In my opinion, implementing this eventually evolves into AI-embedded in brain-computer interfaces for all, which plausibly solves gradual disempowerment, AI-human alignment (because the left hemisphere is naturally aligned with the right, and you are aligned with both), and maybe aging as well.
<or is there a secret third thing, a “smart membrane”, that is intermediate between the full transparency of a transformer and the full opacity of the hash? If so, I haven’t seen it. Get in touch>
embedding search i think is an example of the third thing
eg in a social network where the only way to find others' content is to query it semantically with your own content
but I don't think it's quite right... the embeddings compress information but I don't think you've cut off any information flows (after all the transformer itself uses a fuzzy embedding search internally).
I think the secret third thing looks more like viscous information flow, so you have to pay more of a limited currency to access more information... I guess querying with your own content is one way to 'pay', as long as you enforce some kind of scarcity on how many times you query or some sort of reputational stake to prevent false queries...
The way Dark Forest worked is that you had to mine hashes (like mining Bitcoin in a browser tab) to reveal the world map, but that still means everyone ends up with a view of the same world in the end.
normally in a social network you can log on and immediately see what everyone's been saying. you can search with no stakes. you can navigate to a profile page and see everything someone's ever said. no viscosity.
if the only way to find others' content is to query with your own content then the default information flows do get cut off.
> (or is there a secret third thing, a “smart membrane”, that is intermediate between the full transparency of a transformer and the full opacity of the hash? If so, I haven’t seen it. Get in touch)
Maybe this is cheating but I guess humans fit this description? More generally an agent is always defined both by the borders that separate it from its environment, and the causal flow (actions, information, effects) between itself and its environment.
I think it's worth pointing out that Switzerland used to be known for its laws maintaining bank secrecy and the concomitant tax evasion but Obama forced them to bend the knee like 15 years ago. The mountainous terrain didn't help when Obama could threaten to cut off your bankers from the USD. Tying it back to your thesis, it seems that physical coercion to control global networks (e.g. USD) is most effective and USG has a ton of leverage over that.
Yeah I think the Swiss example is more referring to historical Switzerland, it's not clear to me how much the modern Swiss state is independent of USG.
Although it's mostly a self-chosen economic dependency, right? Switzerland chose to specialize in banking and specifically in USD-denominated tax evasion so of course they could be squeezed by the USD hegemon.
It does relate to network effects and how sufficiently large network effects kinda shade into coercion. Probably sovereignty at any scale is incompatible with being too dependent on a network that's owned by someone else. e.g. if you have 1M followers on X but no other outlet then you basically have to do Elon's bidding.
Have you seen Seb Krier's idea about personal agents unlocking Coasean bargaining at scale (https://blog.cosmos-institute.org/p/coasean-bargaining-at-scale)? This is another variation of universal basic computation.
In my opinion, implementing this eventually evolves into AI-embedded in brain-computer interfaces for all, which plausibly solves gradual disempowerment, AI-human alignment (because the left hemisphere is naturally aligned with the right, and you are aligned with both), and maybe aging as well.
<or is there a secret third thing, a “smart membrane”, that is intermediate between the full transparency of a transformer and the full opacity of the hash? If so, I haven’t seen it. Get in touch>
embedding search i think is an example of the third thing
eg in a social network where the only way to find others' content is to query it semantically with your own content
I've heard of a social network like that ;)
but I don't think it's quite right... the embeddings compress information but I don't think you've cut off any information flows (after all the transformer itself uses a fuzzy embedding search internally).
I think the secret third thing looks more like viscous information flow, so you have to pay more of a limited currency to access more information... I guess querying with your own content is one way to 'pay', as long as you enforce some kind of scarcity on how many times you query or some sort of reputational stake to prevent false queries...
A few more examples that feel like the third thing:
- Find my Friends
- The Dark Forest game: https://zkga.me
- ZK Hunt: https://0xparc.org/blog/zk-hunt (maybe it only feels like this because I have strong mechanistic intuitions for zk game circuits)
- Token gated social networks
- Games that unlock levels as you level-up?
- Probably the thing that feels most like this is location-gated sharing apps: https://x.com/crystalcultures/status/1319022215795372032
The way Dark Forest worked is that you had to mine hashes (like mining Bitcoin in a browser tab) to reveal the world map, but that still means everyone ends up with a view of the same world in the end.
normally in a social network you can log on and immediately see what everyone's been saying. you can search with no stakes. you can navigate to a profile page and see everything someone's ever said. no viscosity.
if the only way to find others' content is to query with your own content then the default information flows do get cut off.
embeddings are fuzzy hashes?
> (or is there a secret third thing, a “smart membrane”, that is intermediate between the full transparency of a transformer and the full opacity of the hash? If so, I haven’t seen it. Get in touch)
Maybe this is cheating but I guess humans fit this description? More generally an agent is always defined both by the borders that separate it from its environment, and the causal flow (actions, information, effects) between itself and its environment.
Love this!
It's interesting how you frame datacenters as the new governors, but I wonder if the true power is in the algorithms, not just the hardwere.
I think it's worth pointing out that Switzerland used to be known for its laws maintaining bank secrecy and the concomitant tax evasion but Obama forced them to bend the knee like 15 years ago. The mountainous terrain didn't help when Obama could threaten to cut off your bankers from the USD. Tying it back to your thesis, it seems that physical coercion to control global networks (e.g. USD) is most effective and USG has a ton of leverage over that.
Yeah I think the Swiss example is more referring to historical Switzerland, it's not clear to me how much the modern Swiss state is independent of USG.
Although it's mostly a self-chosen economic dependency, right? Switzerland chose to specialize in banking and specifically in USD-denominated tax evasion so of course they could be squeezed by the USD hegemon.
It does relate to network effects and how sufficiently large network effects kinda shade into coercion. Probably sovereignty at any scale is incompatible with being too dependent on a network that's owned by someone else. e.g. if you have 1M followers on X but no other outlet then you basically have to do Elon's bidding.
would love to hear your thoughts on where proof systems fit into this framework - are they a third primitive, or an evolution?