On Monday 26 May 2008 09:55:14 am, Mark Waser wrote: > Josh, > > Thank you very much for the pointers (and replying so rapidly).
You're welcome -- but also lucky; I read/reply to this list a bit sporadically in general. > > > You're very right that people misinterpret and over-extrapolate econ and > > game > > theory, but when properly understood and applied, they are a valuable tool > > for analyzing the forces shaping the further evolution of AGIs and indeed > > may > > be our only one. > > No. I would argue that there is a lot of good basic research into human and > primate behavior that is more applicable since it's already been tested and > requires less extrapolation (and visibly shows where a lot of current > extrapoloation is just plain wrong). It's interesting that "behavioral economics" appeared only fairly recently, to study the ways in which humans act irrationally in their economic choices. (See Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, e.g.) But it's been observed for a while that people tend to act more rationally in economic settings than non-economic ones, and there's no reason to believe that we couldn't build an AI to act more rationally yet. In other words, actors in the economic world will be getting closer and closer to the classic economic agent as time goes by, and so classic econ will be a better description of the world than it is now. > The true question is, how do you raise the niceness of *all* players and > prevent defection -- because being the single bad guy is a winning strategy > while being just one among many is horrible for everyone. Intelligence. You identify the bad guys and act nasty just to them. Finding ways to do this robustly and efficiently is the basis of human society. > > So, in simplistic computer simulations at least, evolution seems to go > > through > > a set of phases with different (and improving!) moral character. > > So why do so many people think evolution favors the exactly the opposite? Several reasons -- first being that evolution education and literacy in this country is crap, thanks to a century and a half of religious propaganda and activism. Another is that people tend to study evolution at whatever level that predation and arms races happen, and don't pay attention to the levels where cooperation does. Example: lions vs zebras -- ignoring the fact that the actual units of evolution are the genes, which have formed amazingly cooperative systems to create a lion or zebra in the first place. And even then, the marketplace can channel evolution in better ways. It's a quantum jump higher step on the moral ladder than the jungle... Miller and Drexler write: (http://www.agorics.com/Library/agoricpapers/ce/ce0.html) ... Ecology textbooks show networks of predator-prey relationships-called food webs-because they are important to understanding ecosystems; "symbiosis webs" have found no comparable role. Economics textbooks show networks of trading relationships circling the globe; networks of predatory or negative-sum relationships have found no comparable role. (Even criminal networks typically form cooperative "black markets".) One cannot prove the absence of such spanning symbiotic webs in biology, or of negative-sum webs in the market; these systems are too complicated for any such proof. Instead, the argument here is evolutionary: that the concepts which come to dominate an evolved scientific field tend to reflect the phenomena which are actually relevant for understanding its subject matter. 4.5 Is this picture surprising? Nature is commonly viewed as harmonious and human markets as full of strife, yet the above comparison suggests the opposite. The psychological prominence of unusual phenomena may explain the apparent inversion of the common view. Symbiosis stands out in biology: we have all heard of the unusual relationship between crocodiles and the birds that pluck their parasites, but one hears less about the more common kind of relationship between crocodiles and each of the many animals they eat. Nor, in considering those birds, is one apt to dwell on the predatory relationship of the parasites to the crocodile or of the birds to the parasites. Symbiosis is unusual and interesting; predation is common and boring. Similarly, fraud and criminality stand out in markets. Newspapers report major instances of fraud and embezzlement, but pay little attention to each day's massive turnover of routinely satisfactory cereal, soap, and gasoline in retail trade. Crime is unusual and interesting; trade is common and boring. Psychological research indicates that human thought is subject to a systematic bias: vivid and interesting instances are more easily remembered, and easily remembered instances are thought to be more common [21]). Further, the press (and executives) like to describe peaceful competition for customer favor as if it were mortal combat, complete with wounds and rolling heads: again, vividness wins out. These factors go far to explain the common view of market and biological ecosystems. For contrast, imagine that symbiosis were as fundamental to biology as it is to markets. Crocodiles would not merely have birds to pick their teeth, symbiotic bacteria in their guts, and the like; they would have symbiotes to provide them with orthodontia and tooth crowns, to say nothing of oral surgery, heart surgery, and kidney transplants, as well as shoes, clothing, transportation, housing, entertainment, telecommunications, massage, and psychiatric care. Likewise, imagine that predation were as fundamental to markets as it is to biology. Instead of confronting occasional incidents of theft in a background of trade, one would be surrounded by neighbors who had stolen their cars from dealers who had mounted an armed assault on factories in Detroit, which in turn had grabbed their parts and equipment by pillaging job-shops in the surrounding countryside. So-called "hostile corporate takeovers" would involve, not purchase of shares of ownership from willing stockholders, but a sudden invasion of offices by an armed gang. Biological ecosystems have evolved creatures and environments of great beauty and complexity, and they exhibit a grand spontaneous order, but that order is quite different from the synergistic, symbiotic order of the market. If the aim in building computational ecosystems were to maximize their beauty and complexity, biology might be an excellent model. Given the goal of building a computational ecosystem which will organize itself to solve problems, however, one should seek a system that fosters the cooperative use of specialized knowledge and abilities. Market ecosystems seem better suited to this. ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
