From: Alex F. Bokov (alexboko@umich.edu)
Date: Mon Jun 18 2001 - 10:29:26 MDT
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On Mon, 18 Jun 2001, John Clark wrote:
> >>Me:
> >> Mom and pop can not do none of these things.
>
> Alex F. Bokov <alexboko@umich.edu> Wrote:
>
> > So this is basically an argument for centralized control.
>
> Yes. In general there's nothing wrong with central control, sometimes
> for something's it's the best way to get things done. Sometimes for
> something's it's the worse way to get things done. The free market
> decides which is which. If a hundred thousand mom and pop companies
> could make an airliner more efficiently than Boeing they would do so and
> put that huge company out of business. They haven't. The open source
> software movement is trying to put Microsoft out of business. They might
> be successful, or they might not. I'm not smart enough to know which
> is the better approach in this case, but the market knows.
I agree that markets speak louder than elegant theories. It just seems
intuitive to me that the natural way for things to go would be for the
internal structure of corporations and governments to start mirroring
the demonstrably successful structure of the (relatively) free market
they operate in, followed by a collapse of the boundaries between the
inside and outside. Eventually everybody becomes a one-person
corporation... or a partner-employee-customer in one giant planetary
corporation, depending how you choose to look at it. Then again,
intuition is no substitute for empirical evidence, so like yourself
I'll wait and see. Or maybe I'll start a claim on www.ideafutures.com
if I can think of a way to phrase this question in an ideafuturistic
manner.
> > Why is the same argument not applicable to governments.
>
> Let me know when there is a free market in governments, I'll have to
> revise my low opinion of them.
There is a partial free market in governments insofar as democracies
are concerned. Immigration is inconvenient but nonetheless an option,
especially for educated individuals with marketable skills. In fact,
since there is no real global authority to tax or regulate migration,
you could say that the market in which governments compete for
citizens is in some ways freer. Since we're reminded every day how low
governments are capable of sinking, this would suggest that free
competition restricted to interactions between entities doesn't by
itself guarantee freedom *within* them.
"...the source of the greatest direct duress experienced by the
ordinary adult is _not_ the state but rather the business that employs
him. Your foreman or supervisor gives you more or-else orders in a
week than the police do in a decade."
--Bob Black, The Libertarian As Conservative, 1984
> >Why does it have to be a 'somebody'? Why not a some *thing*? For
> >instance a marketing AI that analyzes market research data and feeds
> >it directly to R&D AIs that pass the prototypes on to tester AIs... etc.
>
> An AI program that good would be a somebody, or more.
You're right, though ersonally I think collaborative intelligence will
hit a growth spurt even sooner than AI (which is not to say CI will
always remain superior). In their own limited domains, eBay and
NASDAQ's stock-bots already are "somebodies".
- --
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