Immanence Reputations of Intelligent Instances running on Smartnetworks

One vision of the future is digital societies, comprised of different forms of intelligence like blockchain AIs, smart-contract DACs, and human mindfile uploads all running on smartnetworks. Verification of such digital identities may well be required for smartnetwork access. We are already living in a prototype of this world now, in the sense that access to digital properties requires digital identity verification. Many websites invite logging in with Facebook or Twitter as an already-established digital identity heuristic.

Also in the contemporary world, we are currently constrained to an embodied form, but there would be no such requirement in the digital societies of the future. Digital identity could become so distributed, portable, copiable, open-sourceable, sharable, malleable, and shardable, that it no longer makes sense to think in terms of entities. Instead of entities, personal identities, or embodied containers, there could be ephemeral instances; thinking, informational, actional, enjoyful, subjectivational instances. The question would then be how to enable smartnetwork operations in a post-entity society, perhaps one in which ‘ephemeral instances of capability and creativity’ have replaced identity-bounded entities.

One answer is that reputation could still matter. Even if not a full-fledged identity-entity, any instance, any measurable quantum, any participation no matter how ephemeral could still have a reputation. Reputations could become a lot more complicated, measuring different levels like actor, action, and intention, and also line-item credit for contributions and new ideas. Composite team reputations could be calculated for sharded groupmind participations. All this is could be possible through technology like blockchains that afford more granularity and accessibility in record-keeping.

Thus teputation might persist as a validation mechanism, even in advanced scenarios like post-entity digital societies. However, the trick will be to enact reputation assessment schemas that are not completely externally-imposed and outside the purview of the agent being evaluated. Preferable is re-envisioning reputation as a mechanism to empower the liberty and expression possibilities of the entities or instances being reputationified. This is an immanence reputation, one that is reflective of criteria self-determined by the agent and that accentuates its possibilities. The predictive analytics of the big data era could be applied to the development of reputational mechanisms to encourage agent futurity and potentiality realization as opposed to those that solely based on past acts.

Blockchain Thinking: Transition to Digital Societies of Multispecies Intelligence

The future world could be one of multi-species intelligence. The possibility space could include “classic” humans, enhanced humans, digital mindfile uploads, and many forms of artificial intelligence: deep learning neural nets, machine learning algorithms, blockchain-based DACs (distributed autonomous organizations), and whole-brain software emulations. Machine modes of existence are different than those of humans, which means the need for ways to interact that facilitate and extend the existence of both parties.

Blockchains for Trustful Interspecies Social Contracts
The properties of blockchain technology as a decentralized, distributed, global, permanent, code-based ledger of transactions could be useful in managing such interactions. The cryptographic ledger system could be used for interactions either between humans or multispecies parties, exactly because it is not necessary to know, trust, or understand the other entity, just the code system.

While perhaps not a full answer to the problem of trustful multispecies interaction, and the subcase of enacting Friendly AI, decentralized smart networks like blockchains are a robust system of checks and balances. As such, blockchains are a mechanism with more leverage than other available solutions in responding to situations of future uncertainty. Blockchains could be the infrastructure for setting forth the new social contract between humans and technology, and formalizing this arrangement in smart contracts.

Mutual Coexistence in the Capacity Spectrum for Actualization
Trust-building models for interspecies digital intelligence interaction could include both game-theoretic checks-and-balances systems like blockchains to alleviate threats and fears, and also at a higher level, frameworks that put entities on the same plane of shared objectives. The problem frame of machine and human intelligence should not be one that characterizes relations as oppositional, but rather one that aligns entities on the same ground and value system for the most important shared parameters, like growth and actualization.

What we want is the ability to experience, grow, and contribute more, for both humans and machines, and the two in symbiosis and synthesis. This can be conceived as all entities existing on a spectrum of capacity for individuation (the ability to grow and realize potential). Productive interaction between intelligent species could be fostered by being joined in the common framework of a capacity spectrum that facilitates the objectives of personal, mutual, and collective growth in creating the digital communities of the future.

Adapted from: Swan, M. We Should Consider The Future World As One Of Multi-Species Intelligence. Response to The Edge Question 2015. Ed. John Brockman. 2015. 

Reliable access to an objective reality

Already people obtain their ‘news’ from a variety of sources, a mix of traditional media and new media, especially tweetstreams and blogs (for example from NPR’s Andy Carvin (“The Revolution will be Tweeted”)). This suggests that more different versions of reality are being created and perceived.

The issue of ‘what is objective reality’ and reliable access to it could become more important over time. Reality-confirmation tools could likely proliferate. One example is the contemplated arrival of thousands of privately-owed microcams descending to film any situation of interest and posting opensource footage or auctioning it to bidders (proposed by David Brin in Kiln People). Like blogs and phonecams, private microcams could further counter the influence and propagandizing of media, and provide a more reliable confirmation of reality.

In the longer term, individuals may have a more explicit ability to manage the realities they access. Different realities could be shared at different times per volition and convenience (an extension of Nancy Kress’s shared reality concept in the Probability Trilogy).

Digital personas

There are more machines than humans on the internet, and more machine-to-machine traffic than human-to-human traffic despite the trillions of text messages sent every year. Perhaps the most interesting category of messaging is machine-to-human. There are many mundane examples of this such as RSS feeds, automated email notifications and status updates from entities (groups, companies and other organizations). Coming innovations in machine-human communication could be quite fun and life-enhancing.

There are already fan-run Twitter accounts, FaceBook parodies and other interaction sites for fictional characters, often contemporary television characters. The next step could be creating digital emulations that could automatically respond in character. For example, subscribing to the Ben Franklin feed – “ooh-zapped the heck out of myself with my kite last night.”

There could be many uses for digital personas in addition to entertaining status updates, for example, having kids hang out with Marie Curie and the Wright Brothers as role models. It could be interesting to have a society where dead or fictional characters become part of the conversation, having a voice and a lasting ongoing presence. Digital personas could be managed with sliding parameters (e.g.; amp up Churchill’s humor), and have add-on modules (get the early-adopter technophile package for the great-grandmother persona...”I’m off to text in my response to Dancing with the Stars.”)

Digital personas would not need to be exclusively reserved for dead or fictional characters, anyone could create one as a facsimile with some sort of fidelity from current digital content, data and other artifacts. Celebrities could possibly earn greater remuneration by renting their emulations rather than through live engagements involving their actual physical persona.

As robotics continue to advance, digital persona overlays could be applied so that Franklin Lloyd Wright or Frank Gehry could walk around and discuss home renovation plans with you, Lady GaGa could be at your next soiree or Einstein and Feynman could join a scientific brainstorming session. A new field for productive and entertainment endeavor could emerge to create and bring together the digital personas of historical figures for problem-solving and fun. Would ‘Lost’ be better with Genghis Khan, Ella Fitzgerald, Moctezuma, Rosalind Franklin and Sherlock Holmes in the cast? Lawmakers could obtain measured input by running the Thomas Jefferson and John Adams personas simultaneously. The world’s great scientific and intellectual minds could be assembled to focus on current problems.

Upload world science fiction

It is strange that there has not been more in-depth exploration in science fiction about what mind upload societies would be like. A few aspects are examined in books like Accelerando, the Golden Age, Permutation City, Diaspora and the Cassini Division. Many issues could play out in fun ways in science fiction.

Trust in an upload world
In a world where everyone has uploaded their minds into computer banks and experience is simulated in virtual reality, what is real? How will checks and balances be established for trust and security? How do you know you are not being hacked? How do you know you are getting the bandwidth and processing power promised by your service provider? If you instantiated into an embodied form to go off-bank to check, how would you know that this has really occurred and is not a simulation of an embodied download by the service provider?

A science fiction story could revolve around escaping the upload service provider, finding its deviance (it has shockingly slaved entire banks of human minds to its own nefarious purposes) and overthrowing it to restore order only to find an even more evil system, like a spam-protection unit gone awry with emerging AI, now has the upload society in its clutches. The discrimination practices of the future could be delivering slower run-time environments to certain groups. The thematic issues to examine are the integrity, influence and control of an upload society.

Motivation and activity
What is the nature of being in an upload world? Is the construct of the individual still relevant? What are the driving motivations? What are the activities? What do minds do with 24 hours of run-time each day? If individuals can make copies of themselves, what are the legal and practical issues? How can constructive behavior be incentivized instead of regulated? An interesting story could ensue as an extension to the Kiln People concept, where a copy of a person mutates and wants to kill the original to assume its legal status. An interesting branch of future law may deal with copies interaction.

Societal dynamics
It could be interesting to look at how society redesigns and reorganizes itself in an upload world. Different subgroups may edit their utility functions in different ways. What are the reproduction norms? Do types of gender proliferate? Which memeplexes would arise and predominate? In the Post-Scarcity Economy, what will be organizing factors for society?

Information evolution
How do the Internet and the individual and the group evolve? In one interpretation, they are all just collections of information. Does distinction become meaningless at some point? Are there other distinctions that would be more relevant in an upload world? What establishes who owns, controls and has permission to view and create different information, whether people bits or data bits?

Civilized transition to the post-scarcity economy

Contemplating a new era of bountiful resources compared to previous times, some call for a socialist, or equal, distribution of the new resources. Two examples of new eras would be those triggered by the advent of the molecular assembler and uploaded human minds; the resources would be, respectively, Earth and Solar System matter and processing capacity.

A socialist resource allocation is moot because:

1. At t+1 or t+n, there will have been a reallocation of resources based on individual skill, utility and Darwinism,
2. Capitalist forces will figure out how to attain more of the resources in other ways,
3. Ways of enforcing a socialist resource distribution will probably not exist or be desirable, and
4. Market mechanisms are likely to provide the most effective resource distribution.

Much more important than which post-scarcity economy resource allocation model to use is how to engender a smooth transition to the new era.

Presumably the rule of law will persist and the critical part will be adapting it to extend and protect rights in the new eras. What is going to happen when someone erects a Dyson sphere around newly terraformed Mars homesteads and starts levying a toll on IP traffic and physical egress? Law seems to be the most stable profession in the face of accelerating technology and new eras!

Absent UN AI Peacekeeping Forces, there should be a way to design incentives backed by consequences and force if necessary to reduce the claim-jumping, lawlessness and vigilanteism (its new guise: nano-weaponry arms races!) that has accompanied historical landgrabs.


Reference:
At the end of “Engine of Creation,” Eric Drexler discusses “Inheritance Day,” a time for “distributing ownership of the resources of space” in three possible scenarios:

1. (capitalist) First-come first-served, a landgrab as homesteading and mining claims have occurred traditionally. Dismissed since the first one to arrive with an appropriate molecular compiler could to re-work and thus claim as far as it could reach in the universe,
   
2. (socialist) Equal distribution and recalibration over time, and
   
3. (socialist) One-time equal distribution – the libertarian and most preferable approach

Optimum size for intelligence

What is the optimum size for intelligence? Human intelligence is currently packaged in individuals but this need not persist in an upload world.

Even now we are already seeing the emergence of collective intelligence mechanisms such as prediction markets, wikis, extended collaborative teams, simulations and the Internet especially the meta data level and the linkage and interaction through tags, profiles, social networks, recommendations and blogs.

Applications for intelligence can explode in the digital medium with essentially unlimited mind file copy, backup and merge capability.

In some cases, less intelligence may be useful, permissioning out segregated resources for low level activities. Currently, humans only have primitive processing resource allocation choices and must generally devote, despite not engaging, their full intelligence to any activity irrespective of mundanity.

In the more obvious case, larger intelligence may be better for a disparate range of applications from pure compute power to emotional experience. Three cases are considered:

a) Large intelligence: collected capability of individuals
The general use of larger intelligence could be for an individual mind file to conduct more projects requiring cognitive capability. The activities could be for advancement, amusement or in satisfaction of any variety of goals. Merging and orchestrating diverse capable resources is non-trivial especially since mind files will likely have vestiges of ego, status-seeking behavior, narrowband communication and other EEA characteristics however coordination would likely occur via self-organizing mechanisms.

b) Large intelligence: collected raw compute power of individuals
Individuals may choose to copy and permission out raw compute resources to projects of interest but not capability in an essentially improved partial implementation of government and directed capital. Coordination is important but it is possible that architecture (e.g.; distributed or concentrated) does not matter until reaching the logical extremes of resource limitations and information processing superobjects such as Jupiter brains and Matrioshka brains.

c) Large intelligence: collected sensory experience of individuals
Emotional experience, to the degree occurring in the digital medium, could be enhanced with merged intelligence both by amplifying sensory input and providing a multiplicity of experience.

Capitalist or Socialist Upload Scenario?

There are at least two scenarios for how mass uploading could occur, the Capitalist model and the Socialist model.

1. Capitalist Model (Evolutionary)
In the Capitalist model, uploaders would choose from a selection of storage, processing and security packages. Offerings would be presented with marketing aplomb, perhaps featuring modules analogous to the Gandhi [minimalist], the Toyota [adequate, fully functional] and the Cadillac [premium]. The capitalist model is a Darwinist or evolutionary approach.

2. Socialist Model (Developmental)
In the Socialist model, all storage, processing and security upload packages would be the same, perhaps directed by some sort of quasi or overtly governmental or private advocacy body. Each uploader would receive the same storage, processing and security resource module.

Analysis
At first blush, the Capitalist model seems most likely; it is a logical extension of how economics and marketplaces function in the current world. However, the key issue is the hyper-evolution capability that is assumed to occur in the digital substrate. Perhaps uploads should at least be equalized at the beginning such that all those who upload have the same chance of becoming a super-intelligence.

However, trying to equalize uploads (such as via a handicapping system) or the resources available to them at the offset is both unlikely to occur, and more importantly, unlikely to make a difference. The magnitude of digital evolutionary changes makes the starting point irrelevant, both in terms of capability and processing power.

The real question is what processing power will become available to digital intelligences post-upload or post-creation and the resulting evolution and goals which may become at odds with those of biological humanity. It is not reasonable to assume that external control can be imposed for long.

Is managed experience still real?

Would a simulated experience feel as real if one knew it was a simulated experience? Would part of someone hold back from truly experiencing the situation by knowing it was not fully "real"? Will the simulated experiences of uploaded human consciousnesses be real enough to replace those that we currently experience in the physical world?

For example, could a digital human feel the same sentiments of community, togetherness, nationalism, belongingness, etc. from a simulated digital gathering of community members that ve could in the current physical world picnic, political rally, concert, soccer game, etc.? Would large group simulations be any different than 1:1 simulations?

It might be the conventional wisdom at first, that knowing something is a simulation, one would not fully give oneself to the experience, but examples of other simulation-type experiences - which are not at all as immersive as the ones coming - indicate that in fact people do completely give themselves to the simulation, e.g.; reading a book, playing video or alternate reality games, and may even have trouble reimmersing in the real world, e.g.; the Stanford prison experiment.

In fact, simulated experiences will probably feel even more real and have the possibility of being managed with settings just like other current digital experiences; one could dial up or down the intensity or other parameters as preferred, some people may want more charge, more light, more sound, different sound, more pleasure receptors firing, more intellectual wonder, more fascination, others might want less.

The amount of self-awareness that can come from altering and fine-tuning one's experience of experience could facilitate a new era of interaction amongst intelligences since much of current interaction and communication involves personal constraints (e.g.; ego, acknowledgement, acceptance needs etc.).

Experience management is not new, right now meat humans indirectly manage their experience using drugs, alcohol, caffeine, exercise, TV, conversation, etc. to enhance or dull pleasant or unpleasant experiences, what would it be like to move the intensity bar up or down pre-experience? Or have several self sims running with different parameter mixes to capture the event in just the right way since the most pleasant and unpleasant events are often not pre-determined.

Is managed experience still real? Shouldn't the individual have the freedom to choose?

How much of myself should I bring to the future?

One of the current unknowns in cryonics is how much fidelity a reanimated person will have in the future, will one be an amnestic clone or a being with full memory and personality?

The future form factor or storage and action platform for the human mind could take several and perhaps multiple forms, hopefully by choice, ranging from dryware to wetware; from non-corporeal computers and virtual reality to different flesh bodies. An early example of diverse purpose-driven flesh body types is portrayed in David Brin’s “Kiln People” as an incidental detail.

How much of me (memory, personality, etc.) do I need to feel like me? Do I even want to feel like the me now in the future? What would I like to save from me now for me of the future? Not all the current me will be relevant in the future (in fact, a risk is that all of me will be irrelevant). If corporeality is irrelevant in the future, many memories can be jettisoned. If the construct of self is absent from the future, large chunks of personality and memory will be irrelevant. Beyond irrelevancy, not all of the current me is desirable in the future. Those quirks are part of my uniqueness, but I would be better without at least some of them, and I could still be me without them, especially in a non-me construct. What kind of journal/manual/guide would I write for the future construct of a reanimated me?