Ownership is the ability to fully exclude others from, or if you wish, dispose of, an object. Ownership is an extremely dumb negotiation outcome for any object larger than a sparrow. It’s something that humans think is fine and eternal because of how dumb humans are. We simply aren’t able to do better, but better deals are easily imaginable.
As an example of why you wouldn’t want to pay the premium (which would be high) of full ownership over a galaxy: If you have sole ownership of something, then you can exclude others from knowing what you’re doing with it, so you could be running torture simulations in there, which would bother other people a lot, just because it isn’t in my yard doesn’t mean it’s not affecting my utility function, so you would have to pay an insane premium for that kind of deal. You’d prefer to at least cede a limited degree of ownership by maintaining constrained auditing systems that prove to your counterparties that you’re not using the galaxy to produce (much) suffering without proving anything else, and they’d be willing to let you have it for much less, in that case.
And in a sense we’re already part of the way to this. You can buy an animal, but in a way you don’t completely own it, you aren’t allowed to torture it (though for the aforementioned humans being dumb issues you can still totally do it because we don’t have the attentional or bureaucratic bandwidth to enforce those laws in most situations in which they’d be necessary). If you mistreat it, it can be taken away from you. You could say that this weaker form of ownership is simply what you meant to begin with, but I’m saying that there are sharing schemes that’re smarter than this in the same way that this is smarter than pure ownership. Lets say your dog looks a lot like a famous dog from an anime you’ve never seen and never want to see. But a lot of other people saw it. So they want to have it cosplay as that for halloween, while you don’t really want to do it at all. Obviously going along with it is a better negotiation outcome, society in theory (and sometimes in practice) would have subsidised your dog if they had an assurance that you’d fulfil this wish. But it wont, or can’t afford to. So you don’t do it. And everyone is worse off, because of how extraordinarily high the transaction costs are for things as stupid as humans.
I did attempt to preempt this kind of response with “some guardrails on effective and ethical use of those galaxies” in my comment. There exists a reasonable middle ground where individual people get significant say on what happens with some allotment of resources, more say than the rest of humanity does. Disagreements on values have a natural solution in establishing scopes of optimization and boundaries between them, even if these are not absolute boundaries (let alone physical boundaries), rather than mixing everything together and denying meaningful individual agency to everyone.
The reasonable question is which portions should get how much weight from individual agency, and which portions must be shared, governed jointly with others. But starting from the outset with little shared resources and (obviously) allowing establishment of shared projects using their resources by agreement between the stakeholders doesn’t seem much different from some de novo process of establishing such shared projects with no direct involvement of individuals, if the stakeholders would indeed on reflection prefer to establish such projects and cede resources to them.
(I’m of course imagining a superintelligent level of agency/governance, to match the scale of resources. But if humans are to survive at all and get more than a single server rack of resources, ability to grow up seems like the most basic thing, and governing a galaxy at the level of a base human does seem like failing at effective use. Preferences extrapolated by some external superintelligence seem like a reasonable framing for temporary delegation, but these preferences would fail to remain legitimate if the person claimed as their originator grows up and asks for something different. So ultimately individual agency should have greater authority than any abstraction of preference, provided the individual had the opportunity to get their act sufficiently together.)
But starting from the outset with little shared resources and (obviously) allowing establishment of shared projects using their resources by agreement between the stakeholders doesn’t seem much different from some de novo process of establishing such shared projects with no direct involvement of individuals
You’re speaking as if we’re starting with strict borders and considering renegotiating, for most of the resources in the universe and also on the planet this is not the case, ownership of space is a taboo, ownership over ocean resources is shared, at least on the nation level. It’s as if humans have shame, sense the absurdity of it all, and on some level fear enclosed futures. I think shared ownership (which is not really ownership) is a more likely default, shared at least between more than one person, if not a population.
But to the point, I don’t think we know that the two starting points lead to equivalent outcomes. My thesis is generally that it’s very likely that transparency (then coordination) physically wins out under basically any natural starting conditions, but even if the possibility that some coordination problems are permanent is very small, I’d prefer if we avoided the risk. But I also notice that there may be some governance outcomes that make shared start much less feasible than walled start.
You’d prefer to at least cede a limited degree of ownership by maintaining constrained auditing systems that prove to your counterparties that you’re not using the galaxy to produce (much) suffering without proving anything else, and they’d be willing to let you have it for much less, in that case.
This idea seems unstable for inherent reasons, not just because of human stupidity. The reasons why it’s unstable help explain exclusive ownership. I’m not sure galaxies are viable units of ownership; I’ll just say “galaxy” to match the original comment. I’ll assume multipolarity.
Single-auditor versions fail because of easy exploitation. If the asset holder controls the audit channel, they can omit or falsify critical information. If a single external party controls the audit channel, they can weaponize it against the owner. Who wants that in their galaxy?
A multiparty audit design seems better. It can be something like safeguards at nuclear sites or financial audits on steroids: auditors chosen by different stakeholders, random and cross-validated inspections, custody of sensors and evidence split so nobody controls everything, etc. These design choices buy something, but they don’t solve the entire problem. Multiparty audits are still exploitable through collusion. Motivated actors may be able to abuse measurement blind spots. False accusations can be turned into political or military action. Monitoring and transaction costs for a galaxy can be quite large indeed. Crucially, the scheme works only in a power-symmetric equilibrium with credible enforcement. Absent that, audits are either useless (the owner has de facto control) or perhaps expand to become centralized governance.[1]
All of this assumes actual ownership in some sense without effective global enforcement. If all of your ownership is ultimately at the pleasure of a singleton, then it can enforce arbitrary rules.
In a world that has ASI, a much better way of maintaining the integrity of the audit system by building it to be intelligent enough to tell whether it’s being fooled, and with a desire of its own to stay neutral. Which I guess is like being multistakeholder, since you both will have signed off on its design.
But in such a world, the audit system would be a feature of the brain of the local authorities. You would co-design yourselves in such a way that you have the ability to make binding promises (or if you’re precious about your design, co-design your factories in such a way that they have the ability to verify that your design can make binding promises (or co-design your factory factories to …)). This makes you a better/viable at all trading partner. You have the option of not using it except when it benefits you. But having it means that they can simply ask you whether your galaxy contains any optimal 17 square packings, and you send them an attestation that no when you need to pack 17 squares you’re using the socially acceptable symmetrical, suboptimal packings, and if it has a certain signature then they know you weren’t capable of faking this message.
I think I made a mistake about your assumptions. I interpreted the parties in your original comment as superhuman non-ASI versions of the human galaxy owners rather than themselves ASIs.
Let’s see if I understand your reply correctly. You posit that the participants will be able to design a mechanism that from N levels upstream (factories of factories) recursively creates honest audit systems. For example, an evil participant may wish to construct an audit system that is absolutely reliable for trade and anything else but allows them to create, hide, and erase all traces of creating torture simulations (once). If the ASIs are able to prevent this, then they can escape game-theoretic traps and enjoy cooperation without centralizing.
Ownership is the ability to fully exclude others from, or if you wish, dispose of, an object. Ownership is an extremely dumb negotiation outcome for any object larger than a sparrow. It’s something that humans think is fine and eternal because of how dumb humans are. We simply aren’t able to do better, but better deals are easily imaginable.
As an example of why you wouldn’t want to pay the premium (which would be high) of full ownership over a galaxy: If you have sole ownership of something, then you can exclude others from knowing what you’re doing with it, so you could be running torture simulations in there, which would bother other people a lot, just because it isn’t in my yard doesn’t mean it’s not affecting my utility function, so you would have to pay an insane premium for that kind of deal. You’d prefer to at least cede a limited degree of ownership by maintaining constrained auditing systems that prove to your counterparties that you’re not using the galaxy to produce (much) suffering without proving anything else, and they’d be willing to let you have it for much less, in that case.
And in a sense we’re already part of the way to this. You can buy an animal, but in a way you don’t completely own it, you aren’t allowed to torture it (though for the aforementioned humans being dumb issues you can still totally do it because we don’t have the attentional or bureaucratic bandwidth to enforce those laws in most situations in which they’d be necessary). If you mistreat it, it can be taken away from you. You could say that this weaker form of ownership is simply what you meant to begin with, but I’m saying that there are sharing schemes that’re smarter than this in the same way that this is smarter than pure ownership. Lets say your dog looks a lot like a famous dog from an anime you’ve never seen and never want to see. But a lot of other people saw it. So they want to have it cosplay as that for halloween, while you don’t really want to do it at all. Obviously going along with it is a better negotiation outcome, society in theory (and sometimes in practice) would have subsidised your dog if they had an assurance that you’d fulfil this wish. But it wont, or can’t afford to. So you don’t do it. And everyone is worse off, because of how extraordinarily high the transaction costs are for things as stupid as humans.
I did attempt to preempt this kind of response with “some guardrails on effective and ethical use of those galaxies” in my comment. There exists a reasonable middle ground where individual people get significant say on what happens with some allotment of resources, more say than the rest of humanity does. Disagreements on values have a natural solution in establishing scopes of optimization and boundaries between them, even if these are not absolute boundaries (let alone physical boundaries), rather than mixing everything together and denying meaningful individual agency to everyone.
The reasonable question is which portions should get how much weight from individual agency, and which portions must be shared, governed jointly with others. But starting from the outset with little shared resources and (obviously) allowing establishment of shared projects using their resources by agreement between the stakeholders doesn’t seem much different from some de novo process of establishing such shared projects with no direct involvement of individuals, if the stakeholders would indeed on reflection prefer to establish such projects and cede resources to them.
(I’m of course imagining a superintelligent level of agency/governance, to match the scale of resources. But if humans are to survive at all and get more than a single server rack of resources, ability to grow up seems like the most basic thing, and governing a galaxy at the level of a base human does seem like failing at effective use. Preferences extrapolated by some external superintelligence seem like a reasonable framing for temporary delegation, but these preferences would fail to remain legitimate if the person claimed as their originator grows up and asks for something different. So ultimately individual agency should have greater authority than any abstraction of preference, provided the individual had the opportunity to get their act sufficiently together.)
You’re speaking as if we’re starting with strict borders and considering renegotiating, for most of the resources in the universe and also on the planet this is not the case, ownership of space is a taboo, ownership over ocean resources is shared, at least on the nation level. It’s as if humans have shame, sense the absurdity of it all, and on some level fear enclosed futures. I think shared ownership (which is not really ownership) is a more likely default, shared at least between more than one person, if not a population.
But to the point, I don’t think we know that the two starting points lead to equivalent outcomes. My thesis is generally that it’s very likely that transparency (then coordination) physically wins out under basically any natural starting conditions, but even if the possibility that some coordination problems are permanent is very small, I’d prefer if we avoided the risk. But I also notice that there may be some governance outcomes that make shared start much less feasible than walled start.
This idea seems unstable for inherent reasons, not just because of human stupidity. The reasons why it’s unstable help explain exclusive ownership. I’m not sure galaxies are viable units of ownership; I’ll just say “galaxy” to match the original comment. I’ll assume multipolarity.
Single-auditor versions fail because of easy exploitation. If the asset holder controls the audit channel, they can omit or falsify critical information. If a single external party controls the audit channel, they can weaponize it against the owner. Who wants that in their galaxy?
A multiparty audit design seems better. It can be something like safeguards at nuclear sites or financial audits on steroids: auditors chosen by different stakeholders, random and cross-validated inspections, custody of sensors and evidence split so nobody controls everything, etc. These design choices buy something, but they don’t solve the entire problem. Multiparty audits are still exploitable through collusion. Motivated actors may be able to abuse measurement blind spots. False accusations can be turned into political or military action. Monitoring and transaction costs for a galaxy can be quite large indeed. Crucially, the scheme works only in a power-symmetric equilibrium with credible enforcement. Absent that, audits are either useless (the owner has de facto control) or perhaps expand to become centralized governance. [1]
All of this assumes actual ownership in some sense without effective global enforcement. If all of your ownership is ultimately at the pleasure of a singleton, then it can enforce arbitrary rules.
Wait, is this anarchism, and I am writing a critique of anarchism?
In a world that has ASI, a much better way of maintaining the integrity of the audit system by building it to be intelligent enough to tell whether it’s being fooled, and with a desire of its own to stay neutral. Which I guess is like being multistakeholder, since you both will have signed off on its design.
But in such a world, the audit system would be a feature of the brain of the local authorities. You would co-design yourselves in such a way that you have the ability to make binding promises (or if you’re precious about your design, co-design your factories in such a way that they have the ability to verify that your design can make binding promises (or co-design your factory factories to …)). This makes you a better/viable at all trading partner. You have the option of not using it except when it benefits you. But having it means that they can simply ask you whether your galaxy contains any optimal 17 square packings, and you send them an attestation that no when you need to pack 17 squares you’re using the socially acceptable symmetrical, suboptimal packings, and if it has a certain signature then they know you weren’t capable of faking this message.
You really don’t want to lack this ability.
I think I made a mistake about your assumptions. I interpreted the parties in your original comment as superhuman non-ASI versions of the human galaxy owners rather than themselves ASIs.
Let’s see if I understand your reply correctly. You posit that the participants will be able to design a mechanism that from N levels upstream (factories of factories) recursively creates honest audit systems. For example, an evil participant may wish to construct an audit system that is absolutely reliable for trade and anything else but allows them to create, hide, and erase all traces of creating torture simulations (once). If the ASIs are able to prevent this, then they can escape game-theoretic traps and enjoy cooperation without centralizing.