Attention-Based Stigmergic Distributed Collaborative Organizations
Attention-Based Stigmergic Distributed Collaborative Organizations
Introduction
"Attention is a scarce resource, information is not!"
In biological networks such as ant colonies, bee hives, or termites, you see self organization which builds and maintains critical architecture. Human beings can also take advantage of this self organizing mechanism to build and maintain institutions. The process is called stigmergy and to take advantage of this concept fully we have to revisit the fundamental theory of "the firm" as form of organization.
An attention based view of the firm
As human beings we are guided by our attention. It is also a fact that our attention is a scarce resource which many competing entities seek to capture. In an attention based view (ABV) of a firm it is attention which is the most precious resource and the allocation of attention is critical to the successful management of the firm. In a traditional top down hierarchical firm managerial attention is considered to be the most precious (Tseng & Chen, 2009), and is an very scarce resource. The allocation of attention within a firm can facilitate knowledge search. Knowledge search is part of the process of producing innovation and is effective or ineffective based on how management allocates their attention.
In the top down hierarchical model of the firm you must rely on managers properly allocating their attention because their attention is scarce. The problem of attention allocation (Tseng & Chen, 2009) and attention scarcity both plague traditional top down firms. In heterarchical flat organizations this may not be true anymore and when stigmergy comes into play it opens a door to a whole new method of knowledge search.
Attention-based stigmergic Distributed Collaborative Organizations
A Distributed Collaborative Organization (DCO) is a new model of human organization which did not exist until recently. Now that technology allows for Distributed Ledgers such as what we see with the Bitcoin blockchain it opens the door to new forms of human organizations such as the Distributed Collaborative Organization. Distributed Collaborative Organizations have unique capabilities and work by utilizing a token which represents "membership" in the DCO. Because of how DCOs are set up the tokens likely do not represent securities as they would if the traditional firm were used.
Attention-based stigmergic DCOs can take advantage of swarm intelligence to direct the attention of the members of the DCO. Stigmergy can be implemented through attractor patterns/attractor tokens, and incentive design patterns, both which would direct the attention and shape the activities of the swarm through simple algorithmic rules written as smart contracts. In this instance as Larry Lessig is famously quoted as saying: "Code is Law" but in a non-hierarchical swarm the user's attention is the most precious resource.
Because attention is the most precious resource in a swarm there should be a mechanism allowing advertisers, or others, to pay for the attention of individual members within the swarm. In this case the DCO would have to be designed in such a way that attention is treated as extremely scarce, something to be preserved by use of bots/autonomous agents (personal preference swarms?) and automation. These personal swarms or personal drone networks if you'd like to call them that would seek out knowledge and information on behalf of individuals without the possibility of distraction.
These swarms could seek out the best deals for individuals. It could collect an extremely detailed amount of information about each and every product and use algorithms to compare products. This would allow swarms to evaluate anything from video games, to supermarket food, to stocks, to populate a list and buy, or to apply swarm intelligence to the construction of investment portfolios. All of this leads to a completely new paradigm of human organization through self organizing stigmergic institutions.
References
Grosan, C., Abraham, A., & Chis, M. (2006). Swarm intelligence in data mining (pp. 1-20). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Martens, D., Baesens, B., & Fawcett, T. (2011). Editorial survey: swarm intelligence for data mining. Machine Learning, 82(1), 1-42.
Ocasio, W. (1997). TOWARDS AN ATTENTION-BASED VIEW OF THE FIRM WILLIAM OCASlO. Psychology, 1, 403-404.
Tseng, C. C., & CHEN, P. C. (2009, August). SEARCH ACTIVITIES FOR INNOVATION--AN ATTENTION-BASED VIEW. In Academy of Management Proceedings (Vol. 2009, No. 1, pp. 1-6). Academy of Management.
This post is certified as from the original author by way of public keys posted at these locations: http://darkai.org/?p=527 and https://steemit.com/steemit/@dana-edwards/private-communication-with-me-via-pgp-for-those-who-know-and-understand
To every whale that upvoted this today, THANK YOU!!!
You have completely restored my faith in our system. This topic really does take the prize in my opinion, this and Xeroc's but this is the best "not steem" topic I've seen since being here.
Certainly agree. I've come to realise that it's bound to happen over time for quality content to be added to whale vote lists, simply because over time their investment in an illiquid STEEM asset increases, which provides an incentive to protect that investment.
@dana-edwards your post and topic are insightful. But pseudo AI networks based on human attention are not new. We've had them for a long while now.
Your idea while innovative is not unique, both Amazon Mechanical Turk and Clickworker do exactly as you describe.
There isn't any benefit that I can see to combining this with blockchain tech the way you described. Nevertheless it is really good food for thought and I would like to collaborate with you on a real distributed AI targeting CDSS applications, but one supported by human experts such as licensed clinicians especially during it's earliest training phases.
Our plan is to make this an XPrize submission.
Let me know if you're interested and I'll contact you offlist with your permission.
p.s. While I realize your primary thrust is humans, you may be interested in reading this...
http://www.wildml.com/2016/01/attention-and-memory-in-deep-learning-and-nlp/
What I'm talking about is intelligent agents. More like Amazon Echo than Amazon Turk. More like Alexa than Clickworker. Here is an example of what I mean: https://github.com/cantino/huginn/
It is my understanding our brains are the bottleneck. Relying on human experts makes sense when there are experts but when you're doing certain new things there is no such thing as an expert. At the same time, how do you know which people you can trust? So instead I'm thinking intelligence amplification is the better solution and the reason to do it on a blockchain is so the whole world can have access without a point of failure.
In your post on your blog you mention beneficial bots. I'm very much for beneficial bots with the understanding that anything which saves time or attention adds value. Both time and attention are scarce resources for humans. If we can set curation on autopilot that is fine as long as it's voting based on criteria we would vote on if we had the attention.
Hey Huginn looks like a really neat platform. Thanks for showing that to me, I can already see possibilities.
I have to disagree on the brain being a bottle neck. It's by far and away the most powerful parallel processing system in the world. However I do understand your point. There are only so many hours in a day and it makes sense to automate repetitive tasks. It's the body that's the bottle neck though, not the brain. Just think about how we develop workflows in our daily lives that begin to self optimize and I think you'll see I'm right there.
We'd have to ask @dan to be certain, but I'm reasonably certain that Graphene, the blockchain tech that powers both bitshares and steem would never be able to deal with the kinds of irregular data you would need in order to store any sort of bespoke knowledge.
Blockchains are not a particularly well suited storage mechanism for this sort of information though because they are really nothing more than a distributed timestamped ledger service with cryptographic guarantees. If you don't need a rigid form of consensus then you don't need a blockchain. What you describe is the opposite of rigid consensus, it's fluid consensus based on perception. "I 25% agree with person A and 40% disagree with person B" In the blockchain world that's a consensus fork. In the real world, it's just how people are.
There is however the possibility of combining cryptographic signing and authentication with a regular document store or even a graph db such as neo4j. So long as there doesn't need to be rigid consensus, just regularity of the dataset then this approach makes sense. For distributed raw data storage you could just use Freenet or something like it...
https://freenetproject.org/
On the whole I do agree with you. Intelligence amplification as a force multiplier is the way forward. And the real secrets will be found in small specialized agent systems that can act cooperatively, i.e. swarms.
If I can be free to think, I can think more. Even typing is a chore that would better be handled by dictation AI. Curation based on a rudimentary form of collective swarm intelligence but with human guidance is also the topic of the blog post I linked above and really, really hope you'll read and comment on. :D
I'm not sure if Graphene in specific could do it as it is now but I do think it could be upgraded to manage it. I know for sure Tauchain could do it which is why I've given so much of my attention to Tauchain. Freenet is a bit outdated (2001) technology and doesn't even handle basics of the semantic web so I would not rely on it. The technology you need is the technology behind the semantic web which Tauchain promises to have. Solid also looks good and is made by Tim Berners-Lee, designed specifically for social media.
Generally though, it's going to happen sooner or later whether we see it on Tauchain or Graphene. To me a blockchain is just a data structure. But it does not have to be rigid, you can make it flexible and Tauchain shows that, but even to some degree you see it in DPOS. The blockchain allows you to have a flow of time, a sequence, an agreed upon shared state for any specific point in time, and for certain things this is necessary, but you can use other data structures too like tangles(DAGs) or even what SAFE Network is doing, depending on what you need to do.
Steemit needs the data structure it has but you can do sidechains with it to extend it.
The benefit of blockchain is that you can bake in economic incentives to reward wanted behaviour. Or am I wrong?
Wow, actually... That's brilliant I hadn't considered the economic incentive before.
@markopaasila this gives me a brilliant idea for something completely unique to steem.
Personal Agents of global mind from Russia. Realized project:
http://aigents.com/papers/2016/Aigents-What-Is-That-2016-en.pdf
Thanks for the read... It gave me some ideas... :)
Thank a lot for the education! It was well needed and you sure got my upvote. Namaste :)
Interesting post, keep posting!
I intend to post more on the topic of attention scarcity because it's the main constraint for Steemit. Steemit is in my opinion based on attention because attention is a required resource for Subjective Proof of Work. The whales do not have unlimited attention and the only way around it long term is bots/intelligent agents or voting power has to be more decentralized.
I was reading smooth on bitcointalk, and he was saying that they have around 40 votes before they exhaust their voting power. Now that -as I understand it- means that even if they were able to have more attention or delegate the curation process to helpers, they'd still be lacking the ability to vote >40 articles or comments... so decentralization of voting is a necessity as you say.
Voting power exhaustion is a matter of percentages. A whale still has more power after 40 votes than a minnow.
Also, whales do not need to vote with max power on each vote. They can give partial votes. The user interface just hasn't adapted to it yet.
My brain knows that those kind of perfection are coming but at the same time Steem is already so perfect that it has a hard time seeing those coming.
Nice... hopefully that will increase whale voting without overthinking how much they give out...
No arguing with that logic :) @dan
I agree, bots would also have inspectable code so that we can see what algos are used by the whales to reward content, right now they not only are limited by their limited attention, they are using criteria that nobody can examine or determine to rewards and incentivize certain content.
Right now they just like what they like. What you see on the front page is Remember this isn't a tipping platform. From the whale's point of view they aren't "tipping" a content producer. They're just upvoting.
It's like when a fat guy does a cannon ball into a pool. He's just having fun & being himself, and doing what everyone else is doing, but people around him can get annoyed because he's making a much bigger splash.
@dana-edwards (posting here because it's ontopic and related to what you're saying)
I would absolutely LOVE your feedback on this...
https://steemit.com/steemit/@williambanks/bot-warz-a-hybrid-approach
Good point about attention being a resource for subjective proof of work and a constraint for Steemit.
Can swarms even form without a whale or two pointing out where they 'should' form?
Similar to SP, SMD tokens cannot be purchased directly on an external exchange. SMD are primarily earned through contributing but can be purchased by converting STEEM tokens to SMD tokens.
Actually Steem Dollars can now purchased on external exchanges !
https://poloniex.com/exchange#btc_sbd
https://bittrex.com/Market/Index?MarketName=BTC-SBD
PS Abbreviation of SBD = Steem Backed Dollars
or just SD = Steem Dollars (not SMD please edit)
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:D I am an amateur beekeeper and this kind of reminds me of how a bee colony operates in locating food source and new hive locations.
Your article inspired me to give it a shot at my own post on how Blockchain, DAO and Steem reflect pheromone actions within a bee colony so thanks for that!
Have a look, it compliments your article quite well!
https://steemit.com/blockchain/@loewan/blockchain-dao-and-steem-from-the-perspectives-of-honeybees
Interesting you mention that. All swarm AI's take their cues primarily from nature, because nature was the first to solve these problems and has gotten really good at it.
A honey bee finding a flower with nectar in it is the same exact behavior as a swarm locating the next best topic to upvote.
It's good fun being a beekeeper. I feel a lot more attuned to the flora and the weather conditions in my surrounding areas. There are always mad surprises whenever I open the hive for inspections and it's always wonderful to read about something new and crazy and have it confirmed by observation.
Want to see the 10 most common words used in this article and a word cloud of the top 100 updated daily? Head over to http://steemread.com
Hey that's pretty awesome! Do you happen to have the source for that tool? I've been looking for a message extraction tool for steem and this looks like a good basis for it.
Who's the idiot that downvoted this topic? 1 down vote cost Dana $1,100?
Are you seriously asking those of us who care about quality content to go somewhere else?
It's completely on topic and targets the majority of community members, even if the people interested in it aren't necessarily whales.
Seriously guys, flagging is for spam and abuse, not because you think a posting is overrated or have a grudge. Using it for anything else is abusing the system.
@Dan come on man, please require that flagging require both a name and a comment, so we can know who these guys are at least and why. You said yourself that bagholders would always act in the best interests of the coin, but how is abusing the flagging system in the best interests of coin? Make them be as public as the upvoters at least, please! That way they at least have their reputation and curation on the line.
Otherwise the flagging system is going to be abused by people who are jealous and have nothing to risk at all. Yeah it might trigger mod wars, but at the very least, the community should have the right to give back the money to the person who earned even if someone is jealous and doesn't feel like they deserve it.
Anyone else agree with me about this?
I agree, the idiot is @smooth and @smooth.witness
same whale with two accounts
I agree with you. There have been many article I have seen that someone has flagged and for the life of me I couldn't see why. I always wanted to know who these people are flagging articles. Maybe it is my sense of "your right to know your accuser". It's the same reason I feel that there should not be any "anonymous" tips to the police. Too easy to abuse the system.
If you are going to flag you should have the courage of your conviction. User names should accompany the flag. Maybe we should also be able to up and down vote the flagger. Flagging should be reserved to a limited set of circumstances.