From: Robin Hanson (rhanson@gmu.edu)
Date: Wed Jun 18 2003 - 10:08:55 MDT
It turns out that economists can trace most of the social problems in the
world to secrets, things some people know that other people do not. It also
turns out that verifiable secrets are not really much of a problem. When
there is something that someone knows, but they could reveal and prove it to
someone else, a variety of institutions can induce people to reveal that
information. So the real problem is unverifiable secrets.
For example, if a nation wants to make an arms treaty, but is concerned
about the possibility of the other side cheating, they might each agree to
open their military bases or production facilities to inspection. When
corporate directors want to convince investors that they are not stealing
the money, they hire accountants to reveal corporate spending. When
individuals want to insure a home, they allow an insurance company
representative to inspect their home's current condition.
So why do individuals still have secrets? Some of their secrets are
verifiable, but only at a prohibitive cost. Insurance companies could set
insurance rates based on how carefully you drive, but it is now too
expensive for them to put a recorder on your car that records exactly how
carefully you drive. This may change in the next decade, however. And in
general as costs fall we should expect to see people agreeing to reveal more
verifiable info about themselves to solve secrecy problems.
Some of the secrets people have, however, are in their heads. Is my spouse
still happy with me, or is he thinking of leaving? Does my business partner
really plan to work hard, or is he hoping I'll do most of the work? Now
some of this info is revealed in our observable behavior so far; humans have
evolved to be "leaky", and to be good at detecting such leaks in the
behavior of others. And as we have been discussing in the "Why believe the
truth" thread, this leakiness has induced evolution to bias our beliefs, in
order to impress others.
The need to be close enough to others to detect such leaks is one of the key
obstacles limiting telecommuting and other long-distance relationships that
otherwise seem so attractive. Some day cheap long-distance communication
may have enough bandwidth to allow us to detect such leaks as we usually do,
and we may perhaps also develop automation that can detect such leaks up
close, so we don't need the bandwidth.
How leaky will our distant descendants be? How far will they want to go,
and be able to go, in agreeing to reveal their secrets to each other, to
avoid the social problems that secrets cause? It seems plausible that our
descendants will be constructed so that they can allow outsiders to directly
inspect the internal state of their minds, to verify the absence of certain
harmful secrets. It also seems plausible that our descendants will feel a
pressure to standardize the internal state of their mind to facilitate such
inspection, just as corporations now feel pressure to standardize their
accounting.
Of course we already expect other pressures to standardize, such as to take
advantage of improvements in mind modules. Even so, our descendants will
probably not reveal everything to everyone; not all possible agreements will
be made, and there will remain some advantages to non-standard mind parts,
which can then become costly to verify (sure I see these bits here in your
mind, but what the hell to they mean?).
Nevertheless, as an overall long term trend, I'm leaning toward expecting not
only a move toward a transparent society (a la Brin), but then toward
transparent minds as well. And one disturbing implication of this is that
we may well evolve to become even *more* self-deceived than we are now,
as believing one thing and thinking another becomes even harder than now.
Robin Hanson rhanson@gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu
Assistant Professor of Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323
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