Exploitation and cooperation in ecology, government, business, and AI

PhilGoetz:

The Catholic church has a feudalistic organization, and is perhaps not coincidentally richer than any Protestant church, probably even per capita - except for the Mormons, with assets of about $6000/member, whose organizational structure I know little about (read this if interested).

This is a completely inaccurate use of the term "feudalistic." The rigid hierarchy of the Catholic Church is extremely dissimilar to the European medieval social order that's commonly called "feudal," in which local lords had a level of autonomy and autarky unimaginable by modern standards.

A Catholic priest who defies his bishop or other superior will lose his position promptly, and the same will happen to a bishop who defies the pope. Control and discipline are enforced tightly at each level, and the hierarchy is staffed by men from lower levels who get promoted and appointed by the central authority (except for the elective pope, of course, and with some rare peculiar semi-autonomous local institutions due to accidents of history). In contrast, a feudal lord ruled his fief for life as his own property, and left it to his heirs after death -- while his overlord, or even king, had no control whatsoever over his day-to-day affairs, and could only demand the regular tribute. Even in cases of open defiance, it was by no means certain whether the king would be able to get his way. This fragmented world of extreme local autonomy and autarky was the polar opposite of the modern tightly disciplined Catholic hierarchy.

Generally speaking, "feudalism" is one of those terms that are often thrown around casually and without any regard for historical accuracy, to the point where they've become nearly meaningless (kind of like "fascism"). Whenever you feel tempted to use it for the purpose of making historical parallels, you should stop and think carefully whether it makes sense.

Modularity sounds like it would refer, not so much to exploitation in itself, but to federalism. A society of small towns, where everybody knows your name and everybody minds each other's business, is modular. Feudalism is also modular: every lord with his vassals is an independent unit. Connections are few, tight, and exclusive. Some people see this as a political ideal: local autonomy, life revolving around small modular units like the family, the church, the lodge.

Nestedness seems to refer to repeated arrangements -- nodes with many edges. People with many friends, many clients, and so on. This notion is a little confusing to me, because it seems to be a property of nodes, rather than of graphs. A star graph has one central node with a lot of neighbors, but all the other nodes are just connected to the center. So is that a highly nested graph, or not?

Just guessing here at a more formal definition, let's let nestedness be the average number of neighbors of each node. That's a measure of how thickly connected the population is, and it makes a rough sort of opposite of modularity.

In that case, a nested society is like an urban society, or like the internet. Each person's circle is wide. Each person has many options. Ideas and conventions are very global, because they can spread pretty much everywhere.

But note that the definition of nestedness matters a lot. Do we want the average? The median? The maximum? The minimum? If we have some very highly connected nodes, and others much less connected, then we have centers of power or influence. It has the global quality of a highly nested graph, but it doesn't guarantee that each person has a wide circle of interactions. Most nodes are dependent on very few, very powerful nodes. (What you think about capitalism will depend a lot on whether you see the economy as closer to a star graph or a complete graph.)

Thinking a bit more about your government-related examples, it seems like one problem is that you don't specify how exactly the notion of "exploiting" translates from the animal world into human relations. Those forms of exploitation that are a clear analogy of animal predatory behavior (e.g. robbery and plunder) are normally illegal in any organized human society and done openly only by rogue criminals. When they're done by organized and persistent structures, rather than outlaw individuals, they're typically given a pretense of a mutually beneficial relationship (e.g. extortionists claiming to sell "protection").

Now, the question is: since the social arrangements that appear exploitative by some criteria will normally be backed by at least some theoretical pretense of mutual benefit, how can we discern to what extent such pretenses are false in each particular case? Moreover, since it's unlikely that any human relations will be purely exploitative or mutualistic in any meaningful sense, how to devise a reasonable measure by which we can rate concrete arrangements on this scale, without any unjustified subjective judgments of whose situation is better or worse? In any case, it seems to me that the approach taken in your "Government" section is too simplistic to be useful.

I wonder if I'm misunderstanding something, or if you are.

Imagine a totalitarian society with one supreme leader. Drawing a simple graph of that, there's one node at the top, connected to many nodes at the bottom. A tree. It seems to me that a tree is neither nested nor modular. If you want to identify freedom with nestedness, and autocracy with modularity, doesn't this pose a problem?

Any artificial intelligence will have internal structure. Artificial intelligences, unlike humans, do not come in standard-sized reproductive units, walled off computationally; there is therefore no reason to expect individuals to exist in a post-AI society. But the bulk of the computation, and hence the bulk of the potential consciousness, will be within small, local units (due to the ubiquity of power-law distributions, the efficiency of fractal transport and communication networks, and the speed of light).

Physics is local. The speed of light is a derivative of that general principle. The local nature of our universe implies some strict limits on intelligence. Curiously, it looks like the only way to transcend these limits (to get a really powerful single intelligence/computer) is to collapse into a black hole, at which point you necessarily seal yourself off and give up any power in this universe. Interesting indeed.

But I have no idea how you leap to the conclusion "there is therefore no reason to expect individuals to exist in a post-AI society." Although partly because I dont know what a post-AI society is. I understand post-human .. but post-AI? Is that the next thing after the next thing? That seems to be getting ahead of ourselves.

Also, you seem to reach the conclusion that there will not necessarily be any individuality in the 'post-AI' future society, but then give several good reasons why such individuality may persist. (namely, speed of light, locality of physics)

But what is individuality? One could say that we are a global consciousness today with just the "bulk of computation" in "small, local units".

A decentralized agent-based AI, in the sense of agent-based software (often modelled on the free market, with software agents bidding on tasks), would be more amenable to mutualistic relationships.

I get the feeling you intend this to be taken as a pun for relationships between the AI and us, although of course you didn't explicitly suggest such a link.

What is the difference between non-nested and modular? (Or between non-modular and nested?)

The pictures seem to be rotated by 180 degrees essentially.