For seeing someone’s source code to act as a commitment mechanism, you have to be reasonably sure that what they show you really is their source code—and also that their source code is not going to be modified by another agent between when they show it to you, and when they get a chance to defect.
While it’s possible to imagine these conditions being met, it seems non-trivial to imagine a society where they are met very frequently.
If agents face one-shot prisoner’s dilemmas with each other very often, there are other ways to get them to cooperate—assuming that they have a communications channel. They could use public-key crypto to signal to each other that they are brothers—in a way that only a real brother would know how to do.
Signalling brotherhood is how our cells cooperate with each other. Cells can’t use cryptography—so their signals can more easily be faked—but future agents will be in a better position there.
For seeing someone’s source code to act as a commitment mechanism, you have to be reasonably sure that what they show you really is their source code—and also that their source code is not going to be modified by another agent between when they show it to you, and when they get a chance to defect.
While it’s possible to imagine these conditions being met, it seems non-trivial to imagine a society where they are met very frequently.
If agents face one-shot prisoner’s dilemmas with each other very often, there are other ways to get them to cooperate—assuming that they have a communications channel. They could use public-key crypto to signal to each other that they are brothers—in a way that only a real brother would know how to do.
Signalling brotherhood is how our cells cooperate with each other. Cells can’t use cryptography—so their signals can more easily be faked—but future agents will be in a better position there.