeking opportunity might head today. Every square foot of earth is already spoken for by one (or more) nation states, every physical frontier long since closed.

With our bodies hemmed in, our minds have only the cloud � and it is the cloud that has become the destination for an extraordinary mental exodus. Hundreds of millions of people have now migrated to the cloud, spending hours per day working, playing, chatting, and laughing in real-time HD resolution with people thousands of miles away � without knowing their next-door neighbors.

The concept of migrating our lives to the cloud is much more than a picturesque metaphor, and actually amenable to quantitative study. Though the separation between our bodies is still best characterized by the geographical distance between points on the surface of the earth, the distance between our minds is increasingly characterized by a completely different metric: the geodesic distance, the number of degrees of separation between two nodes in a social network. Importantly, this geodesic distance is just as valid a mathematical metric as the geographical. In fact, there are entire conferences devoted to cloud cartography, in which research groups from Stanford to Carnegie Mellon to MIT present the first maps of online social networks � mapping not nation states but states of mind.

Perhaps the single most important feature of these states of mind is the increasing divergence between our social and geographic neighbors, between the cloud formations of our heads and the physical communities surrounding our bodies. An infinity of subcultures outside the mainstream now blossoms on the Internet � vegans, body modifiers, CrossFitters, Wiccans, DIYers, Pinners, and support groups of all forms. Millions of people are finding their true peers in the cloud, a remedy for the isolation imposed by the anonymous apartment complex or the remote rural location.

Yet this discrepancy between our cloud subculture and our physical surroundings will not endure indefinitely. Because the latest wave of technology is not just connecting us intellectually and emotionally with remote peers: it is also making us ever more mobile, ever more able to meet our peers in person.

And so these cloud formations of mind are beginning to take physical shape, driving the reorganization of bodies. In the technology space, we have already seen this transpire at small scale: a cloud formation of 2 people coming together for 10 years facilitated by Match.com, a formation of 10 people for a year in a hacker house, a formation of 100 people for a few months at a startup incubator, and a formation of 1000 people for a few days at an open-source gathering like RailsConf. More recently we saw the thousands that occupied Wall Street for a month, the ten thousand Redditors involved in Jon Stewart�s Rally, and the tens of thousands that took Tahrir Square at the height of the Arab Spring. Those trivial photo-sharing apps seem far less trivial in this light.

But while these large rallies command deserved attention, something else of significance is happening more quietly: Cloud formations are starting to take physical shape in the form of long-term friendly communities that are geographically colocated, like Campus, Embassy Network, and the Rainbow Mansion. In some ways this isn�t anything new � the twin ideas of co-living in the same house or co-housing with separate houses in a shared community have been around in Denmark since the 1960s and the U.S. since the 1860s. What is new is the ease of finding compatible peers via web search, online forums, and social networks. And so the concept is spreading around the world, with hundreds of co-living and co-housing locations now accessible through the internet in the U.S., Canada, United Kingdom, and across Continental Europe.

It is not yet clear how widespread this phenomenon will become, but few humans are truly so solitary that they would shun the very idea of shared communities � and from email to mobile phones, what technologists experiment with on the weekends has frequently foreshadowed what everyone else will be doing during the week in ten years.

And from there?

It is simultaneously straightforward and radical to note that when cloud formations take physical shape, neither their scale nor duration has an upper bound. There is no scientific law that prevents 100 people who find each other on the internet from coming together for a month, or 1,000 such people from coming together for a year. And as that increases to 10,000 and 100,000 and beyond, for longer and longer durations, we may begin to see cloud towns, then cloud cities, and ultimately cloud countries materialize out of thin air.

At first this sounds rather implausible. Perhaps the internet will spur a wave of internal migrations as online communities begin gathering in person � but could this process really lead to a new city, or country?

Yet the technical prerequisites are already well underway. Machine translation of signs, text, and speech brings down language barriers and facilitates ever more cross-cultural meetings of like minds. Immersive headsets, input devices, and telepresence robots further collapse space and time, allowing us to instantly be alongside others on the other side of the globe. Mobile technology makes us ever more mobile, increasingly permitting not just easier movement around a home base but permanent international relocation.

Technology is thus enabling arbitrary numbers of people from around the world to assemble in remote locations, without interrupting their ability to work or communicate with existing networks. In this sense, the future of technology is not really location-based apps; it is about making location completely unimportant.

But could everything really become that mobile, that portable? What about transportation, infrastructure, food, shelter, the clothes on our backs?

Consider transportation first: Car ownership is already declining, and the combination of Uber, Lyft, their public-transportation analogs, and new shareable car fleets will greatly reduce traffic and emissions. On-demand rental will ultimately become more convenient than the burden of outright ownership, especially in an autonomous car world, and will make us vastly more mobile as a result. And many more things can be transported on-demand once we have the on-demand car.

With respect to infrastructure, projects from neighborhood pothole repairs to bridge changes are being crowdfunded or driven through private-public sector partnerships (in fact, entrepreneurs built roads for most of American history). And with autonomous cars coming, technologists are going to need to reinvent roads again. Google�s Vannevar is moving construction to the cloud, much of shipping logistics and the supply chain is going there as well, and robots can already build small buildings and operate autonomous mines. The net result is that both core infrastructure and many of the mechanisms for building and funding it are becoming computerized, and thus deployable in new locations.

And from the road we turn our eyes to the sky: next up will be a carbon-friendly computerized infrastructure for safer air traffic control, to guide the emerging fleets of drones doing everything from photography to surveying to delivery.

As for the physical items used in daily life � the present, let alone the future, is already a time where everything from food to shelter to clothing to transportation to your very wallet and keychain can be accessed on demand from your mobile phone, in more cities every day.

So when it comes to the constraints on mobility imposed by the physical world, the rule is simple: when goods themselves can�t be digitized, our interface to them will be.

The benefits of such high mobility are much more than convenience to the people who supply these goods. For example, with online food ordering, an owner of a small restaurant is finally able to prepare meals in batch, order ingredients in bulk, and reach repeat customers without wasting valuable, limited resources in guesswork. With the advent of mobile microtasks, we are seeing the emergence of new digital assembly line jobs that offer greater flexibility, less risk of injury, and hourly wages comparable in some cases to those of new hires at GM. And with autonomous mines, workers can extract needed minerals without risking black lung disease.

This is why location is becoming so much less important: technology is enabling us to access everything we need from our mobile phone, to find our true communities in the cloud, and to easily travel to assemble these communities in person. Taken together, we are rapidly approaching a future characterized by a totally new phenomenon, the reverse diaspora: one that starts out internationally distributed, finds each other online, and ends up physically concentrated.

What might these reverse diasporas be like? As a people whose primary bond is through the internet, many of their properties would not fit our pre-existing mental models. Unlike rugged individualists, these emigrants would be moving within or between nation states to become part of a community, not to strike out on their own. Unlike would-be revolutionaries, those migrating in this fashion would be doing so out of humility in their ability to change existing political systems. And unlike so-called secessionists, the specific site of physical concentration would be a matter of convenience, not passion; the geography incidental and not worth fighting over.

Today, one of the first and largest international reverse diasporas has assembled in Silicon Valley, drawn by the internet to the cloud capital of technology; in fact, an incredible 64% of the Valley�s scientists and engineers hail from outside the U.S., with 43.9% of its technology companies founded by emigrants.

But the geocenter of this cloud formation is only positioned over Silicon Valley for historical reasons, as the semiconductor manufacturing that was made easier by the temperate clime of the South Bay has long since moved away. Nothing today binds technologists to the soil besides other people. In this sense Silicon Valley is nothing special; it is best conceptualized as just the most common (x,y) coordinates of a set of highly mobile nodes in a social network whose true existence is in the cloud.

And this global technology cloud truly stretches over the whole earth, touching down at various locales both in the U.S. � at Sendgrid in Boulder, Tumblr in New York, Rackspace in Austin, Snapchat in L.A., Zipcar in Boston, Opscode in Seattle � and outside it � at Skype in Estonia, Tencent in Shenzhen, Soundcloud in Germany, Flipkart in India, Spotify in Sweden, Line in Tokyo, and Waze in Israel. Cultural connections forming between people in this cloud are becoming stronger than the connections between their geographic neighbors. Palo Alto�s Accel invests in India�s Flipkart, Estonia�s Skype is folded into Seattle�s Microsoft, Israel�s Waze is merged into Mountain View�s Google, and the SoundCloud engineer on a laptop in Berlin builds a deeper relationship with the VC in New York than the nearby Bavarian bank.

Today, the geocenter of the global technology cloud is still hovering over Silicon Valley. But in a world where technology is making location increasingly less important, tomorrow the reverse diaspora may well assemble somewhere else.

Of course, it would take some time for a reverse diaspora assembled in a new location to advance from small communities in existing buildings to the infrastructure for towns and cities, let alone to starting new countries. If history is any guide, it took almost 170 years to go from 1607 (Jamestown) to 1776 (America), 90 years to go from 1857 (Sepoy Mutiny) to 1947 (India), and 52 years to go from 1896 (Herzl) to 1948 (Israel) � though at Internet time, things could happen more quickly than that.

And we can�t know from today�s vantage point where that first reverse diaspora might assemble outside the U.S., or what those cloud cities or countries will be like. They could be countries formed by internationally recognized processes similar to the ones that created 26 new countries over the past 25 years, a pattern noted by Marc Andreessen. They could be regions of the world set aside by global agreement for experimentation, as discussed by Larry Page. They could be floating cities in international waters as put forth by Peter Thiel, or one of the more ambitious 80,000 person colonies on Mars desired by Elon Musk. The specific location is still unknown; in a real sense it matters far less than the people there.

What we can say for certain is this: from Occupy Wall Street and YCombinator to co-living in San Francisco and co-housing in the UK, something important is happening. People are meeting like minds in the cloud and traveling to meet each other offline, in the process building community � and tools for community � where none existed before. Those cloud networks where people poke each other, share photos, and find their missing communities are beginning to catalyze waves of physical migration, beginning to reorganize the world.

Will this ultimately end in a cloud country of our own, as Page, Thiel, and Musk propose in different ways? We can set this as a long-term goal, like the kind of dream that propelled so many millions to exit and come to America in the first place, but it�s unclear what the future holds. We do know this, however: as cloud formations take physical shape at steadily greater scales and durations, it shall become ever more feasible to create a new nation of emigrants.

I agree with a lot of this work, but the current of libertarian ideological nonsense runs through the approach (especially from people like Thiel) that needs to be addressed. So I wrote up the following essay in response:

quote:

A few days ago I reshared this talk from Balaji Srinivasan, along with my initial comments defending the position against what I took to be a superficial rejection from David Brin and others. It was my first watching of the lecture, and my comments were borne of the passion that comes from having considered and argued for similar conclusions over the last few years, against those I felt were resisting the alternative framework BSS was suggesting without due consideration.

But there is always room for critical reflection, and now that I've had a few days to digest the talk I'd like to write a more considered response. I am utterly convinced that a world run by software can be more fair, inclusive, and sustainable than any mode of organization the industrial age had to offer. Nevertheless, BSS says precious little in the talk of what such a world would look like, or what reasons we have for believing the conclusion to be true. BSS's argument is largely critical about the problems and constraints of the existing system, with the goal of motivating interest in an alternative. I agree with much of his critique, especially his observation that people are already eagerly fleeing industrial age "paper" technologies in favor of digital alternatives. But the Silicon Valley audience to which the talk is directed might give the impression that a world run by software would benefit primarily those privileged few who are already benefiting from our nascent digital age, as yet another way to widen the gap between the wealthy and the rest. I think this is a misleading impression. A positive story that constructively described how a world run by software would operate would go a long way towards helping people imagine it as a real and plausible alternative, with distinct advantages over the existing order of things. I hear that BSS is planning to publish a more detailed treatment of his views, but while we wait I'd like to add my own thoughts to the discussion.

Because after all, there is lots to say and lots of discussion still to come from many different quarters. We are talking about about a fundamental change of the social order-- a revolution-- that will bring about many changes at many different scales. These changes might manifest in surprising and unpredictable ways, so feedback from everyone is important. The task of integrating diverse perspectives and feedback was not possible (and barely even conceivable) before the advent of digital technologies. We're just beginning to use these tools to organize digital populations at scales that rival nations, and already these digital populations overlap and engage with industrial age political structures in complex and twisted ways. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. There are discussions we must have about how to use the tools and organizations around us to bring about the changes we want, and then there are discussions about what changes we want and what the world will look like when our revolution is complete. There are important things to say about the former, but I want to use this space to speculate on the latter.

Here's what a world run by software looks like:

A world run by software is run on on open-source principles. It is participatory, and encourages experimentation in an open, collaborative development. There's already been a lot written about open source and peer networks. I don't want to just talk about the values of a digital society, I want to talk about the nuts and bolts of how it works. So I'm taking these principles as given. If any Silicon Valley types think a world run by software is a world of tightly controlled walled gardens, I urge you to consider another line of work immediately. (I'll say more about dealing with the libertopian "walled gardens" later in the essay.)

More abstractly, a world run by software is task-oriented. A program performs a function; a world run by software is designed to execute specific functions reliably and on demand. This involves three basic functional parts:

1. Executors, who carry out some specified task,
2. Programmers, who design and optimize the tasks to be carried out
3. Selectors, who select which tasks get carried out

In democracies like the US, the government is typically charged with all three roles, separated somewhat in the three branches, with democratic feedback taking the form of voting for the representatives who ultimately select, program, and execute our political world. Democratic feedback also takes the form of economic and other sociopolitical activity which the representatives consider, but the feedback in both cases is coarse-grained and unreliable. In a world run by software, these roles can all be more widely distributed and participatory to allow individuals a more direct engagement with the the political order.

Consider first, and perhaps most easily, the role of selection. What activities deserve our efforts and attention, and what should should our attitudes towards these topics be? Representative bodies tend to give such questions a very narrow treatment that is susceptible to corruption and divergence from the general will. Digital communities, on the other hand, self-organize into affinity groups and coalitions that regularly broadcast their positions on any number of social issues and policies. This activity can be regularly and automatically harvested for feedback from the community about any topic you'd like, and can be used to represent and anticipate the dynamics of the general consensus of the people. We don't need to set aside time and rituals for voting and participating in a democracy, because every action you take is a vote in a world run by software.

If our policy directions and collective planning is handled automatically by self-organized digital communities, the role of traditional governance looks radically different. In a world run by software, governance is system administration. "Politicians" are no longer elected representatives empowered to make political judgments, they are administrators tasked with maintaining the tools for supporting and maintaining the people's political judgments. This takes the form, on the front end, of maintaining a public and powerful interface for engaging with the machinery of the political system, and on the back end maintaining the protocols and infrastructure that make it all work smoothly together. Politics becomes a form of engineering, of network management, of organizational facilitation. In other words, a digital government consists entirely of open source programmers who contribute to the code bank of governmental procedure.

The last functional role is played by the executors, who carry out the work requested by the people according to the standard procedures instructed by programmers. Thus far the entire system I've described has been horizontal and self-directed, and the executors are no different. They are free to engage with the general will as they see fit, and can use that information to decide what jobs need doing and where their time and skills are best spent. Executors are the "working class" of the traditional caste system, but in a world run by software every worker is guaranteed recognition for the work they do. This will take the form of gamification techniques where people earn "badges" that represent the many dimensions of their skills and mastery. This system of rewards not only motivates work and encourages a competitive atmosphere, but also serves to more efficiently connect requested work with the people in the best position to handle the job. It also frees the executor from any institutional obligations, so they might follow the vocation of their choosing.

A properly implemented system of this sort, where requests are initiated by users and handled by executors and mediated by political facilitators, is sufficient for managing all political and economic activity. Even under improved automation, there will always be human work to do, including physical human labor. But there are more than enough of us to do all that work many times over, including many who want the challenge and recognition of success at even the difficult or "dirty" jobs. This completely obviates the need for paid employment as a means of compensation and distribution of wealth. So in a world run by software we are each free to follow our idle desires. We can pursue our curiosities confident that our needs and requests (including for basic food, shelter, medicine and education) will be provided on request, and that the political infrastructure exists to support any grievances that might arise. There's an opportunity cost to mere idle fantasy in potential badges unearned, but the possibility that our endeavors can bring genuine recognition and success will continue to stimulate innovation and progress.

In a digital world, influence replaces material wealth as the engine of power. The loud voices in strong communities may command disproportionate influence, with no proper authorities to check that power from above. Instead, their power is checked by the wax and wane of digital populations, as they freely settle into the communities of their choosing. This is a power peasants rarely had against their feudal lords, and requires the protections of the people's right to speech and movement. In other words, it means there can be no perfectly walled gardens; all systems must be porous, allowing information to flow in and out in standardized ways. This is the key to understanding the distinction between the libertopian castle doctrine nightmare many people legitimately worry about, and a collectively self-organized digital society. In a world run by software, privacy is a setting not a right. If you aren't providing feedback and aren't transparently documenting your activity and successes, you will not receive recognition from a digital society, and will have difficulty engaging with or accessing any of its benefits. In other words, you are opting out. People should be free to opt out, but at a certain point it means moving off the grid entirely. And given the freedoms of a digitally self-organized society, that's not something people are likely to do.

I've laid out, as briefly as I can manage, some very high-level organizational structures for managing a world run by software, and pointed towards the potential advantages and disadvantaged it might bring. Many people see such a world as a utopian potential in our distant technological future. I don't see anything in the proposal I've offered here that isn't already possible with existing technologies; in fact, many of the ideas suggested here are already in various stages of implementation and discussion in many active online communities already. I'd argue that the theoretical and philosophical dimensions of this proposal are also tractable within existing political and ethical models.

We do not lack for the tools and talent to implement ideas as ambitious and revolutionary as these. We do not lack the political will to seek out and advocate for real alternatives to our political situation. I feel these changes are inevitable and already well underway, whether I advocate for them or not. I hope that the vision of the future that BSS has provoked me to lay out here helps us resolve that future more clearly so we can better prepare for its arrival.

This thread should primarily be about BSS's argument in the lecture and article, and the implications of the ideas presented therein. If you want to insult me or my views, it might be better to just ignore the fact that I started this thread. I hope it is clear from the above that I'm not offering a full-throated endorsement of his view, but I think it deserves some critical engagement nevertheless.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2013 07:52

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 15:11

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

redscare posted:

What a clever futuristic way of loving over the poor.

The poors are the ones who by definition get hosed over by society. Why do you think a world run by software would be any worse at handling its least fortunate than the system we have now? Why would a digital world have more poor people in worse shape? It seems implausible to me, and against the trends.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2013 08:31

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

I'm taking for granted that any system will have losers. I'm asking why you think the losers in the system being proposed will be any worse off or greater in number than the people who are left out of the existing system.

Because we're doing a monstrously bad job now, and it's hard to imagine an open system grounded in participation doing significantly worse. You seem to think it will inevitably do worse, but have given no reasons other than mistrusting the source. It's not a convincing objection.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2013 08:57

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

This thread has nothing to do with the singularity, because it isn't contingent on some messiah technology rising ex machina and saving the world. BSS explicitly frames the discussion as "within the next ten years".

bassguitarhero posted:

The more that technology does for us, the less need we have of all these people that we have in the system, so I just don't see where we think people are going to go, or what this software world is going to put together to offer people who don't have much to offer that system. In our current world, we have things like welfare and make-work jobs so that even if people aren't able to produce offerings to get them out of poverty, they can subsist. But I have a strong feeling that a world run by software wouldn't bind itself to these views of morality, especially when technology can provide exact measurements of how little poor people have to offer this system.

The primary advantage of a digital society is that it allows for collective self-organization at large scales. Human brains are really good at self-organizing in small groups, where they display a natural predisposition towards cooperation and altruism that is exceptional even among the social mammals. Our new digital tools have made it just as natural and productive for human beings to organize at far larger scales, while supplying the same immediacy, feedback, and control that humans find rewarding from working in small groups. These allow changes in the organizational structure of human society that haven't been possible for generations. In other words, the primary virtue of digital communities is that they allow us to overcome the alienation and disenfranchisement that is characteristic of industrial age society. A digital society can achieve a form of solidarity and consensus at scales that has never before been possible.

This is counter intuitive midst false worries of the "Balkanization of the internet". Moreover, it is out of step with the mainline Thiel-style private-islands-for-everyone vision; "solidarity" doesn't typically appear high on the libertarian selling points. But this collectivist aspect of the digital commons is utterly central to my defense of it. I'm not arguing that it will bring about a utopia that is perfect in all aspects; like any system there will be winners and losers. I'm certainly not arguing that a world run by software will bring about an end to suffering. I'm only arguing that a digitally organized system is different than what we have now, and that it's advantages outweigh its disadvantages when compared directly to the existing order of things. The distinction here is subtle, and the conclusion is by no means obvious, which means we have work to do elucidating the picture. That's all I'm trying to do here. It takes some careful discussion to appreciate the difference, and subtlety isn't D&D's strongest suit, but I'm trying.

The best way I know how is to look towards examples of self-organized eusocial systems in nature. So I'm going to talk about ants, because it is highly instructive for how a self-organized system works. So to address your question directly, it is worth noting that in a colony of ant, up to 60% of the "workers" may be inactive at any time. This actually shouldn't be surprising, if you know anything about the dynamics of complex systems: the distribution of labor in an ant colony follows a power law, where a few of the ants do the most of the work, and most of the ants sit around doing nothing.

I've posted the image above before, so I won't elaborate here. Power law distributions are the rule for organizational dynamics. A few popular kids, but most are hangers-on. A few wealthy influential elite, and most in the long tail of more modest means. Very few Wikipedia editors, tons of users. The average Facebook user has 190 friends, and very few people have over 500. Nevertheless, the entire 1.2 billion users are connected by an average of around 4 degrees of separation, and this is largely due to the relatively few active and very popular nodes that help the whole network hang together. I don't think it is sensible fight against these dynamics, or to reject any system simply because they carry some skewed distribution of wealth and resources. But I'm also not saying that we just give into them, to let a "free hand" guide us towards indeterminate goals. Instead, we need to engineer a self-organizing system that can adaptively respond to changing internal and environmental conditions in ways that allow the system to subsist and support itself as a healthy and sustainable organization. We want a global network of human being that can act with the same agility, cooperation, and individual care and attention as

It's important here to note just how poorly organized our existing system is by contrast! It is weak and brittle, experiencing nauseating economic cycles from which it can barely recover, and persistent global violence, poverty, and suffering. This fragility and corruption is easy to blame on the stupid mistakes of arrogant men, but these systems of power have persisted across countless generations of such men. Directing our anger towards any one of them serves only to factionalize and disrupt cooperation. A large part of the problem is that the voices in the halls of power are few, with poor and inconsistent feedback from the people. Even in representative democracies, there is little power that people have to engage with the political machine. People don't engage politics not because they are stupid or apathetic, it's because they know that they get nothing out of it. They have no incentive to participate because they see no clear connections between the political actions they might take and the implications it has for their political lives. So our system has become unreasonably top-heavy, and it is collapsing under its own weight, because it acts a manner unconstrained by the general will. Without the robust constraints of a genuinely self-organized system, we're mostly just trampling around blindly and wantonly. In the process of industrialization we've done amazing things in terms of improving the standards of living and our population has skyrocketed as a result, but we really have no idea what we're doing. We're wrecking the planet, we're starting senseless wars and enforcing stupid laws and scraping together whatever we have to protect whatever we can, because we're afraid and uncertain of the future we become nasty and brutish.

A world run by software changes these basic organizational dynamics. Those of us in the west have already lived with these technologies for over a decade, and have plenty of clear cases where the incentives and dynamics of digital populations are different. All the value of facebook comes from the activity of its users, so it has a natural incentive to amplify and cultivate those voices, instead of shutting them out of the process. Google's value increases with every search you make and link you click, so they have an incentive to get as many users online and active as possible, and to cultivate a web environment that is useful and user-friendly. User-oriented services for managing self-directed user activity is a completely distinct organizational model from delegated hierarchical authority. I'm not saying it makes these services perfect or immune to corruption; I'm simply pointing out that the flow of power is different, and it changes the possibilities for feedback and collective decision making. We know that we can use twitter to predict the spread of diseases, the results of elections, and all sorts of other important social phenomenon, simply by letting the users chat about whatever the hell they want. This allows us to plan and coordinate our activity in ways that were never before possible, and that central planning could never hope to accomplish. In a world run by software, the people are empowered with the tools to participate directly in the decision making process, through methods as simple and universally accessible as tweeting on a dumbphone. This is a power people currently lack, but is well within our technological means to provide.

To return to to bassguitarhero's question again, Google isn't giving you wifi if you promise to click a certain number of links each month or view a certain number of ads. Its business model doesn't require from you a certain level of commitment and activity in order to justify the services it provides you. It provides you the services only because it thinks you will use them, and it knows that in the process of you using them it can extract enough usable work from the collective activity of all its users to make that model pay off. So even if you are less active than average, or not active at all, it's still in Google's interest to get you on the network. In digital networks even the inactive users count. Now giving out free wifi isn't the same as giving out free food and shelter and medicine, but in a world run on software that is driven by the requests and activity of its users, and where people are confident about their recognition for contributing to such a system, you'd expect that the basic measures of humanity would be among the first to be provided for, and among the loudest and most pressing of issues to address in times of planning and decision. My argument is not that a world run by software guarantees that we'll find the most optimal solution to these problems. Instead, I'm arguing for the more basic claim, that such a world is required if we hope to find any solutions at all.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2013 22:37

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

hotgreenpeas posted:

The Chilean government sort of tried this in the 1970s with Project Cybersyn. (More detailed story here.) Implementation unfortunately coincided with a military coup, so the glorious Socialist Internet Revolution was never to be.

I was disappointed to find that this thread wasn't about failed experiments like Cybersyn or smaller, pragmatic solutions of the sort McDowell referenced and instead was an excuse for the OP to post that buzzword buzzword cloudcloudcloud article.

I was using the OP as a starting point for discussion. Feel free to use the opportunity to educate us; we certainly need it.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2013 23:12

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

Raenir Salazar posted:

A problem I see with the sort of optimization focused solutions that 'software' control would bring is that a lot of interesting things only come from the result of imperfections.

Exploring and colonizing space? Because we can't stop breeding; but what benefit is a growing population to software? Wouldn't it be more logical to impose restrictions if you were software instead of constantly trying to find solutions to something inherently flawed?

The framework of "perfection" and "imperfection" isn't very helpful here. This is a complex system that demonstrates chaotic behaviors, with levels of emergent organization at many layers and nested perspectives. Nothing here is perfect; what matters is how it all is coordinated.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2013 23:39

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

Ratoslov posted:

How, precisely, is your 'world run by software' different from that silly 'marble economy' thing you were ing about months ago?

Also, how the heck is it different from a Soviet-style centrally planned economy? Aside from everyone in the Central Planning Committee having a Comp Sci degree from Harvard.

The marble economy was meant to illustrate an attention economy, where units of attention were treated as discrete particles. Its more natural (but less memorable) to treat the phenomenon as waves, or more precisely to model behavior in field-theoretic terms. We'd ultimately like a master equation to describe the collective activity of agents. But we're not there yet; the ideas I was proposing were probably a decade ahead of the science. The cutting edge attempts at field-theoretic models of goal-directed behaviors are still dramatically underexplored.

A central planned economy is centrally planned. I'm explicitly arguing for distributed planning and self-organized coordination, which would be like using standardized algorithms as the "planning committee" and sampling directly from reddit, twitter, 4chan, et al. for feedback in training the system.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2013 23:49

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

McDowell posted:

Jumping right into a world run by Helios is a terrible idea, the computers will just be a kabuki mask for unaccountable humans.

Corporations are already masks for unaccountable humans. But they sprung up like aggressive weeds, and have ruined the land.

I want to do organizational agriculture, cultivating communities and helping them develop like fruit trees. Its fine if the organizations stand as proxy arbitrary collections of persons, as long as we have the proper methods for handling their cultivation.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2013 23:54

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

Obdicut posted:

So why aren't you out there exploring that poo poo? And if you're not capable of doing that, why the hell do you consider yourself a good judge of the subject?

I am. I recently published an article on human computation, and I've been attending and organizing conferences on the subject. I've also been writing about these ideas on my blogs and social networks for a few years, after getting banned from these boards. I was writing about the same issues during the OWS threads, and I've repeatedly tried to organize some productive discussions here around the topic.

I've also helped start an educational nonprofit, and my collaborator and I have designed an augmented reality game that attempts to implement some of the basic infrastructure for the models I'm proposing. I'm also, for what it's worth, still in grad school and set to defend a thesis in the summer. So I'm doing the best I can.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2013 00:01

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

Obdicut posted:

Do you do any thinking, at all, about why you fail so badly and repeatedly in evangelizing the concepts here? The massive, dense walls of texts, the pictures that you obviously find intuitive but seem like Rorschach tests to the rest of us? You're an evangelist of some new mode of communication but you are a horrible, horrible communicator, to the extent that I do wonder if you're sane, after seeing your G+ presence that convinced me you're not a troll.

Why can't you learn from experience, and present your ideas in anything like a coherent or approachable fashion?

I'll take whatever suggestions you have. I'm providing links to resources and research I've done, and I'm posting these threads to practice writing and making these ideas accessible and coherent. I've been writing on these boards since 2001, and its a format I feel comfortable writing in. Goons are also cynical nay-sayers, and I find it helpful to calibrate my presentation against the wall of utter contempt I get here.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2013 00:29

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

Obdicut posted:

I'm not a cynical nay-sayer. I'm a sociologist who's totally on board with the idea of recognizing existing human computing and thinking about how it can be benefit. But you:

-- Are maniacally positive and emotional about the subject. You are an evangelist, you are not a sober academic and critic. You love the idea of using technology in various ways to 'connect' people, to the extent that you forgo entirely the initial level of critique you should have for the idea.

-- Say things that are totally not axiomatic as though they are, like claiming that you can't fake attention. Yes, you can fake attention. Moreover, many people who need something will not actually give 'attention' to that need. The entire 'attention economy' thing you're hung up on is an inversion of marketing, and completely inapplicable to a broader society, especially where distribution of resources are concerned.

Beyond that, you're occasionally capable of writing coherent small posts. Try to identify the smallest possible unit of communication, some seed idea that you can adequately respond to questions about, instead of plopping these ginormous hunks of intellectual spooge dripping with stylistic and logical flaws. Try giving comprehensible examples.

You say you're in grad school: do you seriously get no criticism of this writing style? I know academic writing sucks, but it doesn't have to.

This is not how I compose academic prose; you can see examples of that here. My blog is also less inflammatory and rhetorical than anything I write here. Here, I'm trying to generate debate and discussion, and that means taking more provocative and extreme positions for the sake of debate.

I don't like the religious connotations of the word "evangelist"; I prefer to call myself a digital advocate. And I see no problem with academics advocating for their subjects. My intellectual responsibility is to be considerate and responsive to serious criticism, and to be consistently informed by the broader scientific and theoretical community. I don't think I'm obligated to speak meekly or about minor topics. I'm a philosopher with a taste for the architectonic, and I'm working on a Big Idea, a unifying synthesis of digital theory, and I'm trying to get people to engage it on that level. I have nothing but respect for other academics who have more modest goals within their domains of expertise, but my training is in the history of ideas, so that's also where my efforts are directed. If it seems too sloppy and big to you, well then I'm obviously struggling with it. But there's not too many others even attempting to advocate for a position like this, so I feel it is my responsibility as a human being to do what I can.

I can try to explain more clearly exactly what I mean by "attention economy" and work with your criticisms, but that would be wasted effort if you think I'm crazy. You are right that attention doesn't always guarantee a response. I'm arguing that by monitoring and adjusting the dynamics of attention we can more effectively engineer solutions to problems as they arise, effectively building a self-organizing system. But this is very abstract theory; we can handle everything in the proposal offered in this thread without appeal to the theory.

Seriously, if you are a sociologist interested in human computation, come to our conference. This subject is being discussed almost exclusively within the context of computer science and engineering, even though it draws heavily from psychology, sociology, economics, and political science. We're trying to get the other side of the discussion to come together and help articulate what's going on, and we'll need all the help we can get.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2013 01:04

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

icantfindaname posted:

Why is it that so many IT/tech boom people are fanatical evangelists of crazy person ideologies? This seems to be a trend from what I can tell.

When people are afraid and uncertain of the future, they tend to mystify their environment and rely heavily on superstition. People have no clear story of the technological changes we are going through, quite frankly because there's no historical precedent for such rapid social and historical change. We've had massive cities and civilizations before, but they always developed over the span of many generations, allowing the people the time to tell stories and develop a social and historical awareness of their condition. We have had no such luxury over the 20th century, and we are left in a bewildering age of enormously powerful technologies with no clue of what we should even do with them. Meanwhile the rest of the world is collapsing in political terror and environmental disaster.

It's precisely the sort of circumstances that have historically bred messianic thinking, and our present age is no different. The singularity is just mysticism for the Silicon Valley types, and it dominates any halfway theoretical discussion of technology simply because there are no plausible alternatives from which to critique it. The worst of these cases is Jason Silva, who sells self-help to cyborgs. I have the unique honor of being banned from his stream for raising criticisms of his performance.

Ironically, many of the same criticisms I've raised against him are thrown at me in these threads. I have complex feelings about this.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2013 01:15

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

icantfindaname posted:

The people who understand and build technology are the ones who are subscribing to the crazy person ideologies. Unless you're suggesting that the IT/tech boom crowd are actually idiots who don't understand how technology works or what its practical applications are.

In fact, I think I just answered my own question there.

But seriously that definition would apply to young upper class white people the least of anyone in society. Young rich white people aren't uncertain and afraid of the future. They're completely detached from the realities of not having money or not having stability or being unwelcome in society.

They know the details about how the technology works at the level of functionality, but they have no clue about what its impact will be when released and used by the wider population. They often have little appreciation for the history of technological change beyond "Moore's law", and little awareness of the philosophical or theoretical tools for understanding their impact on human life and the the planet.

There's not (yet) been a Newton for the meme, if you will. There's no systemic story we have to tell ourselves about our technological circumstance, and that includes the engineers who build the things.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2013 01:33

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

Obdicut posted:

This is what makes me think you actually are nuts. "Unifying synthesis of digital theory" is basically meaningless. It could mean anything. So why would you say it? You might as well have said "Hurffydurfffy". I could interpret "Digital theory" alone in a hundred different ways. You absolutely failed to communicate.

I don't think this is fair or very constructive. Perhaps I've developed some eccentric terminology, but I've been writing about this stuff for years both here and elsewhere, and I find the terminology helpful for keeping my views consistent and organized. You were telling me moments before that my posts are filled with white noise and text-walls, so if I don't appeal to some terminological shorthand I'm not sure how I'd get anything done. I've tried to use these terms in consistent ways, and I can point to places where I've elaborated on the issues more explicitly. To conclude that it is meaningless from your interactions with me on the Something Awful forums would be rather hasty, especially if you are actually interested in the topic.

The audience here is hostile, and perhaps it reflects poorly on the views, but I'm not sure what else I should be doing except giving them the best treatment I can. Since they are multifaceted and have implications for many domains, it's a huge task, and I'm obviously not very good at it which makes it that much harder. But despite my failings I think I'm advocating for a coherent and comprehensive philosophical position that is quite unlike anything I see being advocated by anyone else. I think I can defend the claim that attention can't be faked, given a proper theoretical context, but that requires giving me the discursive room to make the case, and I don't think I have it.

I don't think I've posted anything crazy in this thread, and I'd appreciate the conversation to stick on topic instead of devolving into attacks on me.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2013 02:13

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

Ocean Book posted:

What worries me is that the most efficient conformation of society might involve extermination of massive numbers of redundant human bodies. You compare human social networks to the neural networks of the brain and find social networks lacking in efficient stable dynamic feedback compared to the brain. Are you familiar with 'pruning' and it's importance in the construction of neural networks?

The pruning will happen whether or not we advocate for digital alternatives. Natural systems grow to over capacity, and then settle back into more stable configurations. That's to be expected.

But pruning doesn't mean genocide and killing, which by the way we're already doing quite a lot of without any digital anything. Pruning just means a reduction of the connections between nodes. Technological unemployment is a kind of pruning; it removes the redundant or unnecessary jobs being performed by big clumsy humans, with machines that perform more accurately and efficiently. That means more people unemployed, which means that resources will have to be distributed in some other way than through the labor process, because we can no longer rely on the network of employment for allocating resources. In some sense, it frees up the economic situation to find other stable patterns of interaction.

For instance, you see people worried about the economic implications of things like renters services. If I can just rent a car when I need it from Zipcar, or get a ride from Uber, then I'll never need to own a car. So you get pruning in ownership, and that corresponds to new structures that support the new sharing networks.

Another kind of pruning we'll see is probably a reduction in the size of the really massive social networks like Facebook, as the digital population gets better at finding and cultivating more personalized and immediate communities in other parts of the net. These are forms of organizational pruning that are perfectly normal and expected and shouldn't give anyone cause to freak out. In many cases we can anticipate and prepare for these events, like we do for earthquakes and tsunamis.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2013 02:31

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

Absurd Alhazred posted:

Technocrats keep thinking they can somehow use the latest form of information technology to bypass political economy. Nothing doing. Entrenched powers be entrenched. They must be fought politically.

The call for Silicon Valley to secede from the union is undoubtedly a political call to war.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2013 02:34

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

N. Senada posted:

Is eripsa paying for the privilege to go to grad school?

What does this have to do with anything?

# ¿ Dec 1, 2013 02:36

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

Negative Entropy posted:

The problem with perfect democracy is that it also requires everyone to have a complete understanding of all relevant issues. This may be impossible for some people (ex. the mentally challenged) and quite difficult for non-experts without some kind of amplification of the brain's processing power, critical analysis abilities, and memory storage. When experts try to simplify a concept for popular consumption, they often remove much of the needed nuance, and if everyone is not bringing original ideas to the table then there is redundancy.

No, it doesn't. It requires only being able to discover and amplify the good ideas in the niche communities where they exist, and amplify them into the general consensus. If I trust the community of experts to evaluate the claims of experts, then I don't need to be an expert myself to benefit from the results of that research.

During OWS I wrote up an algorithm describing a consensus procedure designed to do exactly this kind of memetic pruning. This doesn't make it a "perfect democracy" in the sense that it never fails to be a just system, but it does ensure that we avoid the communications problems you are mentioning.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2013 02:42

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

emfive posted:

Eripsa have you ever tried to actually use that algorithm? Has it been exposed to actual reality? It's insanely optimistic about human behavior.

I use a very similar algorithm to run class debates, and have done it for years. The students are allowed to move freely between position groups as the debate progresses; the group that attracts the most detractors by the end of the debate wins. We call it the "Boston Massacre" style debate, which has only recently taken on more grim tones. In any case, it's one of my student's favorite activities.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2013 02:52

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

Absurd Alhazred posted:

He doesn't give a poo poo. Tech-utopians, and utopians in general, don't give a poo poo. Well, I do. Whoever was calling it "the charter schools of public transportation" earlier was right on the money. A completely a-historical attempt to throw "smart money" at a problem, without looking at or even caring about the human consequences. At least a bunch of tech-millionaires and trust-fund hipsters can have a more awesome experience at what to them is a reasonable price.

I agree with the "charter schools" comparison, which is why I devoted explicit discussion to the issue of "walled gardens" and the castle doctrine in my post.

But it's not true that "tech utopians" don't give a poo poo about this. Clay Shirky spends a good long discussion in Cognitive Surplus treating the case of PickUp Pal and the reaction it received from the Canadian transit authority. These are issues the community is well aware of, and actively treating.

I think there's no obligation to work within an illegitimate system, especially when that system fails to provide basic protections for the public interest. I don't think revolution is something to take lightly, but I do think exit is an open and available strategy. At some point the political battles require working the system from the outside.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2013 03:30

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

Tokamak posted:

That algorithm is useless for all but the most trivial problems. I.E. anything at all in the real world. The problem as you describe is one that has been perplexing AI researchers for eternity. The most efficient problem solving algorithms like WATSON are based on very large databases of information, arranged in very complex ways to spend as little time thinking about how to arrive to a solution as possible.

The context to which it was meant to apply was very specific. But its an instance of a more general form, where individuals are given simple instructions that can be followed according to individual judgments, but where the collective behavior of the system does useful work.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2013 04:01

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

Space Gopher posted:

Where's the revolution again?

The fact that services like these are more common and more widely used will have broader impacts on the economy. More renting and sharing through services like these means less ownership and big purchases. Y'all are making fun of how the kids that use uber are rich, but the fact that they are using a service like this instead of buy cars for themselves is a product of a lovely economy, and the fact that 20-30 year olds don't have the kind of free spending cash that they once had. So the increased used of these services is a result of a weak economy; it's an example of pruning in the face of and economic downturn. As such trends become more common, it will have an impact on consumer spending patterns and the wealth of young people over the long term. It is completely reasonable to see these trends as indicators for what the future of the economy (in the next 10 years) will look like.

This may seem like an isolated or insignificant example, but the same basic shift in the behavior from traditional ownership models to digital sharing models has been happening all over the place. YouTube is a great example of how television and media viewership has (despite Google's best efforts) been slipping out of the hands of IP owners and into a self-organized sharing community. IP owners are fighting ruthlessly for their precisely because they know the digital models are a threat to their own business models. No one doubts that new media is disruptive, but there is still an open question of how they will best be handled.

The proposal that these changes will incite a revolution is largely a proceduralist argument: namely, that the procedures through which economic and political relations are formed and maintained have shifted their center of gravity, and demand new protocols for managing and regulating them. The claim is not that some miracle technology will make government and money obsolete overnight. Rather, the claim is that the tools we have for managing economic and political relations is poorly suited to handle the relations that digital populations are rapidly forming. And insofar as the existing system is hostile towards attempts at developing these new tools, we're forced to look for ways of working outside that system. I agree with the criticism that some historical and political perspective is lacking from BSS and others, who arrive at these arguments largely from faulty libertarian first principles. But that doesn't mean the perspective should be rejected entirely, or that the possibility of some digital alternative is absurd. Instead, the critique BSS is offering should be amended withe proper historical perspectives that will modify it in ways that will help it achieve the right ends.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2013 19:31

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

BlueBlazer posted:

This is mostly true. The infrastructure is in place, what it gets used for is up to the passivity of it's citizens. And for other people to take advantage of the infrastructure or it will be just creep back in.

When thinking about ways to to advance the public(ie accessable to everyone) good the first thing that comes to mind is co-opting existing infrastructure before it goes live for other purposes. From a technological standpoint the security apparatus is really expensive to maintain just in bandwidth costs. If even 1% of that capacity was used to provide publicly available free bandwidth, you would be able to provide 3g like speeds to every person within 100 miles of any minor metropolis.

Till the barrier of entry is brought to zero you can argue about how tech can unite the world all you want but you'll still have the age old problem of class barriers in your way.

I honestly think that in a world run by software, all the NSA cameras and tracking systems are operated on a publicly accessible, open and transparent website, something like Wikipedia, except for security.

I think we'd do a much better job of handling security, and the process would be overall less invasive and arbitrary, and much harder to exploit for petty political purposes.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2013 19:36

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

Obdicut: just for the record, writing is loving hard. I've been doing it for a long time, and you see just how bad I am at it. I'm not a good writer, and I'm only barely a passable philosopher. If there's anything I have going for me, its that the subject matter I'm interested in is genuinely interesting, even if I'm loving up the treatment of it.

Obdicut posted:

RealityApologist, can you define what 'attention' is, and make a case for why it can't be faked, as you've claimed?

Attention is, primarily, a memory management system that plays a functional role in cognition. The attention system is the system through which the cognitive system delegates its functional resources to some task. When one "pays attention" to something, one is devoting some combination of cognitive resources to that thing. When I'm watching TV, lots of my functional parts are directed towards the object. When something "catches my attention", it somehow acquires access to lots of those functions. If something is flashing in my peripheral vision, it might make me orient my head and eyes towards it to get a better view. In this sense, the flashing directs my attention.

Attention can't be "faked" because you are either occupying those functional resources, or you aren't. The point here is to distinguish attention from something like a rational judgment, which can be in error. Attention is prejudgmental; we make judgments based on the information we receive, but we have to orient our attention first to receive the information. So I might look at the black spot in the distance and judge it to be a cat; my judgement might be in error (it might be a rabbit), but the fact that my cognitive resources were harnessed and directed towards that phenomenon isn't the kind of thing that can be in error.

This has implications further up the chain for how attention works in the sense typically associated with the "attention economy". A paraphrase of the claim might be "popularity can't be faked". This seems prima facie absurd; for example, I can pay someone who controls a herd of twitterbots to follow my account, so it looks to all the world like I'm a really popular and important twitter user. Looks like a lot of people paying attention, when in fact there is none. There's an example of faked popularity, easy as pie. These are, presumably, the sort of cases you are worried about, yes?

I'm not arguing that one can't present the appearance of attention. But of course, the appearance of attention is not the same as attention itself. There's a difference between real twitter followers and bots, in terms of what they can do and what influence they will have on the network. A real network is certainly more valuable than the bot network. Telling them apart might not be trivial, but there's a difference, and it makes a difference.

When I made the claim, I was attempting to defend the role of "popularity" and "influence" as a reliable measure for managing an economy of attention. The idea was that people don't need rank and position in some corporate or social ladder; instead, they just have a role in the various networks they cultivate, because they've done the work to cultivate them. So the popular kids in a network are genuinely popular. That's not the kind of thing that can simply be assigned, it's a feature of the way everyone's attention is oriented around them, just as whether or not I'm paying attention to the black spot is a feature of the way my resources are directed towards it. There might be kids who "appear" popular but aren't, but in terms of their influence on the network they look nothing alike. Similarly, the swarms of twitter bots don't behave anything like a real active crowd of users, and for exactly that reason have nothing like the influence of a real crowd.

Since this was the linchpin of your whole tirade against me, I can't help but think you won't be satisfied by this response.

quote:

Can you also explain how a heroin addict would play out in an 'attention economy'?

First of all, an attention economy is any economic system that manages resources through the management of attention. So in some sense, any system composed of cognitive agents is going to partly be an attention economy. My view is not that an attention economy is some radical new method of organization; my claim is rather that the methods we currently have for managing our resources makes poor use of attention dynamics. I think that improving our social and political situation involves taking increasing control over representing and managing the dynamics of attention, and that this will allow for self-organizational structures (sharing and reputation economies, and the like) that will be more adaptively stable over time.

So heroin addicts today are in some sense playing out in an attention economy. A really lovely one. But that's not your question; you want to know what happens to heroin addicts in my hypothetical scenario where we have better control over attention dynamics. So here's what I'd like to see:

There are a community of active opiate users and enthusiasts who participate in the production, distribution, and cultural activities of those users, and whose activity is directly responsive to the global demand. That demand is strong enough to allow the community quite a lot of influence in the global resources devoted to the cultivation of opiates, where use is relatively stable. These users all have access to world-class education on opiates and their advantages and risks, and of course everyone has easy and reliable health care that uses the best science and research to help advise users on their doses, desired effects, and potential consequences.

Of those users, some will become heroin addicts in the sense of "unhealthy use". This, first, might be an issue of access or use of health resources, and its first the responsibility of the friends from those communities to assist that person to find the treatment and recovery needed. Since access to those resources comes through the community, there must be some network there the person has to assist them in finding the appropriate health treatments. But perhaps the use is not unhealthy, but just excessive. Again, it is largely the role of members of that community to self-regulate the use and distribution of its services; someone using abnormal or unhealthy amounts of heroin should quickly come to the attention of other users in the community, and there will be easy methods for communicating these worries within the community and publicly resolving them according to the community standards.

But of course, this community isn't walled, and can be observed, monitored, and advised more widely from other, perhaps critical communities. If the opiate community is mistreating or abusing the addict, or otherwise dealing with the case outside of the norms of that community, this can be checked by other communities monitoring that behavior, to alert a wider public and garner more interest and resources in dealing with the case. But presumably, the opiate users are good at handling their own, and the activities of one addict tend not to rise to the level of wider public interest. In other words, issues like the heroin addict (beyond basic medical support) are all about how local issues might get amplified or checked by densely nested and overlapping communities, none of which have any designated authority, but which collectively can marshal resources as it sees fit. No cops or judges or laws, just standards and scope and a protocol.

Now, if addiction itself starts to become an unmanageable aspect of the community, this might warrant some broader reconsiderations over the standards by which the community manages itself. And we can talk more generally about resolution procedures in this way too.

But there's a first pass at dealing with the addict. Thoughts?

# ¿ Dec 1, 2013 20:49

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

Obdicut posted:

No, I'm not. I'm using his definition: What people are actually, physically, sensorially, paying attention to. I'm not playing any semantic games at all. If you believe I am, them demonstrate it instead of asserting it.

My simple contention: If someone pays attention to something, it may be for a huge number of different reasons. No matter what definition of 'attention' you use, this would be true. Can you address that problem, or are you going to simply claim it's semantics and hand-wave it away?

There's no worry about what reasons people have for attending to the things they attend to. That's the point of it being prejudgmental; it isn't the result of a conscious, deliberative decision, it is an immediate reaction to perceived importance. The flow of attention is a direct indicator of what people immediately perceive to be important enough to devote their cognitive efforts towards.

That importance is value-neutral, as in the case of the car crash and the rubber necks. The mere fact that attention has been attracted to the crash doesn't say anything about whether people like crashes or what more or less of them. What it does do is demonstrate where attention is being directed, and that change in the flow of attention is, I claim, sufficient for mobilizing resources. The fact that attention is being directed towards the crash suggests that something needs to be done. Amplifying that signal in a functioning economy of attention ensures that the persons most appropriate for handling the event are made aware so they can be dispatched properly.

This isn't some crazy theory. Waze uses gps to get sensor readings on the flow of traffic, and can extract from that data important traffic information, like where the trouble spots are. This information is enough both to get emergency services to the scene, and to inform everyone else to avoid the area and route traffic around. The point is that amplifying the signal, in the context where everyone has a role and know how to respond, will allow the system to self-organize around the trouble and attend to it appropriately.

What counts as appropriate in this situation depends on what you are doing and what your goals are. If I'm just trying to get across town, then a traffic accident means I should plan a new route. But if I'm an emergency responder, I'd treat that signal in an entirely different way. The point isn't force people to follow the flow of attention, or restrict people to act in any particular way. The point, instead, is to provide them with the proper information to be able to decide for themselves where their services are best rendered, and how best to accomplish whatever goals they have.

That's exactly the treatment I gave of the heroin case. You were perhaps looking for something about treating heroin addicting itself, or the drug problem generally. So you think I'm avoiding the problem entirely, or just waving my hands and passing it off to community responsibility. In fact, what I was describing was a procedure by which different communities might weigh in and collaborate about certain problems they face, and how their activity around these problems is amplified into the domain of other communities who might be better suited to treat the problem. If the problem is just one heroin addict, then that problem probably doesn't rise above the communities to which that person belongs, and I described multiple ways in which the system I'm describing would provide resources for assisting at each level.

I'm describing, ultimately a collective decision procedure. I'm not saying it guarantees the right results every time. I'm saying it accords with more basic principles of participatory feedback and self-organized consensus, and that these procedures open up methods for handling tasks that aren't available in the existing system, and is likely more suited to the problems at hand. Because seriously, the only problem with the heroin addict is the possibility of disease, and the burden they put on their own social networks. A heroin user who can manage these aspects responsibly and to community standards isn't a problem.

Back to the faking of attention: you are worried about the kid facing forward in class with his hands folded, who appears for all the world to be engaged in the material, but in fact is daydreaming about unicorns. The kid is paying attention to something, just not what you think it is. I'm not sure why you think this is a problem for the view, any more than eye spots on butterfly wings is a problem for a theory of visual attention. The butterfly wings appear to be looking at things, but aren't. It might trick some of the creatures around it, but that doesn't imply there's any ambiguity over whether its eye spots are actually looking anywhere. There's no functionality that underlies that appearance of attention, and the difference will play out in behavior. Similarly the day dreaming kid won't do well on their exams because they weren't paying attention to the material. It is a difference that makes a difference.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2013 23:47

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

Gantolandon posted:

Heroin, after all, gets a lot of interest from its user.

But there's no reason to think that heroin use will become an all-consuming passion of the entire population. I would expect that a population given unrestricted access to the drug, other things being equal, would find some steady level of use that would stabilize over time. Environmental conditions can drive up drug use, especially when the environment is unstable or unstimulating. In rats, at least, we know that use of cocaine will stabilize in environments rich with other forms of stimulation. I see no reason for thinking that human use of drugs will be any different.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2013 23:53

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

Obdicut posted:

Yeah, that networks of mutual interest aren't in any way a useful thing to organize around

Why in the world would you think this? Interest groups are one of the primary methods of social organization. If you include family relations as a kind of "interest group", it accounts for the vast majority of human social relations, and it is through these networks that most human social activity is propagated.

One interpretation of the view being offered here is that interest groups will be more efficient at handling organizational problems that hierarchically imposed structures, since such tasks are often motivated by group membership alone. Heroin users have built-in incentives and experience in helping addicts recover from and manage their addictions.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2013 23:58

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

SedanChair posted:

Eripsa, I'm honestly worried that you are going to cause some damage in this world. You're just the man to put a techno-utopian shine on some capitalist's brain-chipping ambitions. You're going to find a patron eventually--tech moguls seem to have a bottomless appetite for flattering bullshit--and you'll earnestly set about convincing idealistic young people that enslavement is a new freedom. Please retire from the world of ideas.

The only thing I might say in response is that I keep coming here to share my thoughts and to argue them out with people who at times viciously disagree with me. I'm not the kind of person who seeks out filter bubbles that only serve to reinforce one's existing beliefs. Furthermore, my views aren't just practical or technical; I'm talking about principles and values at an explicitly philosophical level. I'm largely informed by American pragmatists like Dewey, Quine, and Rorty; my positions are liberal in Rorty's sense, and inspired by my work with anarchist communities and digital networks.

It's probably no consolation, but I'm not just a yes man. I believe my views differ significantly from the libertarian and singularity ideologies that pervade the popular discussion. To the extent that it is unique, and that it represents values and science that are worth defending, then I'd be just pleased as punch to find a patron that can support this work.

I'm worried about the other side of it, actually: not that I get supported, but that someone runs with these ideas without my support. I have contacts at DARPA, and avenues through which I might work to secure funding through them. I also know they are working on projects very close to the ones I've proposed. I do worry that this work contributes to projects that don't represent the values and goals I have, and that improper implementations of the techniques could contribute to the violence and suffering at the hands of the state.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2013 00:14

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

Gantolandon posted:

Given the heroin potential to cause addiction, it can be another way of creating positive feedback that breaks the economy - push drugs to people, bask in their attention, use the resources and manpower you can now claim to promote heroin use even more. A lot of people will try to stop you, but they have a lot of other things to care about, while you just need to reduce the dosage and your customers will devote all their interest to you.

My assumption was that there is some "natural" rate of heroin use in a population, and that artificially tampering with the demand for heroin will result in a hit to functionality elsewhere, which will in turn raise concerns from other interested parties to escalate the discussion.

I don't think the heroin case is a red herring, but it is a complicated example that is difficult to treat given the existing discourse around drug use. Obdicut seems to think that addiction is a problem with an individual, and is looking for solutions at that level, but I'm trying to argue that there are environmental aspects that make the issue a much larger problem of social organization. I'm trying to point to facts about how human communities self organize, in order to suggest ways of leveraging those dynamics in favor of resolving these sorts of problems. And this is all meant as an example of my more basic claim, which is that these organizational dynamics are better suited to handle the problem than centralized, hierarchical, representative government.

But the normative implications of drug use make the heroin example is too complicated to make the larger point clear. I think Obdicut might want to reflect on how extreme and unclear his objections are in light of my responses; it might perhaps help him extend a bit more charity when interpreting my frustrated attempts at articulating my own thoughts. Again, this is a REALLY BIG THEORY, and it covers material all across the web of knowledge, from facts about politics and values to the mathematics of dynamical systems. We shouldn't expect it to be easy. More importantly, there really aren't any theories on the table that can adequately handle this range of phenomena, so we should remember that we're blazing trails, and be more understanding of the mistakes we make along the way.

So let's start more abstractly with less complicated examples. The heroin case is an instance of a general kind of worry about the attention economy:

1) The worry that people are too attracted to bad things

This might be distinguished from the other basic kind of worry,

2) The worry that people will not be attracted enough to good things

So on the one hand, you have everyone following celebrities or using heroin or otherwise making bad decisions, because the things they want to do are dangerous or stupid or otherwise not thing things that should be done. And on the other hand, you have all the important but dirty jobs that no one wants to do, like mine minerals and pick strawberries and clean shithouses and so on. We talked a lot about the latter case in the original marble thread, if anyone is interested they might go back and read it.

Part of the problem with the heroin example is that I don't think heroin is a bad thing, and perhaps Obdicut and I differ there. In any case, I'm not merely equating "good things" with "the things people are attracted to". Some things are genuinely stupid or dangerous, like car crashes, and people are attracted to them anyway. Other things are genuinely good and healthy and should be encouraged. I'm not just defining these problems away.

But there is, nevertheless, a problem for how to determine what these good or bad things are, and also for how to deal with it. The traditional method is to select some governing body that is fewer in number, and less ideologically diverse, and have them make the decisions. They might not be the best position, but it will result in some decision, and that's at least a resolution, and in most cases that's enough. But there will be some problems, especially those concerning the social welfare, that can't adequately be addressed by this method because it requires incorporating voices into the decision making process that are explicitly ruled out by the procedure.

So I'm proposing a new sort of organizational procedure that will let decision making emerge naturally out of the overlapping activity of self-organized communities of interested agents. In this procedure, each community has their own distinct values for judging things to be "good" or "bad", and they are free to cultivate these views as they see fit. A car crash can be good or bad in a thousand different ways, depending on who you are and what you're interested in doing. A safety engineer's criteria for a "good crash" might be totally different from a nascar fan's, and that's fine; there's no need to resolve these inconsistencies in the general case. But they might arise in the case of solving specific tasks, and will of course need to be resolved in that instance.

So let's go back to the heroin example; hopefully the above discussion makes the structure and importance of the example more clear. So here's one problem someone might have with the heroin addict: if I'm an addict too, I'd have a problem if the other one (let's call him Spud) used all the heroin without leaving enough for me. But is this claim reasonable? That is, is Spud doing a bad thing? Well, an attention economy would allow us to, for instance, compare that user's habits against its historical patterns, to see first of all if Spud is using unusually more than he would normally use, and second against the habits of all other users of the drug, to see if Spud's use is abnormal generally. This information will let anyone know if Spud's use is abnormal compared to other users. If Spud is using twice as much as everyone else, then maybe that is a good reason to figure out what's going on with Spud and take the objections to his use seriously. This is the heroin user's built-in incentive at handling these community problems: because I'm a user too, I'm a member of that community and I have an exiting interest in dealing with its structure because it has direct implications for my identity. If we don't do something about Spud, then we won't have any heroin left.

So far this has been all describing intra-community dynamics, where the values of the community itself determine the response the community takes to perceived problems. The judgment of "good" or "bad" has all been according to standards within the community itself, and not compared to potentially hostile communities elsewhere. The attention economy resources aren't solving the problem directly, they are instead supplying the resources for the users to resolve the problems themselves, without appeal to some higher legal authority. But you might imagine a different intra-community problem, where the community picks on Spud by falsely claiming he is taking more than his share, and using this as an excuse to give spud less. In other words, communities aren't always supportive, and can also be hostile to its members. But Spud isn't just a heroin addict, he's also members of many other networks. An external humanitarian effort monitoring the activity of heroin users, using the same attention economy data on use and other behaviors, might observe or even anticipate this bullying situation, and step in on behalf of Spud to correct the wrong to ensure that Spud gets his fair share. In this case, the measure of "bad" came from external to the community. The humanitarian effort wouldn't need authority to engage in this monitoring, and "stepping in" need not be the product of some grand political effort. These communities can engage each other directly, in the context of potentially many other communities and interested parties getting involved.

Presumably heroin users don't want any of that poo poo, which gives them an incentive to stabilize their activity into a normal pattern of behavior that won't raise these triggers for escalating their signal across the wider community.

I can keep going on with the example if you'd like and consider other cases of dispute and resolution, but I'll cut the wall of text here. and let the thread catch up.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2013 01:26

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

Obdicut posted:

Attention paid to something tells us nothing about the importance of that thing.

This is false. It tells you the importance it has to the system paying attention.

That doesn't mean it has any more importance than that. When there is a flash in my peripheral vision because of the sun through the window, it grabs my attention but isn't all that important and loses your attention quickly. But the same flash might have been a grenade, and that would have been important and required more sustained attention. So when you pay attention to something, your brain is saying it is preparing to direct its resources that way. It is making a prejudgment that more attention and resources may be required.

And that's also what's happening when people rubberneck and slow down around a crash: they are making the immediate prejudgment that something interesting is going on here that requires more resources. The fact of their directed attention is at least prima facie reason to suspect that something interesting is going on.

Your objections are stronger than are warranted by what I am writing.

Humanitarian groups might watch over heroin users because that's the sort of thing they are interested in doing, and those are the groups people would trust in handling humanitarian issues. The heroin haters might be monitoring also, but presumably they will have more of a challenge in escalating their complaints to the attention of the general assembly because people expect a normal amount of vitriol and accusation from them. But there's lots of ways these things might go depending on the particular problem and the particular parties involved. I'm not hand waving these problems away; there's just a lot of cases to potentially talk about and I'm trying to be clear and concise and not just post walls of text. I was going to talk about disputes that might arise between the population of heroin users and the wider opiate users generally; it may be the case that the general consensus of people determine that medical uses of opiates deserve priority over the heroin users, so that a "fair" distribution of opium is weighted towards the former. But these details are all just speculations on how the dynamics might play out from different perspectives.

I will say that none of this depends on everyone making the right decisions with exactly proper use of their tools. It just requires that the tools themselves are genuinely useful and available, and that people do they best they can with what they've got. There's discussion in the human computation community of dealing with unreliable human sensors that feed bad data; these things aren't trivial, but they can be managed.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2013 01:57

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

Gantolandon posted:

The system breaks even more hilariously when you consider marketing and advertising industry, which becomes even more powerful in such economy. If you gather enough attention, you are able to divert more and more resources into promoting whatever you do, which - of course - gives you even more people that are interested in what you do. It's capitalism 2.0, except that you don't even need to actually sell your product, just advertising it is enough. It doesn't matter if you are just an idea guy who never did anything tangible, you are able to become rich just because you made a really convincing description of your future masterpiece.

This is mostly right, except it's important to emphasize how loving awful marketing and advertising are at handling attention resources. I'm shown irrelevant ads all the time that obstruct my ability to function smoothly with my environment; the point of these ads isn't just to sell me the thing, but also to imprint the brand and consumer identity in my mind through repeated exposure. It is effective at turning people into little brand-tribes as a regular source of consumption, and is quite a lot like the way we harvest fleece from a flock of sheep. Domesticating consumers is a really super effective at making money.

But in terms distributing all the things properly, the whole system isn't very smart about it. As it works now, advertising is a middleman strategy for connecting users to find services, but ideally we'd want the middleman to get out of the way entirely, with direct connections to services at the user's command If we imagine a world without money, advertising stops being a matter of consumption, and turns purely into identity politics. Why should I as an outsider trust humanitarian group A over group B to step in on Spud's behalf, especially when they differ in their techniques? Advertisement becomes a way of getting users to make decisions like these.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2013 02:18

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

Obdicut posted:

No, it really doesn't. I don't know why you persist in this belief, when it's so easily demonstrably wrong. I may look out the window and watch the traffic while I think about something. I might only pay a few minutes of attention every day to my liquid nitrogen canisters even though they are absolutely, completely, and utterly vital to me. Attention does not measure importance, and this is trivially demonstrable.

If I'm comparing some arbitrary moment of your life to some other arbitrary moment, then perhaps I can't tell the difference of importance. But if I'm looking over the full profile of your behavior, I'm bound to see a difference if there is one. Every day you might hit the same light switch in your room, but those interactions are momentary and at regular intervals, and probably compare normally to the light switch behavior of other people. The fact that you engage with nitrogen canisters at all is probably abnormal for the general population, and already specializes and contextualizes your behavior by having them in your network. Presumably for most people that interact regularly with nitrogen canisters, it plays some important roll in their lives. And again, you might be able to distinguish different forms of typical nitrogen-canister behavior; the profile of a canister delivery person probably looks quite a bit different from yours, etc. In other words, there are sophisticated ways of handling attention dynamics that don't simply reduce to the question of "what do you spend the most time touching" as a brute one-dimensional quantity.

Again, the claim isn't that attention dynamics magically solve every problem, but that it provides a basic tool around which solutions are able to self-organize. You seem to accept on principle that a a representation of your attention behavior is irrelevant to the things that are important to you, but it simply isn't the case.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2013 02:33

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

Obdicut posted:

So in other words, it's not attention that shows the importance, but the qualities of the thing itself. In order to know how important it is that someone is paying attention to something, you have to know everything about that thing.

Again, you're showing how what you're saying is wrong, and yet you don't realize it. You're making the argument against attention showing things that are significant, and instead arguing that the actual qualities of those things show that they're important.

Wait, you are complaining is that I used the only bit of semantic information you gave me, that they were nitrogen canisters? Why is that information off limits? Where did I say that attention alone and no other information will solve all these problems?

My phone knows where I am at any given time, and what routes I typically take to get from place to place. But it also knows that one of those places I've designated as "home", and so it treats that place differently than other places. I go to work and come home every day, but that doesn't mean the two locations are equally important to me, and so Google treats them differently. That's a difference in semantic content that gives the attention data interpretive significance. I'm still looking at the things you are paying attention to, and I'm using semantic data to give that activity significance. It still all depends on capturing that activity.

Or for a slightly more ambitious case, I might correspond to lots of people in my company, but the frequency of email exchanges isn't itself enough for knowing how those exchanges reflect the position in the company. I might email mostly to peers, for instance, and to bosses and underlinings infrequently. So a single letter from a person doesn't tell me enough about what that email might mean. But if the email also contains a signature line identifying itself as the CEO of the company, that semantic information helps characterize the importance of the exchange.

I never said that semantic information is irrelevant. Its incredibly useful for building predictive models, and I'm not sure why you think I'm cheating by appealing to it. It's exactly where Google's services are headed. I'm not sure why you think I ever suggested otherwise, but you've obviously misunderstood the view, and your critique appears to be aimed at a strawman. That would explain why my articulation of the view makes you think I'm arguing against it.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2013 06:14

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

Obdicut posted:

That information isn't "He has nitrogen canisters" it's "He has nitrogen canisters, and that means..." That's the system, that can put together that 'semantic' information, that is the magic hand-wave you're depending on. Attention is the least important part of your system. So why are you calling it an 'attention economy'?

You could also pay work on the other major issues with the attention model itself-- that people ignore problems, that interest groups don't equal expert groups, etc. etc.

I don't need to know exactly what those canisters mean to you; if I have data about your behavior around them (that is, if I have your the behavioral data of what you do around these objects, your attention profile), then even without knowing anything more about you, I might compare your use to the way the general population engage similar objects, and use this information to generalize on other aspects of your behavior. That's all an attention economy really is: a way of generating predictive models on the basis of past behavior. If your attention profile matches the profile of what we know to be, say, a physics lab tech, then we might use this to infer more precise things about how important the canisters are to you because we've made a guess at the kind of user you are.

And again, this guess isn't by having some magical insight, but is simply by comparing your profile to other user profiles, clustering the results, and interpreting them with any semantic data we have on hand. If the email signature profiles of most of the people who use nitrogen canisters in the way you do contain the title "Physics lab tech", then its a reasonable guess that you are also a lab tech, and this generates a host of inferences about how you might use those canisters in the future.

Tuning these predictions in any particular case is going to take a lot of patience and training. I'm not saying it is trivial. But surely it is possible, and surely our machines will have ever increasing semantic awareness of their surrounding and their relevance to our lives. I suppose I can talk in more technical detail about the technical and computational issues involved if you want, but I'm not assuming some computational miracle to make it happen. I'm only assuming that increasingly accurate information about the actual behavior of people will help us build more and better predictive models for anticipating their future behavior. I'm not assuming that they are perfect decision makers, I'm only assuming that we can suss out what kind of decision makers they are, and use that to engineer a world that is properly responsive to the decisions they do make. That doesn't mean giving them everything they want, but it does mean working out the procedures by which they can voice what they want and take clear actions to pursue it, and that the rest of us can try to accommodate and incorporate into the larger social fabric.

I've been putting most of my writing effort into tackling this last issue, of how everything becomes incorporated into a fabric that can operate as an organized system, so most of my answers are pointed in that direction. But again, there are technical and theoretical issues at many points in the scope of the picture. I'm not claiming that digital theory is a completely worked out alternative system that already has all the answers to all the hard social problems. I am saying that digital theory is a coherent framework of values and techniques for addressing all these questions in a consistent and methodological way, and for reorienting the political discourse towards towards these issues.

RealityApologist fucked around with this message at 06:46 on Dec 2, 2013

# ¿ Dec 2, 2013 06:43

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

Eej posted:

I like this attention economy idea. It means that things like KONY gets more resources allocated to it than gay kids being bullied to death.

The allocation of resources for major social projects is something that takes months or years to foment and coalesce. The Kony2012 video's huge quantity of attention was paid briefly, but that attention was obviously not sufficient to move the kind of resources that were being called for in the video. The Kony video was like a flash of light: it caught our attention but couldn't maintain it. We decided that there was nothing interesting here, and we moved on. If anything, it's an example of how good we are already at managing our collective attention.

Contrast with the networks and poliical coalitions building in the gay communities for decades. These groups have marshaled the dedicated contributions and lives of unaccountably many volunteers and activists who have remained passionate about the cause and motivated to do something about it. If these groups fail to attract the resources they require, it is because the systems in which they are embedded are actively hostile to the rights they defend. These interest groups persist despite the hostile environment.

It speaks volumes about how important we consider the one over the other. Y'all act as if youtube view counts are the only measure of attention, but that's certainly not the case.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2013 06:53

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

Obdicut posted:

Right, again, this is the magic handwavey system. Right there. That you don't seem to realize this is magic handwaving is troubling. Not to mention that there's a huge amount of differences in how people who use nitrogen tanks actually use them, depending a lot on the system itself. The important information is not at all the attention they pay to them, it's that they have them in the first place. I'm pointing out that your 'attention system' requires a label on everything in the goddamn world, or requires the system be able to recognize every object in the world. It furthermore has to evaluate the uses of those object and make sense of the disparate ways people interact with the same objects to do the same work with them. That is the magical handwavey system, the actual 'attention' bit is really goddamn secondary to your magic AI system you've got there that can recognize all objects in realtime.

This seems like a very petty objection. You don't like that I'm using the word "attention" as the name of the system. Okay, well suck it. I like the name, and it seems perfectly appropriate to me. If it bothers you, then get over it and talk about something that actually matters.

I'm not handwaving around this system. I've been giving several attempted to describe how it works at various levels of generality. Your objections are wild and untargeted and stem from a very unsympathetic reading of my view, so if I'm struggling to target exactly your worries it is a dialectical problem as much as it is a problem with the view itself.

But you yourself just characterized exactly the sort of thing it has to do. I think you are exaggerating; it doesn't need to know every object and label, but it should know as many as it can, and it should be able to learn and generate new labels as and when required. My brain is a cognitive system and has to do basically the same thing with my world. There's no "right way" to carve up the objects that exist in the world, but my cognitive system makes the best guesses it can in real time, and has a bunch of back-ups and fail safes it is ready to deploy in case something goes wrong. That's an impressive feat, no doubt, but obviously it is possible. I'm not asserting that such things are possible today, but only that our technology is developing in that direction and we need to plan our organizational models where such techniques are common and widely available. Because they will be.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2013 07:00

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

Kalman posted:

So the actual attention is meaningless and instead we need to interpret that attention through human-generated filtering and data analysis to determine how important a given piece of attention actually is.

Why, no, I don't think this will in any way reflect existing economic, social, and racial biases and systematically undervalue attention to anything that isn't important to those writing the system (I.e., middle class/upper class technocratic elites).

You can't just overturn the social zeitgeist in one fell swoop. The fact is that most of our biases now are reactions to the heavy propaganda and conditioning that is imposed by the socially powerful. But with participatory digital technologies, individuals have been given a voice that partly counterbalances those ideologies, and more importantly encourages others to seek out alternatives. And through this process we've been slowly chipping away at the 20th century values bit by bit. We're living in a world where most media is consumed through sources that probably didn't exist even 10 years ago, that can be actively engaged through computers we are holding in our hands, that are cheap enough to give to basically everyone in the world, and that are being used to form actively engaged communities that are organizing across all sorts of political and social boundaries.

These fundamental changes to the infrastructure of social life offer the best hope of challenging the biases and dogmas that have become so deeply entrenched in our world. Taking advantage of the circumstances is the best shot we have to effect change. I'm really not sure what you think the alternative would be. More of the same?

# ¿ Dec 2, 2013 07:22

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

Cream_Filling posted:

HAhahahah yes the NSA will crowdsource national security surveillance. This is an actual thought had by a supposedly intelligent adult human.

I did not suggest the NSA will crowdsource surveillance. I suggested that crowdsourced surveillance would do a better job of security that the NSA. These are not the same things, and you are mocking a view I don't have.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2013 15:14

RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

Adar posted:

Eripsa, just out of curiosity, did you pay any attention to the last thread where evilweasel pointed out that applying your crowdsourcing traffic plans to the US would result in doubling the death rate in the country as a whole? As you've immediately brought up another car analogy my guess is you did not. Is this perhaps a crack in your theory that the wisdom of crowds rewards good ideas?

evilweasel's objections, just like Cream Filling's and yours, have literally nothing to do with the view I've been defending in this thread.

In fact, I've given explicit procedures for describing how to avoid the problem of the fat smelly guy hogging all the resources; that's exactly what a distributed system is supposed to fix, and exactly the situations I'm trying to resolve. You are all just obfuscating through white noise and disinformation without actually considering the view being presented. Which is fine, but sorry if I'm not taking it as a knock down objection to the view.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2013 15:18

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RealityApologist: Mar 29, 2011; ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS

Tokamak posted:

They won't respond because they're lacking the ability to articulate their own thoughts in a technical way. Its easier to chat about attention economy, because it's 'just an idea' and it can't really be critiqued (unlike, say a decision making algorithm).

Besides that was not the point of my post, if you read the link then you would know that individual people will be arguing on the proposed solutions. It is similar to consensus decision-making and the 'brains' behind it are people splitting into groups/camps and coming to agreement in the smaller group. I guess the idea is that the 'best' solution will bubble up from a small group and bring about a consensus. If the group can't come to a consensus, then the suggestion is to try it again; this obviously does not work for divisive issues (so almost all of them).

It's really just a variation of utility function iteration with a bit of simulated annealing thrown in to try and get the utility function iterating towards its goal. It's not really novel, and the pitfalls of the algorithms the poster is cribbing from are well understood. It will only work if the bar for consensus is relatively low (~50%-66%, similar to how governments operate), or if one group suppresses enough dissenting views to form an artificial 'consensus'.

"Boston Massacre" style debate is actually a descriptive name for it and illustrates why the poster is a crank and shouldn't be taken seriously.

"Attention economy" is the big idea that makes the technical solutions to the consensus problem fit into a larger story of the politics and values of a digital society. Since I'm trying to characterize the alternative at that level of description, that's where most of my efforts lie.

But I'm perfectly happy to talk about this at a more technical level. The algorithm that you are critiquing was obviously not a general purpose algorithm, and I was quite clear about the situations in which it is meant to work: a live crowd trying to resolve some discussions in real time, It operates under the assumption that people want to cooperate even where they disagree, and gives an illustration of how such a procedure would work, aimed at a particularly nontechical crowd. Consensus grouping is designed only to fix problems with participation from the crowd, and to work around the problem of the loud obnoxious people who try to dominate the procedure. The procedure might fail for particular divisive issues, and them perhaps some other procedure is necessary. But the point wasn't to resolve all possible debates, it to construct a procedure under which constructive debates might happen.

There are obviously similar looping problems and decision procedure failure in other kinds of deliberative bodies (like the house of representatives), so the fact that my simple and context-specific algorithm has the same problems shouldn't be an immediate defeater. Again, the claim isn't that it finds better solutions, only that the procedure is inclusive and distributed. If I had made claims that this algorithm would resolve all disputes or serve as the basis for all governance, I'd be a crank. But I'm not claiming that, and I'm very clear about how it is meant to work. And yes, Boston Masacre style is an appropriate name. I'm not sure why this makes me a crank.

iFederico, I know very well what a master equation is, and I've taken graduate level math classes on the subject. A master equation describes a system through a complete description of the relations between all the parts (its state), and the changes its state undergoes over time. This is what we'd like to see for human populations: a description of the relations between all the people and their relevant objects, and the changes in those relations over time. Such a master equation would constitute a model for the attention economy. I don't think I'm making mistake when describing this as the goal, or at least I'm not sure what mistake you think I'm making.

In any case, when I said these ideas are 10 years ahead of the science, I mean specifically that scientists aren't ready yet to start giving such a state description of things as complex as the full set of human social relations. I posted articles from the HCOMP conference last month which represents the state of the art on the subject, and people are still dealing with very simple incentive models in high constrained environments where the possible relations are represented in very simple toy models. Extending these models to actually cover the range of cases I'm considering in this thread will take some time. I'm not at all saying that I'm outthinking the scientists; instead, I'm only assuming that these models will extend out in the ways I've described, and I'm trying to talk about the larger social and political ramifications of those changes once they occur.

Because I'm not a data scientist, I'm a philosopher. I don't want to misuse these subjects, so if I'm making a mistake I'd love a correction. But I don't think I'm making any technical mistakes, I'm just speculating on how these tools play out over the next decade. In particular, I understand how these methods for organizing populations differ fundamentally from the industrial age tools they are replacing, and that's where most of my theoretical discussion lies.

RealityApologist fucked around with this message at 15:58 on Dec 2, 2013

# ¿ Dec 2, 2013 15:51

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