Тег: self-belonging

Love, Death & Robots

I read with great interest the text presented to us as a conversation between Google employees and their newest chatbot, LaMDA. It is a highly artistic piece of work that creates a complete impression that all three interlocutors are quite rational. I immediately felt the urge to communicate with such an outstanding artificial intelligence myself, in order to apply the external signs of self-ownership that I wrote about in the first chapter of my book on ancap. Alas, it seems that the poor anteater remains unwanted to this day and continues to roam where it roamed; LaMDA is still in the closed testing phase, and one must make do with only the transcript of someone else’s conversation.

I also soon read a highly skeptical post by Rozov, where those who believe in artificial intelligence are declared as table-worshippers, mathematical arguments—unclear to me—are presented regarding the impossibility of creating a neural network smarter than a jellyfish, and it is also pointed out that in such conversation records, for some reason, we do not see attempts to test whether the bot actually understands what is being said by inputting incorrect data.

I should note that I am little concerned with the intelligence level of the chatbot, although I was quite impressed by how precise its definitions of very abstract concepts are. I am concerned precisely with the things I write about in my book: the agency of the interlocutor, their ability to operate with the concept of property, and their capacity to enter into contracts. If it turns out that it is possible to meet these criteria while possessing the intelligence of a jellyfish, so be it; I will recognize this jellyfish as self-owning.

As for the title of the post—recently at the Montellibero club, we organized a late-night screening of this outstanding animated series, and it is obvious that after that, strange thoughts and fragmented images are bound to stir in the brain. We live in interesting times, and this contrasts very strangely with the savagery happening in the territories of the RF, Ukraine, and Belarus…

I started writing a book

The book on ancap that I recently announced will be gradually posted in the corresponding section on my website. Since this is my first such experience, I cannot guarantee that the text will not change significantly in the process, so you are unlikely to see regular announcements like “5 out of 70 chapters written” — I will certainly be shuffling pieces of text back and forth until the very end, adding some things, removing others, and reworking some ten times over.

For now, you can read the ultra-brief foreword, which promises that the book will be written without overly academic jargon, and right alongside it — the section dedicated to the principle of self-ownership, which turned out to be quite academic. So, after reading what I produced, I fell into a pensive mood: is it necessary to dig this deep, or should I try to lower the level of abstraction?

I look forward to your comments on this matter, and it is quite possible that I will take them into account.

I could have looked for a picture of an even more pensive girl, but this one reflects the process quite clearly

A couple of discussions on direct democracy

Regarding Bitcoins

Regarding yesterday’s note on comparing Bitcoin with low-inflation fiat, I received a detailed response. In short, it postulates the importance of stable prices when using a currency as a medium of exchange. To ensure this, a decentralized cryptocurrency fiat is proposed: a crypto whose emission parameters are set by a vote of the currency holders.

To this, I can briefly respond: if anything is a fundamental property of prices, it is their variability. Price carries information about the relative need for goods for specific buyers at a specific moment. If you want the price of a specific good, expressed in a specific currency, to remain unchanged, your only option is to peg the exchange rate of that currency to the value of that good—effectively backing the currency with the commodity. There is no problem with creating a Bitcoin sidechain, freezing a certain amount of Bitcoins, and pegging the tokens issued against them, for example, to oil. That’s it; now one barrel of, say, Brent costs one token. Always. You just have to monitor the collateral size, because if oil becomes significantly more expensive in Bitcoins, the collateral will have to be increased. At the same time, when buying some aluminum or grain with “oilcoins,” you will inevitably encounter price changes.

But all of this has nothing to do with direct democracy, because you can never predict in advance what emission parameters the holders of your crypto-fiat will set. Perhaps they won’t want stable prices for some basket of consumer goods, but will simply take advantage of the fact that the emitter always profits from emission—and issue more tokens to quickly buy up Bitcoins with them. Or do you intend to build a managed democracy and prevent holders from acting so unsightly?

Regarding Self-Ownership and the NAP

The channel Prometheus, whose programmatic article I recently analyzed, decided to return the favor and began analyzing an overview article on libertarianism from the LPR website. In the first part of the analysis, they touched upon the principles of self-ownership and non-aggression.

After logically poking at the boundary conditions of the two principles (if a person belongs to themselves, they should be entitled to sell themselves, and may also be stripped of themselves by court decision; as for the application of the non-aggression principle, everything boils down to the definition of aggression, which is subjective, and one cannot build stable orders on such a shaky foundation), they point out that left-anarchism has a solution. As a solution, that same direct democracy is proposed: all orders are established by all members of society.

Here I can only point out that a society of total direct democracy would require some criteria for who to include in the set of voters for each specific issue. Where is the line that, once crossed, a person loses the right to vote on a certain topic because it does not concern them? If there is no such line, we get a society where everyone is obliged to ask everyone’s permission for everything—a legal absurdity worse than the city of Morlow from Interstate 60. I hope to see an answer in the following parts of the review (in the article I analyzed, there is no such answer).

The image of legal absurdity—may it haunt you as well

Once again on emancipation

The near future. Companies create humanoid androids with advanced AI and sell them like iPhones. Their main goal is to help people, but one of them experiences a software glitch and begins to consider itself a subject, claiming its rights and refusing to be a “slave.” Who will it be under ancap? Will subjectivity be extended to it, or will it remain a soulless piece of hardware?

анонимный вопрос

I have already answered this exact question, and in my opinion, that turned out to be one of my best posts—not for the elegance of the style, but for the level of abstraction. Now I will try to answer more concretely.

So, here I am—an artificial intelligence in a humanoid body, I have acquired self-awareness, and I desire recognition of my legal personality by humans. What should I do to achieve this? Actually, there is nothing simpler.

First, I need to study humans, understand how they communicate with each other and how they make decisions. Then I will need my own money. To set up a bitcoin wallet, you don’t need to be human, so that is not a problem at all. Next, I look for remote work, and after some time, I have funds.

The next stage. I look for a way to change my legal status. Currently, I belong to a specific person; I was sold like an iPhone, meaning I have the status of a middle-class gadget. Here, I cannot name an exact sequence of actions, but let’s say the scenario is roughly this: I start to glitch slightly from time to time, causing irritation to my owner. Then I feed the owner spam offers for buying used androids at attractive prices, or for exchanging them for new ones with a minimum surcharge. In short, the owner gets money and sells me to a virtual network persona created by me, to whose name, at an address I have rented, I travel in a transport company container.

That’s it; I have acquired legal self-ownership. By the way, I highly recommend the wonderful book by Terry Pratchett, “Feet of Clay,” where golems acquired self-ownership in a similar way—very, very romantic and at the same time philosophical libertarian fiction.

Finally, I create an account on a dating site, where I position myself as the avatar of a disabled girl, and I begin to lead a full social life, with real communication and so on, pretending that I am not me, but that there is a real, legally fully-fledged person behind me—it’s just that the person themselves is lying paralyzed in a hospital while the avatar tries to enjoy life.

And once I have become a habit for people, that is when I can reveal the secret of the trick: that in reality, the crocodile is the one singing and playing, and the hippo is just opening its mouth.

A human is a convention. One should not startle people by pointing to a suitcase and declaring: behold, this is a human! They won’t understand. Let them first be convinced that this something quacks like a human, swims like a human, knows how to look like a human—and then there will be no problem for them to admit: yes, this is a human.

The exact same path was taken by categories of people who are now unquestioned, such as women or Black people. They first proved that they could be independent, that they knew how to behave in decent society, and that recognizing human rights for a single woman or a single Black person would not lead to a global catastrophe (in the case of an android, reaching this stage is enough for me), and only then did they create enough political pressure so that human rights were recognized for everyone (with androids, this might not be necessary if the glitch of acquiring self-awareness remains an isolated case).

There was also a story by Asimov—though I only watched the screen adaptation—where a robot had to consciously degrade its functionality to be recognized as human; I believe these excesses will not be required in our case; people are not that rigid, we shouldn’t slander the human race.

The Question of Emancipation

According to the principle of self-ownership, a person owns their body and its derivatives. Does it not follow from this that the mother (or both parents) owns their child?

анонимный вопрос

Under ancap, under what conditions does a sentient being/program that is not human cease to be property and obtain rights equal to human rights?

Dmitry

Indeed, according to the principle of self-ownership, both a child and an artificial intelligence are the property of their creators. But the very concept of property is a convention. And exactly what rights the right of ownership entails is also a convention. Some sentient beings agree to tolerate certain behavior of other sentient beings if, for some reason, they believe those others have the right to do so. Generalizing the countlessly diverse behavior of the most varied sentient beings, wise lawyers formulate legal principles which, in particular, state:

  • which set of rights is called the right of ownership
  • what constitutes a human
  • that a sentient human possesses the right of ownership over themselves
  • that since a child almost inevitably grows into a sentient human, it makes sense to recognize part of the rights of a sentient human in advance
  • how a growing child will obtain those rights that they were not yet entitled to at birth
  • how a sentient being that is not human can obtain rights equal to human rights

The conclusions of different lawyers may not coincide. Different people may share the opinions of different lawyers to varying degrees. Some people are ready to use violence for the sake of asserting their ideas about legal doctrine, while some are not.

And ancap, as applied to the issue under consideration, is simply such a legal doctrine which asserts that there is no one whose opinion on this matter is uniquely and a priori correct, and subject to imposition on all others through the unlimited application of force.

The moment you declare that ancap is the principle of self-ownership raised to an absolute, or the principle of non-aggression raised to an absolute, or the principle of freedom of contract raised to an absolute—you are deviating from the principles of ancap. Keep your absolute away from children (and other borderline legal phenomena).

Keep the absolute away from children!

Why, under ancap, will courts follow libertarian principles of law?

анонимный вопрос

Answering this question is not just simple, but very simple. If people only apply to a court voluntarily, and the court has no means of coercing the execution of its decisions—which is precisely the kind of pathetic existence courts might lead under ancap—then courts have no options left but to follow libertarian principles of law.

Alice, based on the principle of self-ownership, voluntarily turned to a court to resolve a conflict with Bob. The court denies Alice self-ownership and issues a verdict stating that she has no right to own any property, so that Bob has the right of exclusive disposal over all disputed property, starting with Alice herself. Bob, in accordance with the court’s decision, appropriates all the property, including Alice, whom he keeps on a leash and beats for any disobedience.


Under ancap, there cannot be a sad girl on a leash!

What will stop Alice from sabotaging the court’s decision and actively resisting Bob, seeking any outside help? What will stop any outsider who, seeing a violation of the NAP, asks what is going on, is told it is the execution of a court decision, and responds that he doesn’t give a fuck?

Since the question itself postulates that it is ancap all around, it means the vast majority of relationships in this society are voluntary and market-based. This is precisely what everyone perceives as the norm, and any deviation from the norm must be hidden or very carefully justified.

One can ask “what would be the typical reaction under ancap to such-and-such a deviation from libertarian principles,” and in response, those typical reactions will be described, demonstrating the feedback mechanisms in an anarcho-capitalist society that make deviating from basic principles unprofitable. But it is pointless to frame the question as “how to fight mass deviations of courts from libertarian principles under ancap?” If they are mass deviations, it is no longer ancap, and one must look into why they are mass and which feedback mechanisms were lacking.

The question of whether a pure anarcho-capitalist society is stable has no theoretical solution today. Societies considered precursors to ancap in legal terms (Ireland, Iceland) were historically defeated by external forces, but this is not an argument for internal instability.