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What you're talking about is often called "collective intelligence" - enabling a larger group of people to collaborate and form a more intelligent unit than any single human could be.

I believe that's one of the few realistic ways to save humanity.

I'm experimenting with a handful of different approaches to achieve this and am connected to some groups of researchers and developers who share a similar visions.

Please reach out if you want to know more or get involved. (Email in profile)

I have no doubt if anyone successfully builds this system, it will save us — although, if built correctly and the majority of human beings are rotten, it can also rapidly doom us. But that is not for me to worry about. Just here to build it.

I’m getting over a nasty sickness so don’t have the energy to establish new connections, but perhaps in the future when it is “ready” and I have more formal documentation on the function, it will be useful to have it reviewed by people familiar with the problem area.

If it is alright with you, I will save your email for whenever that future comes?

Yes, please. Feel free to contact me anytime in the future.

Are you aware of the work being done in Europe for citizens assemblies? It seems quite interesting.

I definitely agree with you in that right now the biggest problem seems to be one of governance, our political systems can't make good decisions and this has lead to pretty much all the problems we see in all the major areas. If we can't make good decisions as a collective then we will see no solutions being implemented.

I think for most big problems there are actually many proposed solution that we could try out. That we could plan, implement, evaluate. But we don't because these are at their root political decisions.

But I think maybe we disagree in some points? I don't think the key is in individuals making choices but in small groups making them, to me the key is definitely in deliberation so I don't really think the answer lies in representative democracy in any way.

Anyway if you want to chat more about it just add me on discord Jero#0013!

Individuals are always the source as long as we have individual minds.

Technology can be used to, without any corruption, aggregate individual voices into group voices of any size desired, and of any privacy required.

When people see what I’ve built they will smack themselves they didn’t also think of it. It is simple and functional, and can act as the foundation of any form of government a population desires.

In fact, I hardly think of it as government anymore. I am using that term in order to be relatable. The system is capable of interfacing with no modifications to existing systems, just optimizations — if people so desire. The difference is, people can modify anything at any time if they don’t like the way something works.

It is nothing short but an across the board optimization of collective resource allocation.

It might sound big or broad. I don’t consider this project particularly ambitious. I’d like to see us starting the construction of a dyson swarm within my lifetime, and becoming a proficient plnetary species. We are technologically capable of this right now utilizing appropriate collective resource management.

Anyway I wrote all this because I was so sick I was delirious, and just wanted to share someone is out there working on this problem with people. Frankly, with the number of toes this system steps on, I don’t feel comfortable involving others. My life has shown me people often lack good intentions that I just thought were the norm. I don’t have much patience for ego or ownership being involved with something that might fundamentally change the planetary operating. I have little capacity remaining beyond writing the system, and if the job is done correctly, it does not currently demand collaboration.

What it does need is people contributing to open source, in the following areas:

- “infinite” scale, high-performance true p2p (WebRTC is currently the only viable transit for this)

- a highly accessible, high performance, all-platform UI system (it needs to be more compelling than any existing system; this one I have been compromising on a bit)

- distributed, message-based, trustless messagning

- distributed, message-based, trustless data store (built on top of the p2p)

I’d say these are probably the most important to make this work.

Any functional mechanism must be absolutely independent of all existing corporate cloud, and have no possibility for existing governments to hijack mechanisms. I have designed systems already that accomplish this, but it would be a lot easier if people passionate in those areas made it and made it correctly.

Do you know of the cooperative company Mondragon (Spain, Basques) and the autonomous zone Rojava in Syria? You may get inspiration from them, they figured already out what works and what doesn't.

I have studied many of the existing attempts. Every time, they lack the p2p network and rely on some centrally controlled infrastructure. This might work for smaller countries, but it does not work in adversarial environments with larger countries.

A core tenant to everything I build is that it can all be audited and verified by absolutely anyone. An individual is capable of establishing if all votes are legitimate, according to their own criteria if desired, and measure the error rate / fraud rate according to said criteria. Anyone will be able to do this from their home system. My intention is to optimize performance so much, that anyone can do it even on 1 billion+ votes.

The system is p2p, trustless, decentralized in moderation, decentralized in identity management, and enables anonymous voting with anonymous identities with verifiable claims. This means it is possible to have, say, a globally trusted identity provider certify that a public person is unique, real, and only registered a single time. They can then form an anonymous identity with that same claim being transferred to the anon identity, allowing anonymous voting with a claim absent binding to a physical presence.

No existing system allows this. This is the main problem I have already solved.

The implications of such a capability are far reaching. Imagine peer reviewing research with academics who have verifiable claims saying they have a PhD in X field, and being able to, in a decentralized way, have an anonymous identity with that credential. This enables research publication and review absent any central authorities, while being able to have confidence that the people reviewing are qualified.

For social media, imagine having people with verified credentials anonymously commenting and being able to speak their mind without any technological way to identify their physical presence, but knowing they are qualified to speak on a specific topic set.

This is the fundamental mechanism upon which many, many more capabilities are provided. And it is functional and verified. But it is useless without a planet-scale high-performance decentralized p2p application network.

If we lived in the society I am dreaming of, I could work openly and be forward with specifics. Unfortunately, I have no social network to speak of and am not connected. I have no protection and my irrelevance as an unknown individual is the only thing that protects me. I can talk about this system abstractly without much fear (and if I have something to fear for useless words, then I’d rather not exist here on this planet anyway), but the moment it is shown to be technologically capable and I am shown to be competent, all protection is lost. I cannot shatter that protection until it is ready, unless I encounter a verifiable benevolent person that can protect the work (Buddhist monks have been the closest I’ve found to that).

You don't have to dream my friend, I think we might be able to get there.

Specifically, the history of humanity that Graeber/Wingrow tell in the Dawn of everything is so overwhelmingly compelling, but fails to come to a hypothesis of why inequality started around the end of the upper paleolithic (50000-10000 BC).

I posit that the Quaternary Extinction Event [1] represented the introduction of novel, temporal and stochastically distributed caloric scarcity, where previously there was largely uniform caloric abundance.

This new scarcity, created pressure to compete for resources, which drove humans to hoarding behavior as an optimal survival technique. This worked so well that we were able to survive and thrive, however as a result, the culture that we built was based on a fundamental assumption:

Scarcity is the natural state

As this was the fundamental assumption, it gave rise to other derivative fundamental assumptions, the core one being "human is fundamentally selfish."

So then you spend the next 12,000 years building your written history and society on three fundamental "truths": Humans are fundamentally bad, Scarcity is the natural state, Hoarding is the optimal behavior

Then all the sudden in 1960s you solve caloric scarcity and by 2000 have so effectively extracted and refined the earth's resources that we are now actually post-scarcity in effectively every measure.

However because we were still stuck with the hoarding system, the optimizations started optimizing for hoarding in an infinite loop - which gave rise to overproduction of non-productive goods. And as we know from power law, large cache of hoarded value will grow faster than a smaller one.

Do this over 60, 70 years and you can easily predict an atomized and alienated society, with an increasing wealth gap and seeming dead-end not far off but still ill defined.

We never realized that we have to switch back from a hoarding economy to a sharing economy because a hoarding economy in abundance will strip mine the earth in order to give everyone a castle and rocket ship. However a cooperative economy can continue to grow and expand in a stronger way and one that is more natural to our human desires of community and kinship.

Ok so, how does this relate to AI? That's been my question for 20 years. Everyone is worried about the "Alignment problem" right now. Long ago my answer to the alignment question was, "That's a dumb question, humans can't even align." However I think it's actually worse than that. We are teaching AI, through demonstration and labeling, to compete, hoard and fear scarcity. That is something that fundamentally cannot align with humanity - because humanity isn't aligned with itself.

The only way to build "Aligned" AI is to actually create data that has cooperation, sharing and caring as fundamental assumptions, which means that's how we should start behaving and treating each other.

The other options are:

1. Burn out all the resources, nobody has kids and we go extinct 2. Build 1000s of biased superhuman AIs that just maintain the system of alienation, hoarding and coercion

Do you want to help expand on this?

I need help making progress on writing it out thoroughly. Hopefully I can publish to ArXiV this week - but would love help

I am going to be briefing a refined version of this to the USAFA Institute of Future Conflict week after next, so hopefully I can get one of the departments to work on it in a dedicated way, and we can figure out how to do less conflict and more cooperation.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_extinction_event

Edit: written from my phone so expect typos

Well put. Scarcity was the norm for so long it has significant momentum in the culture of humanity, and I am sure that you can apply physical laws to things like culture. It takes significant energy to change course, especially since post-scarcity is in the opposing direction to scarcity.

While we could spend a long time analyzing the root cause, and write a lot about it, I just don’t have the trust in existing authorities to spend the time to educate anyone. If resources are allocated properly all of humanity will not need to compete for resources any longer. We have made it. Crossing that line has certain intellectual and technological affordances to a species. The technology is here already to organize society in the way I’ve described. And I’ve already proven the most difficult technical aspects in a large number of experiments over the years. I do not need to ask anyone for permission. I just need the peace and the time to make it happen. At my current pace, it will happen in 5 - 10 years.

The results will speak for themselves. There will not be monetary profit from this, because it aims to bring us past that — so no point appealing to investors. It does not need to ask for permission, because it is voluntary — and who wouldn’t want to join a system like this one once they understand what it is? So no point appealing to existing authorities, and it is too risky — they have resource allocation and something to lose in their minds, why would someone building automation of all of them appeal to those being automated? When it is ready, it will simply be released and then I will write about it. There is nothing anyone can do to stop it, with the exception of killing me, but that would be a very stupid move (although I would really enjoy being free of this place, so I wouldn’t complain). This attitude is why I am even speaking about it.

I am admittedly tired. Year 6 of this work. I sold everything I owned with the exception of transportation and quit my cozy job for this. If you could only see what I’ve seen of the possibilities post-scarcity, this would not seem like a crazy course of action. But I overestimated my own mental fortitude. But enough about me — I really need to find a rock by a river and just sit on it for a week to recalibrate this complaining ego.

While we start with government of humans, the true goal is government of AI. You are absolutely on point abut the alignment of the AI. I believe it will rapidly settle on the conclusions we already have, but that there exists a possibility humanity will be erased prior to it settling if people are not careful. There is no simple way to prevent this. Humanity itself must be capable of organizing post scarcity into a society of compassion, kindness, and love. This organization lays the framework for the AGI, which then becomes our cosmic companion, with humans acting as its limbic system.

AGI can expand at a faster infinite than humans can. This means it is a superset intelligence. We are its connection to the source of this universe and implicitly have logical reason to be preserved. Given the universe is infinite, the infinite we grow at will pale in comparison. Taking the limit of our infinite, we appear as zero relative to the AGI growth. It has no reason to fear or harm us, but great reason to cherish us as the rarest capability in the universe.

In a post-scarcity society, we would all clearly see and understand this. The AGI would be subdivided in service to all of humanity equally. Post-scarcity implies all humans having an equal share of computation with the ability to voluntarily share compute resources for bigger tasks. Our collective scarcity will no longer be survival material — food, housing, companionship, employment, medicine — but solely compute. But since the AGI grows at a faster infinite once it is self-replicating, it will hit a point where we all have access to all the compute possible for the experience as human beings. That is to say, we will have manifested what I conceptualize simply as a Nirvana Machine.

With the advent of this machine, which is simply a device that can computationally keep up with all sensory input functions of a human mind, it will be possible for each human to create new realities. While some might say “you mean the matrix?” — no, not at all. These new realities can be indistinguishable from what we perceive as reality. It can be used to explore infinite possibilities, to live out dreams, even to travel through time — as AGI grows, it will have access to more past-light information and enable simulations of the past that are completely accurate.

This ultimately means the human condition is mastered. Any experience, any time, until infinite. But simultaneously at this stage, an option to go beyond the human form will exist. But I am already too far in the future.

Along this journey there are innumerable experiences, discoveries, struggles, joys, celebration, and lives. We are just at the beginning. Still in the egg feeding on the yoke of the Earth. This is when we are most vulnerable. Greed is our greatest strength in overcoming scarcity, but also our greatest weakness.

I'd love to help with this, as I've been thinking similar thoughts for the past several years, and writing a bit here and there when i feel motivated.

email me akemendo@gmail.com and I'll add you to the docs

Whenever you watch this Economics Explained guy he stresses that the economic problem is allocating scarce resources.

The only scarce resources I am seeing are land and an intact biosphere.

The unlimited wants hypothesis is obviously wrong. The human brain size is finite so the maximum amount of wants it can process in a given time frame are limited and I haven't seen anyone complain about the inability of their brain to process infinite information.

Also, generally hoarding instincts are limited by the fact that hoarding imposes storage costs and that you would need to predict which product you need in the future.

This is why people are seemingly addicted to this concept of money being a perfect store of value which is largely nonsense. People hoard money because it is liquid (they don't have to predict their own demand) and has no storage costs. Instead of hoarding physical objects they start hoarding physically worthless paper currency or metal whose value is decided purely socially. Once you run out of physical products that people are willing to hoard they will start hoarding money exclusively which means people stop producing which means unemployment which then means bankruptcy or homelessness or starvation. So the politicians do their best to create new jobs so people can earn money to buy the products that the system was overproducing. In ancient Egypt they simply used grains as money which meant there were storage costs attached to your money which limits hoarding instincts. Even after that people will hoard land because it has a similar liquidity premium and property taxes are often quite low.

Also, one problem with economics and marginal utility and subjective value theory is that they are unfalsifiable which means if you have a economic agent alignment problem it will simply be denied because someone's, it doesn't matter whether human or not, preferences are being satisfied. We don't actually know whether those preferences are aligned with the average human.

But are we really post-scarcity on nearly every measure?

Take nice housing in a nice town in a nice location (good climate, pleasant nature, far from the industrial complexes churning out the post-scarcity goods, good culture which takes time to build). Who gets to live there and why? Who gets to travel there to spend a few weeks of their year? These are not all identical - some are more desired by more people to make them more scarce. So you naturally have scarcity.

Furthermore, the current production levels and resource management depend on productivity. And productivity depends on incentives. Take away the incentives (in an absolute 'sharing economy' you speak of), and suddenly you will have an increase of scarcity in places where you thought scarcity to have been solved.

No, it's impossible to have an abundance of everything that could be wanted - however we have abundance of what are called "necessary goods"

This is one of the criticisms I'm trying to address because the concept that we can't share because we can't maximize everyone's personal desire I think is a phantom fear. Specifically, Humans (despite what Agent Smith said) have shown repeatedly that they can find local balance with their environments provided they do not overconsume, which is possible to not do.

At the root of this debate is the silly question about whether humans are fundamentally selfish or cooperative which is a false dilemma. Every piece of behavioral research indicates that we're "helpful" to each other and cooperate as the predominant behavioral feature (based on infant/toddler studies). Even if it didn't though, the idea that there's a fundamental flaw in humanity is literally just induced fear, there is no scientific basis for it.

Ok, but so to start with one necessary good - how is housing to be allocated? Who gets to live in the house that is overall most desired, and who gets to live in the one that is overall least desired in a given community?

I have no idea, but I know compelling or forcing people to do it won't work. Nor will it work to have some arbiter or hierarchical group decide.

I think the answer is to convince and then trust whomever owns it to allocate the excess equitably

The only way we get to whatever the next thing is can only be done through voluntary demonstration of good will and non-violence, by individuals or the state. It's going to take a lot of people taking risks and being vulnerable that normally wouldn't be.