On Wed, Dec 26, 2001 at 03:16:49PM -0800, Michael M. Butler wrote:
>
> They both seem to be very much at work today, and in too recent history to be ignored. So, on to the key questions of my
> post:
>
> (po1) If no ordinary person can be trusted
> with a few ounces of
> low explosive wrapped in metal,
> how are you ever going to trust a person
> with the thousand or so micronukes he needs
> to leave the Solar system?
> (substitute any other "dangerous" tech of your choosing)
>
> (po2) What magic turns an ordinary person into a trustworthy one?
>
> This ought to be an ExI FAQ. But it's going to need a pancritical, not
> a final, answer.
I don't think it is a FAQ - rather it is a FDA: a Frequently Desired
Answer. (Ouch, that is a horrible abbreviation :-) As you say, what we
need is to create a discourse that builds an answer.
As for po2, I think I can at least throw out a first iteration: trust is
about long-term relations. As Axelrod suggested, you can build trust in
IPD-like situations since participants know they will be around each
other for a long time, and hence it is in their interests to cooperate.
I think it was Novak who later on did some game theory on how reputation
also helps: if your actions become known to others, then it pays to show
yourself trustworthy since other members in your community will take
your past actions into account even when they were aimed at somebody
else. So trust can be promoted by making past interactions clearer and
well known, and by the awareness of that there is a long future ahead.
We tend to trust a notarius publicus, lawyer or demolitions expert we
don't know because we know that there has been a certain selection
process underlying their achievement of that office, and that they would
be seriously penalized if they betrayed their trust. We trust them even
more when we know them (i.e. many interactions, and possibly a greater
investment in each other). The more ties and interactions we have with
each other, the easier we can build trust. Webs of trust and all that -
it doesn't matter that individual links are fallible if there are enough
of them to withstand the tensions caused by selfishness, parasites,
fundamentally incompatible goals and large risks/rewards.
The problem we face here is that we now have a far larger and diverse
society with larger tensions - suddenly everything is global, your
neighbour is a gay zoroastrian sociologist and the smallpox genome can
be found on the Internet. Solutions trying to fix things by making the
world a smaller place (isolationism) are practiclly unworkable (the
benefits are enormous), as are attempts to put genies back in bottles
(relinquishment). Attempts to make people less diverse are not just
ethically questionable and impractical, they also tend to breed
resistance that produces just the kind of nasty backlashes we have come
to fear. Hence any solution has to deal with strengthening those webs of
trust.
I think the NYT article makes a mistake by suggesting the choice is
between a less open society (artificial trust established by having a
special trusted part - the government - being given all the power), a
more controlled world (which seems to imply the same thing, but now on a
global scale) or higher risk. The naked airlines idea really shows a way
out: a bit of lateral thinking mixing a technical solution with a social
one.
If the west has exported hightech but not the social fabrics necessarily
to use it reasonably safely, we better find ways of packaging social
fabric with the hightech (maybe as packing material?).
As the cryptologists and cypherpunks have demonstrated trust is a hard
technological problem - but mainly if you try to solve it *only* through
some cryptographical protocol. What if we try to use tech to strengthen
those aspects of the social web of trust that can be technically
strengthened? Typical examples would be to improve memory and
reputation. Using the net it should be possible to make reputation
systems better and more accessible - we already have economic
reputations in the form of credit histories. The future-oriented side of
trust is less technical and more social: we need to ensure that others
have a stake in our future and vice versa. The interconnectedness of the
global economy is a good start. Borders where no merchants pass usually
have armies pass by soon. As somebody suggested here a few months ago,
give foreign aid in stocks to make other nations even more interested in
our wellfare. I am sure there are lots of great lateral thinking
technocultural solutions, everything from the smart contracts explained
by Mark Miller at E5 to better ways of embarrassing fundamentalists.
As I see it, the answer isn't the top-down *control* many people seem to
see as The Only Way (tm), but through adaptive and pervasive
*influence*. The more different groups influence each other, the less
incentive to strike against the other and the more incentive to work
together. It is the isolated groups that have nothing to lose that are
dangerous.
I don't claim this solves problems with truly devastating
one-mistake-blows-up-the-world technologies (my Eliezer simulation
subprocess has been going on throughout writing this essay about this;
but I leave that for another thread), but it certainly seems to be a
good start to deal with the here-and-now problems of both terrorism,
poverty, distrust etc. I also think we transhumanists with our somewhat
different perspective on human potential compared to the mainstream are
ideally suited for some truly lateral ideas of techno-cultural
innovations - which would be not just good for others, but for us as a
movement and as individuals capitalizing on these (hopefully) good
ideas.
> Me? I'm probably too "Neg" at the moment to be on this list; I'm no Anders Sandberg; yet I still spend less time
> explaining myself on this list than I'd have to in a corner bar. ("Hier steh' ich--ich bin nicht Anders", to completely
> murder the Martin Luther quote and inject a few cc of humor)
ROFL! Thanks, that joke really made my day. Maybe you should be Spike's
humor deputy? :-)
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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