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There's one major flaw in this spectre of the unstoppable killing machine known as the "autonomous corporation": If the whole premise of its autonomy rests sol
by droneStrikes 13y ago
There's one major flaw in this spectre of the unstoppable killing machine known as the "autonomous corporation":
If the whole premise of its autonomy rests solely on it's ability to engage in metered economic exchanges by way of some kind of bitcoin-style protocol, then an "autonomous corporation" MUST, by definition, persist on a distributed global network of continously available computers. So, if this entity has that dependency, then who's providing the hosting?
He who opts in on hosting the protocol, carries a say in the fate of the entity, thus this is no more "autonomous" than any other body of distributed human decision making. Whether it be voting, the purchase of publicly traded shares, or the organization of a bond to fund a bridge to nowhere.
It comes down to this: In order to mine bitcoins, or rather, add value to the system, you have to be constantly connected tothe internet. You can't mine a bitcoin in isolation. You can't power up a stand-alone, air-gapped machine, and mine bitcoins and expect them to have value when you connect it to the internet.
If you can't mine your own bitcoins in a vacuum, then very obviously, this requires you to interact with the world at large, over public networks. Those other systems must be available and complicit in such activities. That certainly doesn't fit my definition of "autonomous" in the sense of some massive force-of-nature style artificial intelligence boogey man. These systems need to be switched on, activated and tended to by someone. Someone will eventually want to extract value from these economic crypto-currencies.
So, here we are, coming back to the drone/remote control debate. Is a drone really "autonomous" when there's a pilot manning a set of remote controls from a bunker? Similarly, is this truly an "autonomous" corporation, when there are people deploying agents onto client hosts and services onto servers, all with the goal of gaining wealth? However you want to encapsulate the skill sets involved, that still requires expertise, and human intervention in my book, and certainly doesn't sound autonomous at all, to me.
Autonomy is a relative term. Whose autonomy are we talking about, here? And autonomy from "what" precisely?
- polarix 13y agoHere's a related question: is anything in our society currently autonomous?
- yen223 13y agoAt the risk of sounding like a hippie - mother nature. Forests, savannahs, and oceans have been doing their thing long before humans arrived, and will continue doing their thing long after we perish.
- pathy 13y agoThe planet has a whole is... largely autonomous but is still affected by the sun, meteors, the moon. Oceans are affected by those above as well, and by us. We have managed to affect the oceans quite a lot during our short time on earth, mainly by pollution it and the environment in general. Nothing is really autonomous in that sense. Yes, the earth will probably be here after we perish and it will probably survive, more or less, intact so in that sense it is probably quite autonomous.
- droneStrikes 13y agoGood question.
- erikpukinskis 13y agoDecentralized hosting is coming. We already have * Messaging (https://bitmessage.org/wiki/Main_Page https://bitmessage.org/wiki/Main_Page) * Hash table (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia) * Name service (http://dot-bit.org/Main_Page http://dot-bit.org/Main_Page) The only other thing you really need to be able to program arbitrary services is a decentralized work queue. And I'm not suggesting that those particular protocols are the final solutions for these tasks, but they are proofs of concept that are being iterated on by a lot of very smart computer scientists.
- droneStrikes 13y agoA lot of very smart computer scientists then, are the ones who claim stewardship of the system. Let's say the computer scientists die, and leave these systems behind. If their legacy is ignored, it will not persist in humanity's absence. Unless people continue to employ these tools, the tools will not spring back to life and animate themselves for their own sake. Just because you have an idea, and you throw up a wiki, and some client code on github, does not an A.I. make. This all sounds so much like it's just a Simple Matter of Programming (SMOP). http://everything2.com/title/Smop http://everything2.com/title/Smop As humans, we generate the electricity, we manufacture the chips and lithium-ion batteries. We buy the remote controlled quad-copters, and send them flying through the air. We turn the radios on and off. We plug in the network switches and routers, and administer the servers and prevent them from overheating. These things don't produce and care for themselves. There's a person on the other end, no matter how much they attempt to obfuscate their identity, or piggyback on crowdsourcing. Even with distributed peer-to-peer crowdsourcing, you still need peers and you still need a crowd. Are there self-replicating computers out there, building 3D printed copies of one another, fabricating their own solar cells, growing legs, walking themselves over to wall outlets, plugging in, and then executing block transactions for the sake of their own desire to be a bitcoin node? How, then, is this autonomy?
- icebraining 13y agoYou're arguing against a strawman. Autonomy doesn't mean complete independence. It just means self-governance. An human is considered autonomous, even if he relies on other people for survival, like we all do.