The Selfish Ledger - A requested response to @cupidzero's post
@cupidzero wanted my thoughts on this. It is a response to what he wrote about in The Slow Creep of Scientific Dictatorship: Google's "Selfish Ledger" + Transcript and while it started as a comment it grew and I decided it was worth a post of its own.
There are several things this makes me consider. One is an aspect of Google itself, and the other is around the term acceleration. I'll talk about Google first.
Google started with the motto "Don't be evil". I think that is a pretty good motto as the only people we truly can and should be able to control are ourselves. So "Don't be evil" is an introspective motto. I think it was actually a pretty good one.
The problem comes about when the word Don't is replaced with the word Stop. That turns it into a subjective force that generally is extroverted rather than introverted.
This means the people will make it their goal to attempt to stop what THEY see as evil. This typically leads to very bad places.
I contend that some of the first seeds of true are evil arrive from the concept that it is okay to force others to act against their will whether it is physical force, or coercive force.
I am a strong advocate of the saying "Good ideas don't require force" and in fact that currently is my favorite saying. It is at the center of many of the ways I think.
The Selfish Ledger rather than allowing nature and the spreading of ideas without force seeks to apply a directed experience that subtlety forces people towards a desired goal. It is innocuous, secretive, and easy to ignore its incremental erosion of free will.
So while I do see it definitely as something that can work, I am no fan of people dictating the end goal that they believe everyone should follow.
"Don't be evil"
Now I'd like to discuss the second thought that occurred to me as I was watching the video from Google on Selfish Ledgers.
I believe this to a degree happens naturally. These things occur without the technological push. As with most things enabled by technology the task and the actions have always existed, but the technology enables a dramatic acceleration of the process.
It is much like the tech, and algorithms often provide us with a fast forward device that let's us speed through things.
There are consequences of such an acceleration.
It is important to recall that all tools can be used for malevolent or benevolent purposes. If they can then in general they WILL be used for both. In society we simply hope that the cases of malevolence are greatly outnumbered by the cases of benevolence.
Through a natural progression these cases of malevolence should likely be spaced out and not come at us in rapid punch succession.
It should be noted that if we greatly accelerate the process then the frequency with which we encounter malevolent situations should be much higher. So too would be the cases of benevolence.
Analogy
I want to use an analogy to represent my concerns about acceleration.
In your life it is likely you will know someone killed or hurt badly in a car crash. Though mostly you'll hear stories about successful travel, and benevolent experiences. When someone you know or care about is injured or killed in a car crash that can be a strong psychological impact and quite mentally traumatic. It usually takes you some time to deal with that. Let's say that happens once ever 10 years which is likely high.
If we were to fast forward this and accelerate it. What if you had to deal with this trauma every year, then every month, then every week, then every day?
What would that do to your mind? I suspect it'd do quite a bit of damage, and eventually if you managed to survive with some semblance of sanity you'd become numb to such things. Friend killed? Shrug. It happens.
This is a bad thing.
We must keep in mind that accelerating processes while it COULD get us somewhere faster, may also strip us of our ability to cope with the malevolent outcomes due to having insufficient gaps in time between occurrences.
The Selfish Ledger approach to me seems to be simply steps to greatly accelerate what already occurs at a much slower pace in nature.
The "Good ideas don't require force" is not a statement about being subtle or innocuous. It simply is if the premise is a good one then you need not apply any force at all simply because people will choose to do so of their own free will. It does not require selective omission of information that might steer them some other way. It does not require selective insertion of information to steer anyone a certain way. A good idea doesn't require manipulation.
It simply need be presented and people will think "that is a good idea" and choose to embrace it of their own volition.
Free Will.
For those that are religious. Even God did not seek to take away "Free Will".
Your thinking is good. Now people just want himself happy like selfish. But everybody should control his selfishness with in a limit. Don't be evil.
"Good ideas don't require force"
does that mean that if you have to enforce a law that you have a bad law?
If the law is not protecting private property or the natural rights of an individual then yeah I'd consider it a bad law.
If you are defending either of those things then are you forcing, or are you resisting an infringement upon yourself and your property?
self defense in other words?
Yep.
A nice summary of what is taking place.
I have thought this for a long time. I remember decades ago wondering as I heard liberals pitch for more of my money to be taxed why they were not writing bigger checks to the IRS to help fund these things they insisted we were allowing to fall through the cracks. Or setting up an independent organization with their money to tackle it. Why is it always my money and sweat when it is their vision?
I do see the invasion on privacy accelerating as well. It has left me dismayed as I watched cameras put up at street corners, then Amazon and Google have voice activated technology allowing them to listen to every word.
In the last 6 weeks or so I have had to cancel my Office subscription due to their updated TOS allowing them to not only monitor, but cancel/share my work however they wish.
Yahoo is forcing an agreement that they will scan every email, every comment and not only punish accordingly but also share the information.
I noticed in the new lease I signed that they have permission to enter my apartment with no advance notice, legally able to break the door down if it is impeding them.
The acceleration of insistence on there being no escape from intrusion and being watched is frightening.
Who knows, perhaps by the next election Bernie will buy his fourth house as he calls for higher taxation so everything can be free. Better not hold out either, they can see every last penny you have no matter where you go as no motion or corner is left unmonitored.
Check out LibreOffice. Open source. Works well.
I had forgotten about the "don't be evil" motto....lol. Looks to me like they've kind of gotten away from that and embraced evil and selfishness wholeheartedly. Unfortunately I still have a gmail account which has been my primary email for years now. It's hard to find big companies these days that aren't, by true definition, evil.
I've given it some serious thought. Don't be evil is about a person looking at their own actions. Historically when people decide they can fight evil outside of themselves that leads to evil. Evil is subjective and when people think they can stop evil in others that typically leads to some type of persecution.
Don't be evil applies to ourselves. Us applying our own subjective analysis of evil just to ourselves is not impacting others.
Don't be evil is more of a lead by example approach.
Stop evil is more of a tyrannical and authoritarian approach.
I think Don't Be Evil was actually the beginning of Fake News:). I've never thought for one second it was anything but a Jedi mind trick to make us think something about Google while they actually pursued whatever was in their capitalistic self interest... I don't have a gmail account and don't use google search in general. Just like I don't use FB.
Thanks... I'm stealing your IW meme!!!
That was made by @insanityisfree and he shared it in the discord the day he made it. It is low footprint so I like it.
Technocracy News did a good article on it. I haven't gotten to do a post yet... I got up yesterday thinking it was Sat. and I was going to do my Donald Marshall post- then broke a tooth and it cut up the inside of my mouth... I think I'll go back to bed... Wait I have to go to the hospital
Honestly- I don't want to be me anymore!
Things come in clusters. It'll get better. Sorry to hear about that though, doesn't sound like a particularly enjoyable time.
Curated for #informationwar (by @wakeupnd)
Relevance: Knowledge is power.
I like the concept of acceleration as you apply it here and I see very clearly how it applies to the selfish ledger. It is, as you note, the restriction of information that deforms the natural process of selecting options and makes the selfish ledger an instance of force.
Given your computer knowledge, I was also wondering how effective you think expert systems would be in being able to determine what it is they don't know about us and determining how best to get that information. As a rhetorical, if an expert system designs a product just for us, could we tell if that product was presented as one option of many? A weird variant of the Turing test perhaps...
Thanks for your response, I enjoyed reading it!
I read an article yesterday in MIT Technology Review (a magazine I've reading for 20 years). The article was titled: Dueling Neural Networks.
Here is the breakthrough they talked about: "Two AI systems can spar with each other to create ultra realistic original images or sound, something machines have never been able to do before." The approach they used was something called generative adversarial network (GAN). It takes two neural networks and puts them against each other in a cat and mouse type game. They both train on the same data set. One is generator and the other is the discriminator. The generator creates variations of images already seen and the discriminator identifies weather the image is like other images it was trained on or a fake produced by the generator. Over time, the generator gets so good that the discriminator can't tell if it's fake.
I was a bit freaked out that in the very near future, AI will be able to create what they don't know about us and that will become fact. We will start to doubt what is truth or fact... It won't be limited to images and sounds.
That is crazy! I was under the impression that the fakes would always be detectable, we are in for a world of confusion if that isn't the case. And in the future, the likelihood that it won't be limited to images and sounds is high, nor will it even be necessary to generate such when the machines can directly interface with your neural network. Check out my latest post on just that topic: Cyborg Chickens
Thanks for sharing your Cyborg Chickens post. Scary stuff...
I haven't spent a lot of time doing predictive modeling of wants, desires, etc. I have mostly done Natural Language Processing, AI Opponents for games, and simulated life forms sometimes referred to as A.L.F.s.
I did play around with making programs that would ask a bunch of questions and then make a stereotypical statement about what type of person you are.
The problem with stereotypes and generalizations is they leave very little room for the individual. They instead seek to kill the individual and say we are all like whatever groups they deem we fit into.
The problem with presuming the interests of people is that if they are anything like me my interests change. I don't want to endlessly consume the same types of books, the same TV shows, and the same food.
I may for a time have those I prefer, but my tastes change.
Selfish Ledger doesn't seem to leave much room for people to be individuals and to change their minds. It spends all this time predicting what the algorithm thinks you want based purely from input from a specific time in your life. Once you have taken a path you are forever labeled, forever shoehorned, forever damned.
Witness the death of individuality. Witness bigotry in its purest form as it targets the only minority that truly matters. The individual.
Love this saying so much, that it has been my steemit moniker since day one. I was recently told by a socialist that capitalism requires force, I had a good laugh about it. Thanks for a good write up on it.
That socialist has a view of capitalism that really is corporatism, not capitalism.
Capitalism is an economic system. It is not a government. It has not law enforcement branch, it has no rules other than supply, demand, and voluntary exchange.
To make anything involuntary is typically the introduction of a government, a rule maker, etc. That is not a free market.
So because Capitalism has been so muddied down and people usually have their own interpretation I usually stick to the free market and make it very clear that as soon as any rules are applied to it that it truly is no longer free. The only rules that should matter are the voluntary contracts between individuals.
Yeah, that was all mentioned and known to him. Yet still dismissed. Some people are just too dense to get it.
Thanks for the information sir.
its a very helpful post, thank you :)