Capitalism

From: John Clark (jonkc@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Wed Sep 02 1998 - 11:14:39 MDT


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J. Maxwell Legg income@ihug.co.nz Wrote:

>it will become obvious that AI's data mining efforts are being
>frustrated by the inability to access full transactional content.

Translation: The reason AI's don't know everything is because they don't
know everything. Yes it will become obvious, in fact it's obvious right
now. I don't want to be too harsh, at least your statement if free of
internal contradictions and it's even true, just like all tautologies.

>Then it will become globally apparent that national currencies are
>in fact an unregulated but inferior form of supervised neural
>network (i.e., all those cumbersome hidden layers, the invisible
>hand of capitalism, etc.)

The best way to improve the world's currencies is to increase the amount
Of speculation on them not decrease it. If an individual would rather
be paid in pounds than dollars let him, if a nation tried the old
tax by inflation trick people could just switch to a better currency.

>Capitalism is not a natural law of nature, as some like to say,

I like to say that there are many parallels between capitalism and
Thermodynamics as well as Evolution.

>and was born during times of inferior data gathering concepts.

Yes, data gathering concepts have improved, so have data hiding concepts,
and the economy has become astronomically more complex.

>the grand top-down AI challenge of the 21st century

For an AI to design the economy in which it lived better than the market
can it would have to understand it, but that's impossible. The most
important economic factor in the world is people but people don't
understand people very well so they can't design an economy very well.
A super intelligent AI would be the most important thing in its world but
Turing proved in 1935 that it would be no better at predicting its
behavior than we are.

An economy is the most complex object in the known universe, an individual
human brain is trivial in comparison, and you expect to design one from
first principles and expect it to work? It would be like trying to derive
the laws of political science by studying the ramifications of the
Schrodinger wave equation.

>Don't forget that no land area on earth is presently exempt from the
>totalitarian concept of money

Personally I find nothing totalitarian about money, but if you disagree
that's OK, just refuse to have anything to do with it. I find it amusing
when people go on and on about how evil money is and then find out
the most evil thing about it is that they don't have enough of it.

>exchanging one concept for another at particular moments in history has
>been done before.

Exchanging concepts in the free market of ideas? Oh no we can't have that!
In the future all concepts will be determined by a central authority, new
Ideas will be issued to you when and if you need them.

>Like I said before the world's rulers are on record as wanting to
>ultimately do away with capitalism and currency speculation.

Obviously they don't like them, it interferes with a dictators power.

>Let's give them this part of what they want with the added rider
>that they then forget about the continuing to rule bit.

Mr. Stalin, we'll help you destroy capitalism but once that's done and
you become the only power center in the world you must promise to
voluntarily step down from power, OK?. I know we can trust you because
history has taught us that dictators are always men of high moral fiber.

>21-C 4-96|41 BRIN: "I live off intellectual property. I would gain far more from
>openness than encryption. Encryption allows people to make infinite copies of my
>work. In an open society, I will find the bootleg copier, and make him or her pay
>me the royalties."

That's the fatal flaw in Brin's idea, he doesn't like encryption but he
never makes clear exactly how he plans to stop people from using it.

   John K Clark jonkc@well.com

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