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What about a self-stabilising globally utilitarian (towards maximal societal output and overall comfort in expense of individual pleasure) system, similar to wh

What about a self-stabilising globally utilitarian (towards maximal societal output and overall comfort in expense of individual pleasure) system, similar to what we have with TCP (which is designed to maximise global packet flow and reliability in expense of local slowdowns)?

joppy 6y ago
What does this mean though? By utilitarian you mean to optimise for some utility function: how do you pick it? Does it allow for 99% of people to be fine while 1% live in absolute squalor? Does maximising societal output mean draining natural resources dry for generations to come? How does this treat personal autonomy, which is a way that many people derive meaning in their lives? Why should something as complicated as human ethics be reducible to terms as simple as a networking problem?
- logicchains 6y ago
  >By utilitarian you mean to optimise for some utility function: how do you pick it? Does it allow for 99% of people to be fine while 1% live in absolute squalor? He could pick a form of utility based on ordinal utility that doesn't allow for interpersonal utility comparisons. In such a theory fewer things could be proven, but it would be easier (although still quite challenging) to prove whether an AI following that theory would decide to kill all humans.
  - anticensor 6y ago
    What I had in my mind was rather a non-linear combinatorial utility function which would allow for global utility comparisons (which would answer not only what the best action is, but also who the most viable actor for a given action given comparable skills is), not an ordinal one. That would enable a framework that gives you maximum societal output and maximum conformity at the same time.
- anticensor 6y ago
  Behavioral interaction is easily reducible to a networking problem with just a few axioms and terms swapped. Simple rules make complex systems. > draining natural resources dry for generations to come? That would count as negative production in my model as I define output as (global production-global consumption)/log(global production+global consumption), aka diminished excess product, not as simple global production. > How does this treat personal autonomy It explicitly does not, as there is an inherent trade-off between personal pleasure and freedom, versus overall conformity. But you can tune the function by adding overall comfort (total objective satisfaction) as a third parameter, which will unfortunately reduce societal comformity. My model is both non-authoritarian and non-liberalistic. It relies on modern day high speed communication facilities to exchange the input parameters for the utility function instead.

joppy 6y ago

What does this mean though? By utilitarian you mean to optimise for some utility function: how do you pick it? Does it allow for 99% of people to be fine while 1% live in absolute squalor? Does maximising societal output mean draining natural resources dry for generations to come? How does this treat personal autonomy, which is a way that many people derive meaning in their lives? Why should something as complicated as human ethics be reducible to terms as simple as a networking problem?

logicchains 6y ago
>By utilitarian you mean to optimise for some utility function: how do you pick it? Does it allow for 99% of people to be fine while 1% live in absolute squalor? He could pick a form of utility based on ordinal utility that doesn't allow for interpersonal utility comparisons. In such a theory fewer things could be proven, but it would be easier (although still quite challenging) to prove whether an AI following that theory would decide to kill all humans.
- anticensor 6y ago
  What I had in my mind was rather a non-linear combinatorial utility function which would allow for global utility comparisons (which would answer not only what the best action is, but also who the most viable actor for a given action given comparable skills is), not an ordinal one. That would enable a framework that gives you maximum societal output and maximum conformity at the same time.
anticensor 6y ago
Behavioral interaction is easily reducible to a networking problem with just a few axioms and terms swapped. Simple rules make complex systems. > draining natural resources dry for generations to come? That would count as negative production in my model as I define output as (global production-global consumption)/log(global production+global consumption), aka diminished excess product, not as simple global production. > How does this treat personal autonomy It explicitly does not, as there is an inherent trade-off between personal pleasure and freedom, versus overall conformity. But you can tune the function by adding overall comfort (total objective satisfaction) as a third parameter, which will unfortunately reduce societal comformity. My model is both non-authoritarian and non-liberalistic. It relies on modern day high speed communication facilities to exchange the input parameters for the utility function instead.