[p2p-research] Project Cybersyn

[J. Andrew Rogers]

On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 8:33 PM, Kevin Carson
<free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/8/09, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Don't you think Kevin, that our present stigmergic capabilities, based on ultra low transaction and communication costs, may revive such possibilities, and replace the dream of centralized planning, by horizontal coordination, as in fact already occurs in the large peer production efforts?
>>
>
> Definitely.  But there's probably a limit to the scale of
> coordination.  Such stigmergically organized projects must be tied,
> directly or indirectly, to a market pricing system that values their
> inputs.  And market pricing systems are useful for providing a system
> for evaluating the most productive use of inputs, comparative demand
> for different products, and the most productive of competing uses for
> inputs.  I see peer production taking place within a market framework
> that serves an informational function (if one of last resort).


There are many examples of cooperative, peer-based structures in real
business and society.  It can definitely work under some parameters.
In more and more *commercial* industries, you have projects executed
as ad hoc organizations of individuals and smaller organizations that
are only reified as a semi-solid business construct for that one
project. I only see it becoming more prevalent.

There are hard mathematical limits on how well cooperative non-market
decision systems scale if we assume altruistic agents of roughly
equivalent intelligence, thought it does scale to useful numbers for
real societies (mucho algorithmic information and decision theory
elided). Comparative advantage as applied to *decisions* has
interesting properties. I think one of the biggest failures of
classical economics, regardless of flavor, is that it has no concept
of this kind of continuum, assuming that it must be one or the other
in all cases.  Cooperative specialization will out-perform
anarcho-capitalism with relatively small numbers of agents but
degrades rapidly and becomes extremely wasteful as scales increase. An
optimal system -- assuming parity of intelligence -- requires both if
pathologies are to be avoided.

Of course, this assumption does not hold if there are gross
asymmetries of intelligence, but that produces a result that is
different from either extreme if we assume that all agents have rough
parity of intelligence. Super-intelligence produces a system where the
equilibrium is essentially totalitarian, but the lesser intelligences
are incapable of even  discerning that fact if well-executed. Even if
we assume modest differentials in intelligence, such as you might find
in a human society, the theoretical consequences tend to be a little
more totalitarian -- and invisibly so -- than most people would likely
prefer. This is where the argument ultimately ends up: if you are
manipulated beyond your ability to discern such that you have no
concept of that manipulation, what does that mean as a practical
matter?


-- 
J. Andrew Rogers
realityminer.blogspot.com