World of Knights

From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Sat Mar 15 2003 - 00:00:16 MST

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    I read something the other day that got me thinking about what the world
    would be like if everyone were honest. By honest I mean mostly that when
    they give their word, they feel bound to keep it. It would also mean that
    people would tell the truth and not lie. To some extent the situation
    in Wright's The Golden Age had some properties like this: although people
    could lie, they had the ability to tell the truth in a verifiable way, by
    letting the machines read their mind. And as it was a pure libertarian
    world, everyone seemed to feel very much bound by contracts that they
    had agreed to. I think maybe the machines enforced that.

    You also get some of the effects of the worlds depicted in Brin's
    Transparent Society, and Halperin's The Truth Machine. You could ask
    someone if they had committed a crime, and they would either tell the
    truth or stay silent. Or you could require people to agree to try to
    obey the laws, perhaps as a condition for free access in society, and
    then if they agreed, they would have to do it. Crime levels would be
    much lower than in our world.

    The article I read discussed the situation with regard to Digital
    Rights Management (DRM). If people were bound by their promises, then
    they could be required to agree to restrictions as a condition for
    receiving information. The result is that you get the effects of DRM
    in the all-honest world, even without any special technology. It just
    happens automatically.

    The surprising thing is that in many ways, the all-honest world feels very
    restrictive and limiting. In fact, it is almost downright totalitarian.
    The one saving grace would be that society wouldn't necessarily have to
    adopt easy solutions like requiring people to promise to obey the law
    or to respond when asked if they had committed a crime. Society could
    take the position that no one had to testify against himself, and give
    people more protection. In effect, in an all-honest world people have
    less inherent personal freedom, so society might compensate by creating
    policies that encourage public freedom.

    In the future, it might be possible for people to convincingly commit
    to behaving honestly. They could have their mental program reviewed by
    some AI which would certify that they were honest. I wonder if doing
    so would be a net advantage or disadvantage? On the one hand, an honest
    person would be a fine partner or associate, one who could be completely
    trusted and who would never cheat. This would suggest that honesty is a
    good policy. But on the other hand, by giving up the option of cheating,
    the honest man may not be able to take advantage of certain potentially
    lucrative opportunities that may arise. His unwavering commitment to
    honesty might impose so many limits that the policy is a net loss.

    Of course we face the same choice and dilemma in our world, but
    we have a big problem: we can't verifiably commit to being honest.
    You can never tell if a person is really honest or is just pretending.
    In this hypothetical future, an honest person will gain the ability to
    prove it, which should greatly increase the value of honesty. In fact,
    over time, social pressure might arise for people to commit to these
    policies of honesty. The world would be divided into Knights, who
    could be trusted, and Knaves, untrustworthy rogues who played by their
    own rules. The dramatic possibilities alone are enormous.

    In some ways, Palladium-style "trusted computing" technology provides a
    preview of such a world, in a small domain. It lets you convincingly
    prove to a remote system that you are running a particular program,
    which means that your computer's behavior is trustworthy from the remote
    point of view. That's why you may be eventually forced to run Palladium
    systems in order to legally download movies and music, because only
    this kind of public commitment to "honest" or "trustworthy" behavior
    will win the confidence of the content companies.

    Will it be good or bad? Is honesty really the best policy? I hope
    and expect that we will learn much more about these issues over the
    next few years as we gain experience with these technologies.

    Hal



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