if you haven't seen the famous Open Source Ecology pitch by Marcin Jakubowski, you're in for a treat!
Open-sourced blueprints for civilization | Marcin Jakubowski, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GEMkvT0DEk
(in the sense of, how to organize society from a blank slate point of view, while maximizing the wealth of experience for all individuals? I think we've gotten a little caught up in ideology and culture wars and stopped looking for ideas to move society forward with more efficient, humane, robust, collaborative (or adversarially cooperative) societal organization systems)
If you thought society as consisting of a large number of agents (with varying degrees of self-interest and diverse motivations), how would you design a system that enables maximum productivity, and maximum well-being? (in the sense of conscious experience: a rich and wealthy life; not necessarily tied to having particular stuff)
Seriously, in all our 100,000 years more or less of modern human existence we've seriously toyed with about 2 large scale architectures of society. Why can't we try better in a non-destructive way?
Whatever you come up by yourself has zero chances of coming to fruition outside your apartment. Working on your local community to improve lives of real people or joining a political party and influencing the direction of debate is way more actionable.
In a way, I want to improve the current system; it's just sometimes an issue of branding, mental models, and compatibility, that it can be useful to think of it as something new. Like a new software that's inspired by legacy systems.
For example, by now it's clear that Open Source technology is almost a miracle. The potential for civilization for a large scale conversion to open source technologies is hard to grasp. Imagine every product sharing design files, and new manufacturers/designers being able to build upon all every other design with zero friction.
We have the problem of how to compensate the developers. Currently we're going with a bland of donations, support systems, and a few other apparently meager funding sources. I don't think our legal system is prepared to tackle this (i.e. you can't fix it completely with a well designed license), and neither our economic system can. So that already begs a certain kind of redesign... what if we had some kind of distributed/decentralized entity supervising the flow of technology/information and rewarding them according to societal impact?
We tend to think of a simple government/industry division, but government tends to be too centralized and imperfectly aligned to effectively fulfill this kind of role (industry due to its economic design tends to perform better).
One of the idea (please, give it a try as well!) is to have a decentralized network of adversarially cooperative evaluators for this (in a system that cross-validates itself and economically aligns estimation accuracy).
This seems naive or small-scale.
But almost every major issue from society stems from this imbalance: the improper/imperfect reward mechanism for doing what's good for us; imperfect coordination. Examples: Predatory advertisement, Pollution, Climate change, Open Source funding, Cultural funding, Addiction-driven design, ... I could go on.
I'm not thinking of completely replacing what we have, but having a third element working alongside government/industry.
This is literally the most important problem in the history of humanity and... there's no much on it, except for ideologically-driven discussion.
Remember: Ideology is a mind killer! [1]
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f/politics-i...
Isn’t this Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand”?
Just because someone isn't spending their time in the way you deem most effective doesn't mean it's not beneficial for themselves or others.
Iterative change is useful and helpful, but it's also how you get stuck in local maxima. They way out of local maxima is to step back and look at the problem fresh without some of the built in constraints of the current system, and is very useful as well even if they end up going back to us, and isn't something we should discourage people from doing.
If nothing else, they'll likely come away with a good understanding of the constraints of the system and why choices are made, and more importantly a "why" that's far more involved and justified than "well, that's how it is and we can't feasibly change it now."
This is the same reason why it's good to have people attempting to make a new HTTP server, or a new database system, or a new ORM. Those people often end up really understanding those systems extremely well even if they usually go back to using the status quo, and once in a blue moon they come up with something new and novel or at least beneficial under a slightly different set of constraints which better serves a certain audience.
What help do you need?
Expert social engineers (sociologists, psychologists, economists, environmental scientists, et. al.) will be chosen to define "well being" using the latest scientific research and data. Money won't exist. You'll have a social credit score from 0 to 1000 depending on your overall value to society, the economy, and the environment. Higher scores will qualify you for better food, housing, and transportation. Lower scores will subject you to various restrictions or even imprisonment. Purchases will deduct different amounts from your score depending on their true overall societal cost; prices will include all economic externalities as determined by the experts.
Since the score asymptotically caps out at 1000, all economic inequality problems will be solved. In addition, there won't be the bureaucratic corporate management overhead of the current institutional patchwork because an expert-tuned AI management system will give you instructions on what work you need to do to help your score (including diet and exercise), using your mobile device or neuralink.
Luckily, there won't even have to be a violent revolution to reach this utopia, because just about every world leader at the UN, WEF, IMF, BIS, major political parties, large corporations, and so on are ALL on board with this.
On the trajectory we're on, we're going to need people like you (OP) to figure out what we'll build on the ashes of our current civilization. I see you like diversity libertarianism / Archipelago. A more robustly decentralized version of the current US constitution, which was actually really good until the corporate coup.
What you should do is design a personality and a society simultaneously, design the personality such that it ponders the society and the society so that it builds such characters. The improvement accomplished reinforces the loop.
The current avenue of approach is indeed in two System Parts:
(1) Definition of the problem: If we want things to be 'best' in a sense, 'maximally humane', 'maximum quality of experience', 'maximum quality of life, existence and culture', etc. we should define those things, and create structures that continually refine and employ the best methods to asses and measure progress.
(2) Optimization of the problem: Choosing the architecture and structures that maximizes our measures. This again almost certainly is some kind of distributed structure that gives rewards and occasionally demands compensation (for a generalization of negative externality -- generalized externality of existence).
I often say that the Universe is a search problem. This is just a big honkin' search problem :)
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Capitalism leaves the job of (1) on the individual, and on the government somewhat. The job of (2) is accomplished by a dual again of capital (supply and demand, allocation of capital for maximum profit) and government (using taxes and incentives). Again the problem of capitalism is that it doesn't account for externalities very well (too often ends up maximizing the wrong function), and the problem of government is inefficiency, centralization (algorithmic inefficiency of resource allocation strategies), lack of agility.
Note: Capitalism (without support structures) is very similar to evolutionary dynamics. It's hard to model exactly what evolutionary dynamics maximizes, but one formulation is that it maximizes environmental domination: expanding to cover the most of the environment, whatever it takes. Lose consciousness and become soul-less robots to take over everything? Sure, no problem; and annihilate anything that gets in the way. Accidentally or not evolutionary dynamics gave us life and consciousness, but it's not certain life and consciousness will endure as essential for environmental domination (in a way, consciousness is currently related to intelligence via humans, but we for example already appear able to create super-human intelligence that is not conscious or at least not very conscious). So we need to change the objective function to create a great harmonious future where some for of existence... exists.
To see why evolutionary dynamics and environmental stability (i.e. the result of environmental expansion) doesn't prize conscious experience (in general, the Meaning of life), I use two thought experiments:
(1) Generalized grey goo/Paperclip maximizer. Again, just picture a very intelligent creature dedicated to maximizing only its environmental domination. It will create other forms of intelligence only as much as needed to maintain its dominion. Any form of existence that's not immediately conductive to the maintenance and expansion of dominion is irrelevant/negative value. I can only see this leading to an empty Universe and a few singular intelligences looking for ways to annihilate all other existences at maximum speed focusing on weapons research and planetary domination exclusively.
(2) Doomsday button. The ultimate thought experiment in this line is the following: suppose you assume environmental regularization (domination) originated by your actions is the 'Ideal goal of existence'. Then I present you a doomsday button: If you push the button, you will trigger some kind of physical mechanism that will consume the entire universe into a regular lifeless crystal-like structure. Think of it as a bomb of expanding regular wave that takes over the entire universe. In a way, this represents a maximally stable solution to dominating the environment... maximum effect, perpetual and irreversible. But that doesn't look like a good solution at all, does it? It's in fact lifeless and non-existential.
Clearly the ultimate objective is related to existence, not to environmental domination or regularization by some abstract definition of 'Individual' or 'Nation' or whatever. If we can't change objective, I predict we'll be consumed by this savage nature quite soon.
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I don't mean to trivialize System Part 1 (Evaluation). It's literally all that matters to humanity and existence. I guarantee it's not a second degree equation :) For example, individual autonomy can be an important component of human experience, the ability and free will to decide more or less independently is likely an important part of the whole.
My approach is that we need to define the Meaning of life clearly. We've also postponed this way too much as a Civilization. By now it shouldn't be that complicated -- we know it's got to do with experience and somehow the internal dynamics of a large neural network, the sustainability and continuity of life. I have a draft[1] but don't expect it to be bulletproof. This should evolve into a Formalization of Ethics program (hopefully a collaborative, worldwide effort) to get the basics done. Think of it as a Super Declaration of Human rights, or a Foundation of Ethics (like we have a Foundation of Mathematics).
This could not be ignored by any nation, hopefully in the short term strengthening clarity and convictions on the objective of human (and generalized conscious) existence.
This Foundations should be Universal.
First, I'm convinced the rough draft (given above) is correct, it should be a matter of truth and reason[2], and not require any advanced metaphysics or elicit genuine controversy after rational examination. This is also part of a new propostion for making philosophy that I call 'Explosive Philosophy': the negation of the Principle of Experience (i.e. consciousness is not the prime motive of existence) leads to absurdity as demonstrated by several thought experiments. Explosive Philosophy is the use of rejection by absurd by taking particularly obviously unacceptable consequences of a principle.
Second, if some Nation is a Competitive Supremacist (i.e. Evolutionarist), that will clearly put it in conflict with the Conscious Foundations. It will try to achieve domination at all costs, and eventually it will need to settle with the Foundations[2] or live under constant watch to make sure it doesn't take over everything or even consume itself.
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Afterwards, the plan is as I insuated, to change the Political-Economic-Cultural system to reflect the universal values (including diversity from derived heuristics). The main idea I've had is to create concrete measures related to Quality of Experience, and a distributed network of evaluations, each specialized in a segment of society (Science, Industry, Culture, Philosophy, etc.) measures impact of Corporations/Entities/Individuals, and compensates for the error the capitalist system has.
So if I create predatory advertisement, this has a social cost. An evaluator can perceive this, measure it (estimate it), and demand compensation (to be given back to society). The evaluator itself takes a share of this compensation to reward its effort. The evaluator can even colaborate with the company to more acurately measure the externality, and reduce the compensation (under uncertainty the evaluator would have an adjustment to overestimate/take an upper bound of the evaluation).
Those evaluator are adversarially cooperative, and predictive, in the sense that they oversee themselves as well, and are predictive. The success of an evaluator is asessed later: a market is established for the correctness of the decision.
The idea is to replace Supply-and-Demand with Science: in particular, a kind of Eventual Consensus -- in simple terms, the Consensus of evaluation by relevant audience/specialists upon reflection after a long time. The Consensus is made through cross-evaluation of evaluators (they get funds based on the later re-evaluation by the wider evaluation network), as well as certain input from individuals, corporations and government. Transparent (and relatively simple) algorithms resolve the credit assignment problem of how each evaluator should be credited. This is similar to the slow eventual consensus of Science, although the goals are different and the system would be both simpler and more transparent. That's close to a definition of truth itself: the eventual consensus model revealed by experiments and sufficient formal reasoning (following axioms of logic, and axiom of reality).
I call this idea 'Elementalism' for now.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/EffectiveAltruism/comments/p2w4ql/e...
[2] Any similarity with Asimov's Foundations is a mere coincidence? :)
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/p6ng5d/what...
Note: What I mean by experience is not any kind of pure hedonism. It's a deep, rich internal collection of qualities and perception of the mind -- consciousness. Again we need principles and consensus to conclude what is the wisest experience, but we can derive general principles, largely centered around our cognition having structure, meaning and depth (this is getting really long so I'll stop now :) to discuss exactly what this means is involved).
Since I can't leave it to chance, here is the solution anyway: Open Source has clear benefits to a huge number of users. This is a huge positive externality. So the evaluators would be trying to measure this positive impact and reward accordingly.
By reward, we should recognize money has 3 functions in society:
(1) Rewards as compensation for expenses. Straightforward: compensate for whatever expenses needed to sustain himself and bring the product to society.
(2) Rewards as investment for future development. This allows the person to create more of what he just did, or create something he only has proposals for so far. This is a kind of predictive compensation for expenses, diminishing risk and allowing realization without capital.
(3) Rewards as Recognition. Everyone needs a signal 'I'm doing well/I'm doing a good thing/I hope I'm of value to someone'. Rewards act as recognition of this value. Today we only have social recognition and a prize here and there, which not many exist.
(4) Rewards as Individualistic Motivation. This one is the primary means we are "supposed" to operate in a competitive environment. Your rewards are spent to satisfy your needs and desires as an individual. (Of course this is fine, everyone has needs and desires... although it's questionable whether one individual can have a 100000x or more the sensitivity or needs of another individual to justify massive individualist expenditure). We should hold no delusion -- we are advanced primates, and want a "banana" or "carrot" or whatever, so this should of course be taken into account.
With all 4 modes of operation, society should work quite well, and individuals should be happy and motivated.
Got a reply along the lines of "we are working with our sponsors and will not be releasing any blueprints".
10 years later you still can't get blueprints from their site: https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/gvcs-machine-index/
They seem like the solar roadways of open source hardware.