The world of decentralized everything.

Following up on my last post on the Summer of Protocols sessions, I want to pass on (again, to my future self, and possibly a few techie MindBlog readers) a few links to the world of decentralized grass roots everything - commerce, communications, finance, etc.  - trying to bypass the traditional powers and gate keepers in these areas by constructing distributed systems usually based on block chains and cryptocurrencies.  I am trying to learn more about this, taking things in small steps to avoid overload headaches... (One keeps stumbling on areas of world wide engagement of thousands of very intelligent minds.)

Here is a worthwhile read of the general idea from the Ethereum Foundation.

I've described getting into one decentralized context by setting up a Helium Mobile network hotspot, as well as my own private Helium Mobile Cellular account. To follow this up, I pass on a link in an email from Helium pointing to its participation in Consensus24 May 29-31 in Austin TX (where I now live) sponsored by CoinDesk.  At look at the agenda for that meeting gives you an impression of the multiple engagements of government regulatory agencies, business, and crypto-world that are occurring.

New protocols for uncertain times.

I want to point to a project launched by Venkatest Rao and others last year: “The Summer of Protocols.”  Some background for this project can be found in his essay “In Search of Hardness”.  Also,  “The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols”  essay by Rao et al. is an excellent presentation of what protocols are about.  I strongly recommend that you read it if nothing else. 

Here is a description of the project: 

Over 18 weeks in Summer 2023, 33 researchers from diverse fields including architecture, law, game design, technology, media, art, and workplace safety engaged in collaborative speculation, discovery, design, invention, and creative production to explore protocols, boadly construed, from various angles.

Their findings, catalogued here in six modules, comprise a variety of textual and non-textual artifacts (including art works, game designs, and software), organized around a set of research themes: built environments, danger and safety, dense hypermedia, technical standards, web content addressability, authorship, swarms, protocol death, and (artificial) memory.

I have read through through Module One for 2003, and it is solid interesting deep dive stuff.  Module 2 is also available. Modules 3-6 are said to be 'coming soon’  (as of 4/4/24, four months into a year that has Summer of Protocols program 2024 already underway, with the deadline for proposals 4/12/24.)

Here is one clip from the “In Search of Hardness” essay:

…it’s only in the last 50 years or so, with the rise of communications technologies, especially the internet and container shipping, and the emergence of unprecedented planet-scale coordination problems like climate action, that protocols truly came into focus as first-class phenomena in our world; the sine qua non of modernity. The word itself is less than a couple of centuries old.

And it wasn’t until the invention of blockchains in 2009 that they truly came into their own as phenomena with their own unique technological and social characteristics, distinct from other things like machines, institutions, processes, or even algorithms.

Protocols are engineered hardness, and in that, they’re similar to other hard, enduring things, ranging from diamonds and monuments to high-inertia institutions and constitutions.

But modern protocols are more than that. They’re not just engineered hardness, they are programmable, intangible hardness. They are dynamic and evolvable. And we hope they are systematically ossifiable for durability. They are the built environment of digital modernity.”

How communication technology has enabled the corruption of our communication and culture .

I pass on two striking examples from today’s New York Times, with few clips of text from each:

A.I.-Generated Garbage Is Polluting Our Culture:

(You really should read the whole article...I've given up on trying to assemble clips of text that get across the whole message, and pass on these bits towards the end of the article:)

....we find ourselves enacting a tragedy of the commons: short-term economic self-interest encourages using cheap A.I. content to maximize clicks and views, which in turn pollutes our culture and even weakens our grasp on reality. And so far, major A.I. companies are refusing to pursue advanced ways to identify A.I.’s handiwork — which they could do by adding subtle statistical patterns hidden in word use or in the pixels of images.

To deal with this corporate refusal to act we need the equivalent of a Clean Air Act: a Clean Internet Act. Perhaps the simplest solution would be to legislatively force advanced watermarking intrinsic to generated outputs, like patterns not easily removable. Just as the 20th century required extensive interventions to protect the shared environment, the 21st century is going to require extensive interventions to protect a different, but equally critical, common resource, one we haven’t noticed up until now since it was never under threat: our shared human culture.

Is Threads the Good Place?:

Once upon a time on social media, the nicest app of them all, Instagram, home to animal bloopers and filtered selfies, established a land called Threads, a hospitable alternative to the cursed X,..Threads would provide a new refuge. It would be Twitter But Nice, a Good Place where X’s liberal exiles could gather around for a free exchange of ideas and maybe even a bit of that 2012 Twitter magic — the goofy memes, the insider riffing, the meeting of new online friends

...And now, after a mere 10 months, we can see exactly what we built: a full-on bizarro-world X, handcrafted for the left end of the political spectrum, complete with what one user astutely labeled “a cult type vibe.” If progressives and liberals were provoked by Trumpers and Breitbart types on Twitter, on Threads they have the opportunity to be wounded by their own kind...Threads’ algorithm seems precision-tweaked to confront the user with posts devoted to whichever progressive position is slightly lefter-than-thou....There’s some kind of algorithm that’s dusting up the same kind of outrage that Twitter had.Threads feels like it’s splintering the left.

The fragmentation of social media may have been as inevitable as the fragmentation of broadcast media. Perhaps also inevitable, any social media app aiming to succeed financially must capitalize on the worst aspects of social behavior. And it may be that Hobbes, history’s cheery optimist, was right: “The condition of man is a condition of war of every one against every one.” Threads, it turns out, is just another battlefield.

 

Fundamentally changing the nature of war.

I generally try to keep a distance from 'the real world' and apocalyptic visions of what AI might do, but I decided to pass on some clips from this technology essay in The Wall Street Journal that makes some very plausible predictions about the future of armed conflicts between political entities:

The future of warfare won’t be decided by weapons systems but by systems of weapons, and those systems will cost less. Many of them already exist, whether they’re the Shahed drones attacking shipping in the Gulf of Aden or the Switchblade drones destroying Russian tanks in the Donbas or smart seaborne mines around Taiwan. What doesn’t yet exist are the AI-directed systems that will allow a nation to take unmanned warfare to scale. But they’re coming.

At its core, AI is a technology based on pattern recognition. In military theory, the interplay between pattern recognition and decision-making is known as the OODA loop— observe, orient, decide, act. The OODA loop theory, developed in the 1950s by Air Force fighter pilot John Boyd, contends that the side in a conflict that can move through its OODA loop fastest will possess a decisive battlefield advantage.

For example, of the more than 150 drone attacks on U.S. forces since the Oct. 7 attacks, in all but one case the OODA loop used by our forces was sufficient to subvert the attack. Our warships and bases were able to observe the incoming drones, orient against the threat, decide to launch countermeasures and then act. Deployed in AI-directed swarms, however, the same drones could overwhelm any human-directed OODA loop. It’s impossible to launch thousands of autonomous drones piloted by individuals, but the computational capacity of AI makes such swarms a possibility.

This will transform warfare. The race won’t be for the best platforms but for the best AI directing those platforms. It’s a war of OODA loops, swarm versus swarm. The winning side will be the one that’s developed the AI-based decision-making that can outpace their adversary. Warfare is headed toward a brain-on-brain conflict.

The Department of Defense is already researching a “brain-computer interface,” which is a direct communications pathway between the brain and an AI. A recent study by the RAND Corporation examining how such an interface could “support human- machine decision-making” raised the myriad ethical concerns that exist when humans become the weakest link in the wartime decision-making chain. To avoid a nightmare future with battlefields populated by fully autonomous killer robots, the U.S. has insisted that a human decision maker must always remain in the loop before any AI-based system might conduct a lethal strike.

But will our adversaries show similar restraint? Or would they be willing to remove the human to gain an edge on the battlefield? The first battles in this new age of warfare are only now being fought. It’s easy to imagine a future, however, where navies will cease to operate as fleets and will become schools of unmanned surface and submersible vessels, where air forces will stand down their squadrons and stand up their swarms, and where a conquering army will appear less like Alexander’s soldiers and more like a robotic infestation.

Much like the nuclear arms race of the last century, the AI arms race will define this current one. Whoever wins will possess a profound military advantage. Make no mistake, if placed in authoritarian hands, AI dominance will become a tool of conquest, just as Alexander expanded his empire with the new weapons and tactics of his age. The ancient historian Plutarch reminds us how that campaign ended: “When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.”

Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis are the authors of “2054,” a novel that speculates about the role of AI in future conflicts, just published by Penguin Press. Ackerman, a Marine veteran, is the author of numerous books and a senior fellow at Yale’s Jackson School of Global Affairs. Admiral Stavridis, U.S. Navy (ret.), was the 16th Supreme Allied Commander of NATO and is a partner at the Carlyle Group.

 

An inexpensive Helium Mobile 5G cellphone plan that pays you to use it?

This is a followup to the previous post describing my setting up a G5 hotspot on Helium’s decentralized 5G infrastructure that earns MOBILE tokens. The cash value of the MOBILE tokens earned since July 2022 is  ~7X the cost of the equipment needed to generate them.

Now I want to put down further facts I want to document for my future self and MindBlog’s techie readers.

Recently Helium has introduced Helium Mobile, a cell phone plan using using this new 5G infrastructure which costs $20/month - much less expensive than other cellular providers like Verizon and ATT.  It has partnered with T-Mobile to fill in coverage areas its own 5G network hasn’t reached.

Nine days ago I downloaded the Helium Mobile app onto my iPhone 12 and set up an account with an eSIM and a new phone number, alongside my phone number of many years now in a Verizon account using a physical SIM card.  

My iPhone has been earning MOBILE tokens by sharing its location to allow better mapping of the Helium G5 network.  As I am writing this, the app has earned 3,346 Mobile tokens that could be sold and converted to $14.32 at this moment (the price of MOBILE, like other cryptocurrencies, is very volatile).

If this earning rate continues (a big ‘if’), the cellular account I am paying $20/month for will be generating MOBILE tokens each month worth ~$45. The $20 monthly cell phone plan charge can be paid with MOBILE tokens, leaving $15/month passive income from my subscribing to Helium Mobile and allowing anonymous tracking of my phone as I move about.  (Apple sends a message every three days asking if I am sure I want to be allowing continuous tracking by this one App.)

So there you have it.  Any cautionary notes from techie readers about the cybersecurity implications of what I am doing would be welcome.  
 

MindBlog becomes a 5G cellular hotspot in the the low-priced ‘People’s Cell Phone Network’ - Helium Mobile

I am writing this post, as is frequently the case, for myself to be able to look up in the future, as well as for MindBlog techie readers who might stumble across it. It describes my setup of a G5 hotspot in the new Helium G5 Mobile network. A post following this one will describe my becoming a user of this new cell phone network by putting the Helium Mobile App on my iPhone using an eSIM.

This becomes my third post describing my involvement in the part of the crypto movement seeking to 'return power to the people.' It attempts to bypass the large corporations that are the current gate keepers and regulators of commerce and communications, and who are able to assert controls that are more in their own self interests and profits more than the public good. 

The two previous posts (here and here) describe my being seduced into crypto-world  by my son's having made a six hundred-fold return on investment by virtue of being one of the first cohort (during the "genesis" period) to put little black boxes and antennas on their window sills earning HNT (Helium blockchain tokens) using  LoRa 868 MHz antennas transmitting and receiving in the 'Internet of Things." I was a latecomer, and in the 22 months since June of 2022 have earned ~$200 on an investment of ~$500 of equipment. 

Helium next came up with the idea of setting up its own 5G cell phone network, called Helium Mobile. Individual Helium 5G Hotspots (small cell phone antennas) use Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) Radios to provide cellular coverage like that provided by telecom companies' more expensive networks of towers (CBRS is a wide broadcast 3.5Ghz band in the United States that does not require a spectrum license for use.)

In July of 2022, I decided to set up the Helium G5 hot spot equipment shown in the picture below to be in the genesis period for the establishment of this new Helium G5 cellular network.  I made my Abyssinian cat named Martin shown in front of the Bobber 500 miner the system administrator. The G5 antenna seen on the sill in the middle of window views ~170 degree of the southern sky. 

This system cost ~$2,500 and by early March 2024 has earned ~4.3 Million MOBILE tokens worth ~$18,000. As in a Ponzi scheme, most of the rewards are from the Genesis period, March 2024 earnings are ~ $45/week.  If this rate of earnings persists, this represents an annual ROI (return on investment)l of ~ 100%

The writing above is mine, and I decided just for the heck of it to recruit the assistance of several GPT engines (Google Gemini, Open AI ChatGPT-4, Anthropic Claude, and Microsoft Bing)  with the following prompt: 

Could you please act as Deric Bownds writing a post for his Blog, Deric’s MindBlog at http://mindblog.dericbownds.net. Describe my setting up of a Helium G5 hot spot using the Bobber 500 miner with FreedomFi CBRS and an internal antenna during the genesis period for the establishment of the new Helium G5 cellular network. 

The responses of Gemini and Bing were excited, poetic, lyrical, overwrought hyperbole, very much in the spirit of the cyber-world pitches one sees online. ChatGPT-4 (the best response) and Claude did toss up some interesting paragraphs, and below I pass on some of ChatGPT-4's slightly edited and redundant text. I would be more sanguine about all of hype over 'democratic participation (or at least my participation)' if I had not been completely flummoxed by the cacophony of  the Helium Discord Discord Server, YouTube videos, and the complexity of the HIP (Helium Improvement Protocol) votes that ratify new changes and improvements to the system.  

The Helium Network, known for pioneering decentralized wireless infrastructure, has embarked on an ambitious journey to extend its reach into 5G, leveraging the power of blockchain technology to create a community-powered network. The initiative is ambitious, aiming to democratize cellular connectivity, making it more accessible and affordable. This endeavor is not just about technology; it's about reimagining the fabric of our digital society.

This genesis period of the Helium G5 network represented a fascinating intersection of technology, psychology, and community. The network's decentralized nature challenges traditional models of infrastructure ownership and control, proposing a more democratic and participatory framework. It prompts us to reflect on our relationship with technology: Are we mere consumers, or can we also be contributors and custodians of the digital landscapes we inhabit?

As more individuals and communities join this initiative, setting up their hotspots and expanding the network, a unique form of collective intelligence emerges. This network, powered by the people, for the people, embodies a new kind of digital ecosystem—one that values collaboration over competition, and shared success over isolated gains.

The implications for our cognitive landscapes are profound. By democratizing access to 5G connectivity, we are not just enhancing our ability to communicate; we are potentially altering the way we think, learn, and engage with the world around us. The Helium G5 network invites us to imagine a future where connectivity is as natural and essential as the air we breathe, a future where our digital and physical realities are seamlessly intertwined.

The technology we embrace today shapes the world we live in tomorrow. Through initiatives like the Helium G5 network, we have the opportunity to craft a digital environment that reflects our highest aspirations for society—one that is open, inclusive, and fundamentally human.

In this journey of connectivity, we are all contributors, shaping the digital ethos of our era. The genesis of the Helium G5 network is not just a technical milestone; it is a call to action, inviting us to rethink our role in the digital age and to contribute to a network that embodies our collective values and aspirations.

The next post describes my becoming a customer of the new Helium Mobile cellular service plan costing $20/month.

 

Explaining the evolution of gossip

 A fascinating open source article from Pan et al.:

Significance

From Mesopotamian cities to industrialized nations, gossip has been at the center of bonding human groups. Yet the evolution of gossip remains a puzzle. The current article argues that gossip evolves because its dissemination of individuals’ reputations induces individuals to cooperate with those who gossip. As a result, gossipers proliferate as well as sustain the reputation system and cooperation.

Abstract

Gossip, the exchange of personal information about absent third parties, is ubiquitous in human societies. However, the evolution of gossip remains a puzzle. The current article proposes an evolutionary cycle of gossip and uses an agent-based evolutionary game-theoretic model to assess it. We argue that the evolution of gossip is the joint consequence of its reputation dissemination and selfishness deterrence functions. Specifically, the dissemination of information about individuals’ reputations leads more individuals to condition their behavior on others’ reputations. This induces individuals to behave more cooperatively toward gossipers in order to improve their reputations. As a result, gossiping has an evolutionary advantage that leads to its proliferation. The evolution of gossip further facilitates these two functions of gossip and sustains the evolutionary cycle.

The Hidden History of Debt

I pass on this link from the latest Human Bridges newsletter, and would encourage readers to subscribe to and support the Observatory's Human Bridges project, which is part of the Independent Media Institute:

Recent scientific findings and research in the study of human origins and our biology, paleoanthropology, and primate research have reached a key threshold: we are increasingly able to trace the outlines and fill in the blanks of our evolutionary story that began 7 million years ago to the present, and understand the social and cultural processes that produced the world we live in now.

What Is a Society?: The Importance of Building an Interdisciplinary Perspective

I'm passing on the abstract I just received of a forthcoming article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences that I am starting to have a look through. Motivated readers can obtain a PDF of the article by emailing me.

Abstract: I submit the need to establish a comparative study of societies, namely groups beyond a simple, immediate family that have the potential to endure for generations, whose constituent individuals recognize one another as members, and that maintain control over access to a physical space. This definition, with refinements and ramifications I explore, serves for cross-disciplinary research since it applies not just to nations but to diverse hunter-gatherer and tribal groups with a pedigree that likely traces back to the societies of our common ancestor with the chimpanzees. It also applies to groups among other species for which comparison to humans can be instructive. Notably, it describes societies in terms of shared group identification rather than social interactions. An expansive treatment of the topic is overdue given that the concept of a society (even the use of such synonyms as primate "troop") has fallen out of favor among biologists, resulting in a semantic mess; while sociologists rarely consider societies beyond nations, and social psychologists predominantly focus on ethnicities and other component groups of societies. I examine the relevance of societies across realms of inquiry, discussing the ways member recognition is achieved; how societies compare to other organizational tiers; and their permeability, territoriality, relation to social networks and kinship, and impermanence. We have diverged from our ancestors in generating numerous affiliations within and between societies while straining the expectation of society memberships by assimilating diverse populations. Nevertheless, if, as I propose, societies were the first, and thereafter the primary, groups of prehistory, how we came to register society boundaries may be foundational to all human "groupiness." A discipline-spanning approach to societies should further our understanding of what keeps societies together and what tear them apart.

The "enjunkification" of our online lives

I want to pass on two articles I've poured over several times, that describe the increasing "complexification" or "enjunkification" of our online lives. The first is "The Year Millennials Aged Out of the Internet" by Millenial writer Max Reed. Here are some clips from the article. 

Something is changing about the internet, and I am not the only person to have noticed. Everywhere I turned online this year, someone was mourning: Amazon is “making itself worse” (as New York magazine moaned); Google Search is a “bloated and overmonetized” tragedy (as The Atlantic lamented); “social media is doomed to die,” (as the tech news website The Verge proclaimed); even TikTok is becoming enjunkified (to bowdlerize an inventive coinage of the sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow, republished in Wired). But the main complaint I have heard was put best, and most bluntly, in The New Yorker: “The Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore.”

The heaviest users and most engaged American audience on the internet are no longer millennials but our successors in Generation Z. If the internet is no longer fun for millennials, it may simply be because it’s not our internet anymore. It belongs to zoomers now...zoomers, and the adolescents in Generation Alpha nipping at their generational heels, still seem to be having plenty of fun online. Even if I find it all inscrutable and a bit irritating, the creative expression and exuberant sociality that made the internet so fun to me a decade ago are booming among 20-somethings on TikTok, Instagram, Discord, Twitch and even X.

...even if you’re jealous of zoomers and their Discord chats and TikTok memes, consider that the combined inevitability of enjunkification and cognitive decline means that their internet will die, too, and Generation Alpha will have its own era of inscrutable memes and alienating influencers. And then the zoomers can join millennials in feeling what boomers have felt for decades: annoyed and uncomfortable at the computer.

The second article I mention is Jon Caramanica's:  "Have We Reached the End of TikTok’s Infinite Scroll?" Again, a few clips:

The app once offered seemingly endless chances to be charmed by music, dances, personalities and products. But in only a few short years, its promise of kismet is evaporating...increasingly in recent months, scrolling the feed has come to resemble fumbling in the junk drawer: navigating a collection of abandoned desires, who-put-that-here fluff and things that take up awkward space in a way that blocks access to what you’re actually looking for.

This has happened before, of course — the moment when Twitter turned from good-faith salon to sinister outrage derby, or when Instagram, and its army of influencers, learned to homogenize joy and beauty...the malaise that has begun to suffuse TikTok feels systemic, market-driven and also potentially existential, suggesting the end of a flourishing era and the precipice of a wasteland period.

It’s an unfortunate result of the confluence of a few crucial factors. Most glaring is the arrival of TikTok’s shopping platform, which has turned even small creators into spokespeople and the for-you page of recommendations into an unruly bazaar...The effect of seeing all of these quasi-ads — QVC in your pocket — is soul-deadening...The speed and volume of the shift has been startling. Over time, Instagram became glutted with sponsored content and buy links, but its shopping interface never derailed the overall experience of the app. TikTok Shop has done that in just a few months, spoiling a tremendous amount of good will in the process.

 

 

AI makes our humanity matter more than ever.

I want to pass on this link to an NYTimes Opinion Guest essay by Aneesh Raman, a work force expert at LinkedIn,  and Maria Flynn, president of Jobs for the Future,  For readers blocked by the NYTimes paywall, I paste in the conclusion of the article:

Minouche Shafik, who is now the president of Columbia University, said: “In the past, jobs were about muscles. Now they’re about brains, but in the future, they’ll be about the heart.”

The knowledge economy that we have lived in for decades emerged out of a goods economy that we lived in for millenniums, fueled by agriculture and manufacturing. Today the knowledge economy is giving way to a relationship economy, in which people skills and social abilities are going to become even more core to success than ever before. That possibility is not just cause for new thinking when it comes to work force training. It is also cause for greater imagination when it comes to what is possible for us as humans not simply as individuals and organizations but as a species.

 

 

 

An agent-based vision for scaling modern AI - Why current efforts are misguided.

I pass on my edited clips from Venkatesh Rao’s most recent newsletter - substantially shortening its length and inserting a few definitions of techo-nerd-speak acronyms he uses in brackets [  ].  He suggests interesting analogies between the future evolution of Ai and the evolutionary course taken by biological organisms:

…specific understandings of embodiment, boundary intelligence, temporality, and personhood, and their engineering implications, taken together, point to an agent-based vision of how to scale AI that I’ve started calling Massed Muddler Intelligence or MMI, that doesn’t look much like anything I’ve heard discussed.


…right now there’s only one option: monolithic scaling. Larger and larger models trained on larger and larger piles of compute and data…monolithic scaling is doomed. It is headed towards technical failure at a certain scale we are fast approaching


What sort of AI, in an engineering sense, should we attempt to build, in the same sense as one might ask, how should we attempt to build 2,500 foot skyscrapers? With brick and mortar or reinforced concrete? The answer is clearly reinforced concrete. Brick and mortar construction simply does not scale to those heights


…If we build AI datacenters that are 10x or 100x the scale of todays and train GPT-style models on them …problems of data movement and memory management at scale that are already cripplingly hard will become insurmountable…current monolithic approaches to scaling AI are the equivalent of brick-and-mortar construction and fundamentally doomed…We need the equivalent of a reinforced concrete beam for AI…A distributed agent-based vision of modern AI is the scaling solution we need.

Scaling Precedents from Biology

There’s a precedent here in biology. Biological intelligence scales better with more agent-like organisms. For example: humans build organizations that are smarter than any individual, if you measure by complexity of outcomes, and also smarter than the scaling achieved by less agentic eusocial organisms…ants, bees, and sheep cannot build complex planet-scale civilizations. It takes much more sophisticated agent-like units to do that.

Agents are AIs that can make up independent intentions and pursue them in the real world, in real time, in a society of similarly capable agents (ie in a condition of mutualism), without being prompted. They don’t sit around outside of time, reacting to “prompts” with oracular authority…as in sociobiology, sustainably scalable AI agents will necessarily have the ability to govern and influence other agents (human or AI) in turn, through the same symmetric mechanisms that are used to govern and influence them…If you want to scale AI sustainably, governance and influence cannot be one way street from some privileged agents (humans) to other less privileged agents (AIs)….

If you want complexity and scaling, you cannot govern and influence a sophisticated agent without opening yourself up to being governed and influenced back. The reasoning here is similar to why liberal democracies generally scale human intelligence far better than autocracies. The MMI vision I’m going to outline could be considered “liberal democracy for mixed human-AI agent systems.” Rather than the autocratic idea of “alignment” associated with “AGI,” MMIs will call for something like the emergent mutualist harmony that characterizes functional liberal democracies. You don’t need an “alignment” theory. You need social contract theory.

The Road to Muddledom

Agents, and the distributed multiagent systems (MAS) that represent the corresponding scaling model, obviously aren’t a new idea in AI…MAS were often built as light architectural extensions of early object-oriented non-AI systems… none of this machinery works or is even particularly relevant for the problem of scaling modern AI, where the core source of computational intelligence is a large-X-model with fundamentally inscrutable input-output behavior. This is a new, oozy kind of intelligence we are building with for the first time. ..We’re in new regimes, dealing with fundamentally new building materials and aiming for new scales (orders of magnitude larger than anything imagined in the 1990s).

Muddling Doctrines

How do you build muddler agents? I don’t have a blueprint obviously, but here are four loose architectural doctrines, based on the four heterodoxies I noted at the start of this essay (see links there): embodiment, boundary intelligence, temporality, and personhood.

Embodiment matters: The physical form factor AI takes is highly relevant to to its nature, behavior, and scaling potential.

Boundary intelligence matters. Past a threshold, intelligence is a function of the management of boundaries across which data flows, not the sophistication of the interiors where it is processed.

Temporality matters: The kind of time experienced by an AI matters for how it can scale sustainably.

Personhood matters: The attributes of an AI that enable humans and AIs to relate to each other as persons (I-you), rather than things (I-it), are necessary elements to being able to construct coherent scalably composable agents at all.


The first three principles require that AI computation involve real atoms, live in real time, and deal with the second law of thermodynamics

The fourth heterodoxy turns personhood …into a load-bearing architectural element in getting to scaled AI via muddler agents. You cannot have scaled AI without agency, and you cannot have a scalable sort of agency without personhood.

As we go up the scale of biological complexity, we get much programmable and flexible forms of communication and coordination. … we can start to distinguish individuals by their stable “personalities” (informationally, the identifiable signature of personhood). We go from army ants marching in death spirals to murmurations of starlings to formations of geese to wolf packs maneuvering tactically in pincer movements… to humans whose most sophisticated coordination patterns are so complex merely deciphering them stresses our intelligence to the limit.

Biology doesn’t scale to larger animals by making very large unicellular creatures. Instead it shifts to a multi-cellular strategy. Then it goes further: from simple reproduction of “mass produced” cells to specialized cells forming differentiated structures (tissues) via ontogeny (and later, in some mammals, through neoteny). Agents that scale well have to be complex and variegated agents internally, to achieve highly expressive and varied behaviors externally. But they must also present simplified facades — personas — to each other to enable the scaling and coordination.

Setting aside questions of philosophy (identity, consciousness),  personhood is a scaling strategy. Personhood is the behavioral equivalent of a cell. “Persons” are stable behavioral units that can compose in “multicellular” ways because they communicate differently than simpler agents with weak or non-existent personal boundaries, and low-agency organisms like plants and insects.

When we form and perform “personas,” we offer a harder interface around our squishy interior psyches that composes well with the interfaces of other persons for scaling purposes. A personhood performance is something like a composability API [application programmers interface] for intelligence scaling.

Beyond Training Determinism

…Right now AIs experience most of their “time” during training, and then effectively enter a kind of stasis. …They requiring versioned “updates” to get caught up again…GPT4 can’t simply grow or evolve its way to GPT5 by living life and learning from it. It needs to go through the human-assisted birth/death (or regeneration perhaps) singularity of a whole new training effort. And it’s not obvious how to automate this bottleneck in either a Darwinian or Lamarckian way.

…For all their power, modern AIs are still not able to live in real time and keep up with reality without human assistance outside of extremely controlled and stable environments…As far as temporality is concerned, we are in a “training determinism” regime that is very un-agentic and corresponds to genetic determinism in biology.What makes agents agents is that they live in real time, in a feedback loop with external reality unfolding at its actual pace of evolution.

Muddling Through vs. Godding Through

Lindblom’s paper identifies two patterns of agentic behavior, “root” (or rational-comprehensive) and “branch” (or successive limited comparisons), and argues that in complicated messy circumstances requiring coordinated action at scale, the way actually effective humans operate is the branch method, which looks like “muddling through” but gradually gets there, where the root method fails entirely. Complex here is things humans typically do in larger groups, like designing and implementing complex governance policies or undertaking complex engineering projects. The threshold for “complex” is roughly where explicit coordination protocols become necessary scaffolding. This often coincides with the threshold where reality gets too big to hold in one human head.

The root method attempts to fight limitations with brute, monolithic force. It aims to absorb all the relevant information regarding the circumstances a priori (analogous to training determinism), and discover the globally optimal solution through “rational” and “comprehensive” thinking. If the branch method is “muddling through,” we might say that the root, or rational-comprehensive approach, is an attempt to “god through.”…Lindblom’s thesis is basically that muddling through eats godding through for lunch.

To put it much more bluntly: Godding through doesn’t work at all beyond small scales and it’s not because the brains are too small. Reasoning backwards from complex goals in the context of an existing complex system evolving in real time doesn’t work. You have to discover forwards (not reason forwards) by muddling.

..in thinking about humans, it is obvious that Lindblom was right…Even where godding through apparently prevails through brute force up to some scale, the costs are very high, and often those who pay the costs don’t survive to complain…Fear of Big Blundering Gods is the essential worry of traditional AI safety theology, but as I’ve been arguing since 2012 (see Hacking the Non-Disposable Planet), this is not an issue because these BBGs will collapse under their own weight long before they get big enough for such collapses to be exceptionally, existentially dangerous.

This worry is similar to the worry that a 2,500 foot brick-and-mortar building might collapse and kill everybody in the city…It’s not a problem because you can’t build a brick-and-mortar building to that height. You need reinforced concrete. And that gets you into entirely different sorts of safety concerns.

Protocols for Massed Muddling

How do you go from individual agents (AI or human) muddling through to masses of them muddling through together? What are the protocols of massed muddling? These are also the protocols of AI scaling towards MMIs (Massed Muddler Intelligences)

When you put a lot of them together using a mix of hard coordination protocols (including virtual-economic ones) and softer cultural protocols, you get a massed muddler intelligence, or MMI. Market economies and liberal democracies are loose, low-bandwidth examples of MMIs that use humans and mostly non-AI computers to scale muddler intelligence. The challenge now is to build far denser, higher bandwidth ones using modern AI agents.

I suspect at the scales we are talking about, we will have something that looks more like a market economy than like the internal command-economy structure of the human body. Both feature a lot of hierarchical structure and differentiation, but the former is much less planned, and more a result of emergent patterns of agglomeration around environmental circumstances (think how the large metros that anchor the global economy form around the natural geography of the planet, rather than how major organ systems of the human body are put together).

While I suspect MMIs will partly emerge via choreographed ontogenic roadmaps from a clump of “stem cells” (is that perhaps what LxMs [large language models] are??), the way market economies emerge from nationalist industrial policies, overall the emergent intelligences will be masses of muddling rather than coherent artificial leviathans. Scaling “plans” will help launch, but not determine the nature of MMIs or their internal operating protocols at scale. Just like tax breaks and tariffs might help launch a market economy but not determine the sophistication of the economy that emerges or the transactional patterns that coordinate it. This also answers the regulation question: Regulating modern AI MMIs will look like economic regulation, not technology regulation.

How the agentic nature of the individual muddler agent building block is preserved and protected is the critical piece of the puzzle, just as individual economic rights (such as property rights, contracting regimes) are the critical piece in the design of “free” markets.

Muddling produces a shell of behavioral uncertainty around what a muddler agent will do, and how it will react to new information, that creates an outward pressure on the compressive forces created by the dense aggregation required for scaling. This is something like the electron degeneracy pressure that resists the collapse of stars under their own gravity. Or how the individualist streak in even the most dedicated communist human resists the collapse of even the most powerful cults into pure hive minds. Or how exit/voice dynamics resist the compression forces of unaccountable organizational management.

…the fundamental intentional tendency of individual agents, on which all other tendencies, autonomous or not, socially influencable or not, rest…[is]  body envelope integrity.

…This is a familiar concern for biological organisms. Defending against your body being violently penetrated is probably the foundation of our entire personality. It’s the foundation of our personal safety priorities — don’t get stabbed, shot, bitten, clawed or raped. All politics and economics is an extension of envelope integrity preservation instincts. For example, strictures against theft (especially identity theft) are about protecting the body envelope integrity of your economic body. Habeas corpus is the bedrock of modern political systems for a reason. Your physical body is your political body…if you don’t have body envelope integrity you have nothing.

This is easiest to appreciate in one very visceral and vivid form of MMIs: distributed robot systems. Robots, like biological organisms, have an actual physical body envelope (though unlike biological organisms they can have high-bandwidth near-field telepathy). They must preserve the integrity of that envelope as a first order of business … But robot MMIs are not the only possible form factor. We can think of purely software agents that live in an AI datacenter, and maintain boundaries and personhood envelopes that are primarily informational rather than physical. The same fundamental drive applies. The integrity of the (virtual) body envelope is the first concern.

This is why embodiment is an axiomatic concern. The nature of the integrity problem depends on the nature of the embodiment. A robot can run away from danger. A software muddler agent in a shared memory space within a large datacenter must rely on memory protection, encryption, and other non-spatial affordances of computing environments.

Personhood is the emergent result of successfully solving the body-envelope-integrity problem over time, allowing an agent to present a coherent and hard mask model to other agents even in unpredictable environments. This is not about putting a smiley-faced RLHF [Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback]. mask on a shoggoth interior to superficially “align” it. This is about offering a predictable API for other agents to reliably interface with, so scaled structures in time and social space don’t collapse.  [They have] hardness - the property or quality that allows agents with soft and squishy interiors to offer hard and unyielding interfaces to other agents, allowing for coordination at scale.

…We can go back to the analogy to reinforced concrete. MMIs are fundamentally built out of composite materials that combine the constituent simple materials in very deliberate ways to achieve particular properties. Reinforced concrete achieves this by combining rebar and cement in particular geometries. The result is a flexible language of differentiated forms (not just cuboidal beams) with a defined grammar.

MMIs will achieve this by combining embodiment, boundary management, temporality, and personhood elements in very deliberate ways, to create a similar language of differentiated forms that interact with a defined grammar.

And then we can have a whole new culture war about whether that’s a good thing.

How long has humanity been at war with itself?

I would like to point MindBlog readers to an article by Deborah Barsky with the title of this post. The following clip provides relevant links to the Human Bridges project of the Independent Media Institute. 

Deborah Barsky is a writing fellow for the Human Bridges project of the Independent Media Institute, a researcher at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution, and an associate professor at the Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona, Spain, with the Open University of Catalonia (UOC). She is the author of Human Prehistory: Exploring the Past to Understand the Future (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Historical Myths as Culturally Evolved Technologies for Coalitional Recruitment

I pass on to MindBlog readers the abstract of a recent Behavioral and Brain Science article by Sijilmassi et al. titled "‘Our Roots Run Deep’: Historical Myths as Culturally Evolved Technologies for Coalitional Recruitment."  Motivated readers can obtain a PDF of the article from me. 

One of the most remarkable manifestations of social cohesion in large-scale entities is the belief in a shared, distinct and ancestral past. Human communities around the world take pride in their ancestral roots, commemorate their long history of shared experiences, and celebrate the distinctiveness of their historical trajectory. Why do humans put so much effort into celebrating a long-gone past? Integrating insights from evolutionary psychology, social psychology, evolutionary anthropology, political science, cultural history and political economy, we show that the cultural success of historical myths is driven by a specific adaptive challenge for humans: the need to recruit coalitional support to engage in large scale collective action and prevail in conflicts. By showcasing a long history of cooperation and shared experiences, these myths serve as super-stimuli, activating specific features of social cognition and drawing attention to cues of fitness interdependence. In this account, historical myths can spread within a population without requiring group-level selection, as long as individuals have a vested interest in their propagation and strong psychological motivations to create them. Finally, this framework explains, not only the design-features of historical myths, but also important patterns in their cross-cultural prevalence, inter-individual distribution, and particular content.

Towards a Metaphysics of Worlds

I have a splitting headache from having just watched a 27 minute long YouTube rapid fire lecture by Venkatesh Rao, given last November at the Autonomous Worlds Assembly in Istanbul (part of DevConnect, a major Ethereum ecosystem event).  His latest newsletter “Towards a Metaphysics of Worlds” gives adds some notes and context, and gives a link  to its slides. As Rao notes:

“This may seem like a glimpse into a very obscure and nerdy subculture for many (most?) of you, but I think something very important and interesting is brewing in this scene and more people should know about it.”

I would suggest that you to skip the YouTube lecture and cherry pick your way through his slides.  Some are very simple and quite striking, clearly presenting interesting ideas about the epistomology, ontology, and definitions of worlds.  Here is Slide 11, where what Rao means by "Worlds" is made more clear:

Mind blog’s first 18 years - what next? A space for discussions among MindBlog readers?

This is post number 5,537 of Deric's MindBlog, which will soon be celebrating its 18th birthday.  I started this blog on Feb. 6, 2006, in the middle of the golden age of Blogging, with a post titled “Dangerous Ideas.”  In the late 2000s the rise of social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram shifted audiences towards shorter more engaging posts, and after 2010 multimedia platforms like YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok became popular. Max Read laments the increasing effort required to deal with the info sphere as millennials have ‘aged out’ and members of generation Z have become more eager early adopters of  ChatGPT than their elders.  The current digital landscape emphasizes content monetization, influencer marketing, and multi-platform presence, but here still  remains a vital role for niche blogs such as this one, where readers can find specialized content beyond the mainstream social media noise. 

I recently received an email from a MindBlog reader in Germany who lamented that MindBlog received very few comments from readers. I have  received numerous emails over the years from silent but loyal readers who express gratitude for effort I put into the blog, but there have been only a few extended discussion threads, such as those of anti-aging compounds and life optimization snake oil .

My German reader made the interesting suggestion that I consider initiating a platform for direct interactions and deeper engagement among MindBlog readers, perhaps a live video and text platform that might include both experts and educated laypeople outside the scientific community. This would be relatively easy for me to set up if sufficient interest is shown, so I invite readers interested in this prospect to email me at mdbownds@wisc.edu

Titles and URLs for key MindBlog posts on selves

I pass on a chronological list of titles and URLs of MindBlog posts assembled in preparation for a video chat with a European MindBlog reader:

An "Apostle's Creed" for the humanistic scientific materialist?
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2006/03/apostles-creed-for-humanistic.html

Some rambling on "Selves" and “Purpose”
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2007/10/some-rambling-on-selves-and-purpose.html

Self, purpose, and tribal mentality as Darwinian adaptations (or…Why why aren’t we all enlightened?)
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2020/05/self-purpose-and-tribal-mentality-as.html

MindBlog passes on a note: on the relief of not being yourself
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2020/03/mindblog-passes-on-note-on-relief-of.html

Points on having a self and free will.
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2021/03/points-on-having-self-and-free-will.html

I am not my problem
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2022/06/i-am-not-my-problem.html

The non-duality industry as a panacea for the anxieties of our times?         https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2022/11/the-non-duality-industry-as-panacea-for.html

Enlightenment, Habituation, and Renewal - Or, Mindfulness as the opiate of the thinking classes?
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2023/01/enlightenment-habituation-and-renewal.html

A quick MindBlog riff on what a self is….
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2023/01/a-quick-mindblog-riff-on-what-self-is.html

MindBlog paragraphs bloviating on the nature of the self ask Google Bard and Chat GPT 4 for help
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2023/05/mindblog-paragraphs-bloviating-on.html

A MindBlog paragraph on non-dual awareness massaged by Bard and ChatGPT-4
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2023/07/a-mindblog-paragraph-on-non-dual.html

Constructing Self and World
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2023/09/constructing-self-and-world.html  

Anthropic Claude's version of my writing on the Mind - a condensation of my ideas
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2023/10/anthropic-claudes-version-of-my-writing.html  

A Materialist's Credo
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2023/10/a-materialists-credo.html

How our genes support our illusory selves - the "Baldwin effect"
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2023/11/how-our-genes-support-our-illusory.html











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Why can't robots check the box that says 'I'm not a robot'?

Wow, Google knows EVERYTHING I am doing on my computer..... 

On shifting perspectives....

I pass on clips from a piece in the 12/202/23 Wall Street Journal by Carlo Rovelli, the author, most recently, of ‘ White Holes: Inside the Horizon’

Somnium

By Johannes Kepler (1634)

1 Perhaps the greatest conceptual earthquake in the history of civilization was the Copernican Revolution. Prior to Copernicus, there were two realms: the celestial and the terrestrial. Celestial things orbit, terrestrial ones fall. The former are eternal, the latter perishable. Copernicus proposed a different organization of reality, in which the sun is in a class of its own. In another class are the planets, with the Earth being merely one among many. The moon is in yet another class, all by itself. Everything revolves around the sun, but the moon revolves around the Earth. This mad subversion of conventional reason was taken seriously only after Galileo and Kepler convinced humankind that Copernicus was indeed right. “Somnium” (“The Dream”) is the story of an Icelandic boy—Kepler’s alter ego—his witch mother and a daemon. The daemon takes the mother and son up to the moon to survey the universe, showing explicitly that what they usually see from Earth is the perspective from a moving body. Sheer genius.

History

By Elsa Morante (1974)

2 This passionate and intelligent novel is a fresco of Italy during World War II. “La Storia,” its title in Italian, can be translated as “story” or “tale” as well as “history.” Elsa Morante plumbs the complexity of humankind and its troubles, examining the sufferings caused by war. She writes from the view of the everyday people who bear the burden of the horror. This allows her to avoid taking sides and to see the humanity in both. The subtitle of this masterpiece—“a scandal that has lasted for ten thousand years”— captures Morante’s judgment of war, inviting us to a perspective shift on all wars.

Collected Poems of Lenore Kandel

By Lenore Kandel (2012)

3 Lenore Kandel was a wonderful and underrated poet who was part of the Beat-hippie movement in California. The tone of her poems varies widely, from bliss to desperation: “who finked on the angels / who stole the holy grail and hocked it for a jug of wine?” She created a scandal in the late 1960s by writing about sex in a strong, vivid way. Her profoundly anticonformist voice offers a radical shift of perspective by singing the beauty and the sacredness of female desire.

Why Empires Fall

By Peter Heather and John Rapley (2023)

4 As an Italian, I have long been intrigued by the fall of the Roman Empire. Peter Heather and John Rapley summarize the recent historiographic reassessments of the reasons for the fall. Their work also helps in understanding the present. Empires don’t necessarily collapse because they weaken. They fall because their success brings prosperity to a wider part of the world. They fall if they cannot adjust to the consequent rebalancing of power and if they try to stop history with the sheer power of weapons. “The easiest response to sell to home audiences still schooled in colonial history is confrontation,” the authors write. “This has major, potentially ruinous costs, compared to the more realistic but less immediately popular approach of accepting the inevitability of the periphery’s rise and trying to engage with it.”

The Mūlamadhyamakakārikā

By Nāgārjuna (ca. A.D. 150)

5 This major work of the ancient Indian Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna lives on in modern commentaries and translations. Among the best in English is Jay L. Garfield’s “The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way” (1995). Nāgārjuna’s text was repeatedly recommended to me in relation to my work on the interpretation of quantum theory. I resisted, suspicious of facile and often silly juxtapositions between modern science and Eastern philosophy. Then I read it, and it blew my mind. It does indeed offer a possible philosophical underpinning to relational quantum mechanics, which I consider the best way to understand quantum phenomena. But it offers more: a dizzying and captivating philosophical perspective that renounces any foundation. According to this view, the only way to understand something is through its relation with something else—nothing by itself has an independent reality. In the language of Nāgārjuna, every thing, taken by itself, is “empty,” including emptiness itself. I find this a fascinating intellectual perspective as well as a source of serenity, with its acceptance of our limits and impermanence.

 

 

Origins of our current crises in the 1990s, the great malformation, and the illusion of race.

I'm passing on three clips I found most striking from David Brooks, recent NYTimes Sydney awards column:

I generally don’t agree with the arguments of those on the populist right, but I have to admit there’s a lot of intellectual energy there these days. (The Sidneys go to essays that challenge readers, as well as to those that affirm.) With that, the first Sidney goes to Christopher Caldwell for his essay “The Fateful Nineties” in First Things. Most people see the 1990s as a golden moment for America — we’d won the Cold War, we enjoyed solid economic growth, the federal government sometimes ran surpluses, crime rates fell, tech took off.

Caldwell, on the other hand, describes the decade as one in which sensible people fell for a series of self-destructive illusions: Globalization means nation-states don’t matter. Cyberspace means the material world is less important. Capitalism can run on its own without a countervailing system of moral values. Elite technocrats can manage the world better than regular people. The world will be a better place if we cancel people for their linguistic infractions.

As Caldwell sums it up: “America’s discovery of world dominance might turn out in the 21st century to be what Spain’s discovery of gold had been in the 16th — a source of destabilization and decline disguised as a windfall.”

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In “The Great Malformation,” Talbot Brewer observes that parenthood comes with “an ironclad obligation to raise one’s children as best one can.” But these days parents have surrendered child rearing to the corporations that dominate the attention industry, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and so on: “The work of cultural transmission is increasingly being conducted in such a way as to maximize the earnings of those who oversee it.”

He continues: “We would be astonished to discover a human community that did not attempt to pass along to its children a form of life that had won the affirmation of its elders. We would be utterly flabbergasted to discover a community that went to great lengths to pass along a form of life that its elders regarded as seriously deficient or mistaken. Yet we have slipped unawares into precisely this bizarre arrangement.” In most societies, the economy takes place in a historically rooted cultural setting. But in our world, he argues, the corporations own and determine the culture, shaping our preferences and forming, or not forming, our conception of the good.

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It’s rare that an essay jolts my convictions on some major topic. But that happened with one by Subrena E. Smith and David Livingstone Smith, called “The Trouble With Race and Its Many Shades of Deceit,” in New Lines Magazine. The Smiths are, as they put it, a so-called mixed-race couple — she has brown skin, his is beige. They support the aims of diversity, equity and inclusion programs but argue that there is a fatal contradiction in many antiracism programs: “Although the purpose of anti-racist training is to vanquish racism, most of these initiatives are simultaneously committed to upholding and celebrating race.” They continue: “In the real world, can we have race without racism coming along for the ride? Trying to extinguish racism while shoring up race is like trying to put out a fire by pouring gasoline on it.”

I’ve heard this argument — that we should seek to get rid of the whole concept of race — before and dismissed it. I did so because too many people I know have formed their identity around racial solidarity — it’s a source of meaning and strength in their lives. The Smiths argue that this is a mistake because race is a myth: “The scientific study of human variation shows that race is not meaningfully understood as a biological grouping, and there are no such things as racial essences. There is now near consensus among scholars that race is an ideological construction rather than a biological fact. Race was fashioned for nothing that was good. History has shown us how groups of people ‘racialize’ other groups of people to justify their exploitation, oppression and annihilation.”