<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">From: <strong class="gmail_sendername" dir="auto">Roger Critchlow</strong> <span dir="auto"><<a href="mailto:rec@elf.org">rec@elf.org</a>></span><br>Date: Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 11:10 AM<br>Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: Next Dictator<br>To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <<a href="mailto:friam@redfish.com">friam@redfish.com</a>><br></div><br><br>I keep thinking that the next big dictator isn't new.<div><br></div><div>Das Kapital is an artificial life form which by a process of natural selection pursues its own preservation and growth. It doesn't care which individuals or institutions survive or perish in the process, it just moves and grows where the return on investment takes it. It has no ethics, no morality, and no sense of humor.</div><div><br></div><div>Daniel Kahneman in <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/magazine/dont-blink-the-hazards-of-confidence.html" target="_blank">http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/magazine/dont-blink-the-hazards-of-confidence.html</a> mentions analyzing 8 years of investment results for 25 successful investment advisers. Though these were all experienced and confident men, the average year to year correlation in their results was 0.01. The highly rewarded experts of finance have no real idea what they're doing, they are highly rewarded for an "illusion of skill", they play roulette with style and their clients buy them expensive clothes to do it in. The news didn't faze them a bit; that they can do what they do and get rewarded for it is all the affirmation they need.</div><div><br></div><div><div class="gmail_quote">In dealing with Das Kapital, I think we're pretty much all in the same boat. No one knows where the slime mold will choose to extend its pseudopodia, or which of the pseudopodia will thrive or wither, or what the novel beneficial or lamentable consequences will be. Some of us worry about the suffering caused by the gold-goo-excrement, others worry about not killing the beast that makes the gold-goo, many just fight for the largest share they can get, and most of us could care less until the bucket of gold-goo-excrement lands in our neighborhood or the gold-goo pseudopod feeding our investments dries up.</div><div class="gmail_quote"><br></div><div class="gmail_quote"><span style="background-color:transparent">--rec --</span></div></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sun, Jan 28, 2024 at 2:48 PM Roger Critchlow <<a href="mailto:rec@elf.org">rec@elf.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr">Das Kapital is our most successful experiment in artificial life, but it's still feral and no one has the least clue how to domesticate it, and the grey goo we're constructing is a mass of collateralized debt instruments.<div><br></div><div>-- rec --</div><div><br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sun, Jan 28, 2024 at 11:03 AM Steve Smith <<a href="mailto:sasmyth@swcp.com" target="_blank">sasmyth@swcp.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><u></u>
<div>
<p><a href="https://doctorow.medium.com/solar-is-a-market-for-financial-lemons-ea00699fe0a2" target="_blank">https://doctorow.medium.com/solar-is-a-market-for-financial-lemons-ea00699fe0a2<br>
</a></p>
<p>I suspect the opinions among the members of this list range
widely on Doctorow's work, my general response to him is a guarded
positive.<br>
</p>
<p>I offer this article to you nominally about the problems with
rooftop-solar "gaming" but as a reflection on Corporations (and I
claim governments, religions, other institutions) as "slow AI".
Rooftop Solar is just a contemporary somewhat benign case-study.<br>
</p>
<p>They are both contrived as "rule-based" systems and evolved in
the same mode as Machine Learning Models. </p>
<p>The 2023 rush of AI/ML into the public's eye and hands might well
overwhelm us with false-paths to individual and collective
prosperity. Opportunities for dead-ends or overshoots abound in
the harsh light of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reward_hacking" target="_blank">"reward
hacking"</a>? <br>
</p>
<p>And then we have the spectre of <br>
</p>
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