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