If the receiver is paid then the receiver has an incentive to favour profit over content interest. If the receiver gets nothing then they’re only going to favour messages that actually interest them.
No amount of money can buy interest, but very little money can buy the artifice of it. I don’t believe that helps anyone in the long term.
That is an entirely fair point.
The problem I have with most stories about AIs is that the AIs are essentially human characters with a dose of one or more personality disorders and megalomania. The matrix series suffers from this problem. What it brought to the table in filmmaking wasn’t particularly anything to do with the premise of AI. It was the same old humans and robots can’t get along so they kill each other trope (which isn’t necessarily a bad backbone for a story. People have been getting attacked by their artificial creations in stories for a long time).
If Wachowski insists on revisiting the Matrix universe then I’d hope that is for a very solid reason. I fear that won’t be the case.
What I’d like to see in an AI story is humans and AIs interacting in complex ways beyond simple hostility. At the end of the Matrix series there was an in principle peace agreement but that’s all there was. Zion was trashed and the machines are staring down the barrel of a massive reduction in their power source (dumb canon, but canon nonetheless). Both sides are facing the prospect of a massive influx of refugee humans leaving the matrix, and causing huge problems for the matrix and the real world. If there has to be more story in the Matrix universe then why not “The war just ended and peace is more complicated and fraught than war”?
Pay to read services already exist and the pay part happens on the service’s servers (for example, via landing pages or formatted links, etc.). The business recruits and profiles an audience then sells their eyeballs to marketers. The business takes their cut and offers a reward to readers.
It’s taken me a bit to realise that this is an economics problem more than a technical one.
Exactly because PoW is less fungible. If businesses can simply buy their way around the problem they’ll do exactly that. Nobody has figured out how to build a time machine yet, so if you’re forced to wait by PoW there’s nothing you can do.
Money also creates financial incentive for low value messaging, PoW punishes it.
In PoW those who communicate well are rewarded, those who don’t are punished, and it is *content* and not finances that decides who gets privileged in that system.
I think that proof-of-identity and proof-of-work could solve the stated problems.
If the default is that the sender must complete a computational challenge that is going to kill the incentive to waste time (because the time they’re wasting is their own). If you can properly identify senders then you get to decide if and how much computation they have to do to message you. That would also allow for highly granular permissions on individual messages (with a high degree of complexity in rules being possible. It’s essentially like a traffic shaping firewall for your inbox).
Another possibility is to allow the sender to indicate importance (or other flags) to the recipient by showing electively larger proof of work. The flag for importance can have an additional price tag or multiplier attached to it in exactly the same way that any other computational rate for a message could be specified.
If that proof-of-work could be made useful, for example with boinc style computations, then nobody has to feel bad about making people jump through hoops or use up electricity.
Email is a time suck because it’s easy for the sender. Paying with money is one way of dealing with the problem but that requires financial transfers of some sort. Proof-of-work is not subject to the same rules and requirements that fiat is, and by definition everyone sending email has a cpu to use (neither fiat nor proof-of-work are going to solve individual differences in leverage. Nothing can do that).
Since we’re redesigning email, can I ask for file transfer to be dealt with too? Email is the defacto small file transfer method between distinct entities without other established means. This is convenient for the parties involved but all sorts of convoluted and wasteful on the back end. It was never meant to be for file transfer (or html) and one look at how it is done makes the hatchet job to get it to work very apparent. We have more efficient methods of file transfer and bandwidth optimisation these days, so it makes sense to use them.
Sanitising the content of messages would be helpful too. It should be some kind of markdown and not the html free for all it is now. A message should be a single self-contained entity that doesn’t communicate with the outside world. It’s a letter, not an opportunity to run code.
Evolution is random chance plus successful reproduction as a fitness function. Assuming that biological i/o is both possible and advantageous (and that’s a huge assumption) then I would assume we haven’t see it because we haven’t waited long enough yet.
We haven’t been around for that long. We are very successful with a lot less than direct i/o. Our brains are already massive calorie consumers and at their physical limits on a number of metrics (most notably, being able to fit through the birthing canal). Given how terrible evolution is at revisions it is highly unlikely that if direct i/o evolves it would do so in our species. There are only a couple of different templates for brains in organisms complex enough for us to consider for this question, so that’s a limitation too (because my own hunch is that direct i/o would need to be a feature very early in that brain’s evolutionary history to work).
If there is anything that I would argue as being on the path to direct i/o as stated it would be hive insects. They use touch and chemical signals to communicate already, so more complex contact based communication could reasonably occur over time.
If one expands the definition of direct i/o then you could argue that colony organisms or symbiotic organisms are already doing a form of direct i/o. Just a very primitive form thereof.
That being said, we are the first species to be able to create and use technology on ourselves. We can use that technology to modify or remove our limits, including those that evolution has handed us. Given that we are on the cusp of artificial gestation it is very likely we are going to experience both a big bump in evolutionary pressures and an outright speciation of humans. When gestation becomes an industrial process it will be subject to standard industrial optimisations and to the pressures of capitalism. Everyone will want the smartest, prettiest, healthiest baby, and they’ll be willing to pay for that. All of that is before any more aggressive technological measures to directly interface with the brain (which is also under extensive research).
I am no scientist. I accept that anthropogenic climate change is a real. The problem I have is the apocalyptic rhetoric attached. Human beings love to claim things are the end of the world when they’re most certainly not. There are plenty of examples of that in recent history (overpopulation, peak oil, the first time environmental collapse was supposed to kill us, etc.) that have come into fashion and then are gone in a decade or two. How am I, as an ordinary person, supposed to tell the difference between a real crisis and largely empty apocalyptic cultural movements? Climate talk often feels like religiously based end times thinking.
It’s pretty clear to me that creating a climate theory that accounts for past results is useless here. For climate modelling to indicate that things are desperate it must predict the future. If someone can say *the temperature will raise by X here in Y time* then that’s a good start. As far as I’m aware, no such modelling exists (and certainly not in an easy to explain and consume format suitable for the majority).
On the pragmatic front, climate action feels like just more baizuo virtue signalling. We have one climate but there are multiple countries, any of which can undo any efforts to remediate climate issues. The West isn’t going to hand the third world the required technology gratis, nor is it going to invade simply to stop people burning brown coal. This feels exactly like recycling—lots of emotive messaging and expensive sorting programs just so all the garbage can be sent to the third world for poor people to rip apart for metal salvage and burn the left overs. Is anything that is being suggested or done for climate actually efficacious? Is there any point if it can simply be undone by others?
Again on the pragmatic front, and somewhat more cynically, I am forced to ask: Who profits? “Follow the money” is an excellent adage when it comes to figuring out what’s really going on in a situation that otherwise appears complex. If the overarching messaging for the population is “Change your behaviour in this direction, think this way, believe these things, accept these impositions” especially when those running the show are doing the exact opposite of what the messaging suggests, then that tends to erode my faith in that messaging. If you’re constantly flying to climate conferences on your Gulfstream between hanging out on your super yacht then I’ll look to your actions rather than your words.
Finally, if climate change is a problem and we want it fixed then that’s almost certainly going to be dependent on building a profitable industry catering to that. If you want something done then the easiest way for that to happen is by paying for it. If people can get rich from fixing the climate then the climate will get fixed (to a point anyway, no one that profits from a problem is ever going to let that problem truly end. Just ask any activist or charity). The UN certainly isn’t going to get it done.
I know that I’m harping on about what can seem to be a minor point but people and their acts aren’t necessarily equivalent. If someone is part of a group that generally shouldn’t be grounds to discriminate against them, whereas if they say or do something that generally is a valid cause for discrimination. Labels are subjective and can be assigned, conduct is objective and comes directly from the individual in question.
I don’t give a damn if Adam is called a nazi by Bill and Charles, I care that Adam wrote something objectively racist in black and white in a particular post and that can be judged without reference to opinion (That’s what karma is for—peer governance to supplement moderation). I need to be able to say “You broke rule N in this post when you wrote X and you will receive penalty Y for that”.
Nazis and their posts are not synonyms though, are they?
It’s in no way difficult to say what is said in the vast majority of groups on the internet: No racism/racist content. That doesn’t target specific groups or individuals, it targets specific anti-social behaviours. If you *do* the wrong thing you are censured, if you *are* the wrong thing by another’s standards but don’t transgress then you’re fine.
I am arguing that shutting down denunciation in moderation is a good thing for the health of any group. You can easily make rules that apply to all to prevent and deal with transgressions of the sort you are objecting to without resorting to denunciation.
Denunciation destroys groups. If you care about moderation then by extension you should also care about having something left to moderate.
I too had the same reaction as the others. When you say nazis you aren’t referring to actual nazis, you’re just validating denunciation (regardless of your second footnote’s attempt at couching that).
You don’t have to like the ‘nazis’ but you absolutely must defend their protection under the rules if they haven’t transgressed. If you won’t defend their rights then you’re just telling everyone that the rights aren’t rights, they’re privileges that are taken away by whichever dictator happens to be in charge.
I can guarantee that people that are not as well meaning as you are will take note of compromised rule of law because it gives them an easy way to take over the group. A significant part of moderation is in protecting the moderation team and apparatus from entryism and hostile takeovers. Partiality in moderation isn’t just an issue of fairness, it’s an issue of security.
As for moderation itself, what you want are judges and not rulers. There must be clear law, applied without fear or favour, and with full transparency (eg. public rulings, right of appeal, prior rulings forming precedent for future rulings, etc.). There can be no doubt as to what is expected from all. Whatever rules there are there must be confidence in the administration thereof, and that includes mods conducting themselves appropriately. Just like IRL judges what a mod can do and what they should do are two different things. A mod has to be concerned with reputation both as an individual and on behalf of the system they represent. Yes, mods will be limited in the things they can express in group, and that’s exactly the point. They aren’t there as ordinary users.
Spamming works at present because it is cheap. If it costs you 60 minutes of CPU time per individual recipient then you’re not going to be so casual about sending out emails to thousands of emails, are you?
PoW has to be the product of machines. We already have these algorithms for crypto. It doesn’t matter what the work is, it just has to be something that cannot be skipped. All it is is the recipient’s mail server saying “I’ll accept your message after you’ve provided the answer to this arbitrary computation”.