From: hal@finney.org
Date: Wed Dec 08 1999 - 14:45:22 MST
Robert J. Bradbury, <bradbury@www.aeiveos.com>, writes:
> Robin, this raises some very interesting questions. Have economists
> considered the parallels between "economies" and "ecosystems"?
> What are the similarities and differences between the two?
I recently re-read an interesting paper which discussed this topic,
unfortunately not by economists, but by Mark Miller and Eric Drexler.
"Comparative Ecology: A Computational Perspective" was published in
their book "The Ecology of Computation". This paper, along with others,
lays out their idea for "agoric computing", in which software systems
would use market-like mechanisms to interact. In effect a program might
pay a subroutine to work for it.
In the process they compare biological ecosystems with economic markets.
Their main conclusion is that the driving force in ecosystems is the
predator-prey relationship, while in market systems the main factor is
cooperative trade, symbiosis:
"Nature is commonly viewed as harmonious and human markets as full of
strife, yet the above comparison suggests the opposite. The psychological
prominence of unusual phenomena may explain the apparent inversion of the
common view. Symbiosis stands out in biology: we have all heard of the
unusual relationship between crocodiles and the birds that pluck their
parasites, but one hears less about the more common kind of relationship
between crocodiles and each of the many animals they eat...
"Similarly, fraud and criminality stand out in markets. Newspapers report
major instances of fraud and embezzlement, but pay little attention to
each day's massive turnover of routinely satisfactory cereal, soap and
gasoline in retail trade. Crime is unusual and interesting; trade is
common and boring.
"... [I]magine that predation were as fundamental to markets as to biology.
Instead of confronting occasional instances of theft in a background of
trade, one would be surrounded by neighbors who had stolen their cars
from dealers who had mounted an armed assault on factories in Detroit,
which in turn had grabbed their parts and equipment by pillaging job-shops
in the surrounding countryside."
Drexler is of course better known for his work on nanotech, but Mark
Miller has continued to pursue these ideas quite actively and is
currently involved in the construction of the E programming language.
This is designed to provide secure communication and information sharing,
a necessary prerequisite for agoric computational systems. Information is
at www.erights.org.
Hal
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