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