> First, let's get rid of the idea that a central government has the authority to create and enfore laws. That's pretty much a recipe for disaster.
That's not a recipe for disaster. That's the universal solution for coordination problems we keep arriving at throughout the history. Creating and enforcing universal laws is the one thing government is actually really good at. The market on the other hand, totally sucks at it. It has its strengths though, and whatever the solution is, it will involve a mix of centralized and distributed responsibility.
I refer you to [0] for an in-depth discussion on coordination problems. It's a long read, but totally worth it.
[0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
I am the kind of person that believes in the existence of a universal absolute moral truth. I don't believe in subjectivity. A disagreement implies that at least one person is wrong. Yet, I don't think a central and rigid infrastructure should exist to enforce this ideal even if we were to discover it.
Can you provide one example of a law that should be enforced by a government?
And you're right about coordination, I don't have all the answers either. Scarce resources, ownership, roads, defense, languages. I'm still not sure how to deal with these in a free market.
I have a similar view of disagreement - it is my belief that two rational people should, having the same information, reach the same conclusion. I don't believe in an "universal absolute moral truth" (after all, where does it come from, and why?), but I think humans share enough of their basic morality to make it de-facto universal for us. We should delegate only the bare minimum of it for the law to enforce, but the government is literally an embodiment of the concept of people getting together and agreeing on things, so I see no problem to it being a way to scale up what in small groups you can do through social customs.
> Can you provide one example of a law that should be enforced by a government?
I think you enumerated some examples yourself - "scarce resources, ownership, roads, defense, languages". Those things are suitable for being managed centrally, and management involves enforcement - even if you delegated most of it to the market, you still need to steer the market to do the job, lest it bails out when it's profitable to do so.
I'm one of those people that don't believe humans to be special and would happily see them being replaced by what made them obsolete.
I don't believe in Friendly AI. Yudkowsky's thesis is flawed. We should be replaced.
Also, I referred you to Meditations on Moloch not because of FAI, but because of the discussion on coordination problems. What do you think about the article's view of that?
Friendly AI, by definition, is not true AI. It won't lead to singularity. It's worthless.
What I want is for the universe to evolve as efficiently as possible. We shouldn't slow down progress just because we want to survive. The only "we" is the universe. Selfless we should be.
I'm not sure what solution he's offering to coordination problems. He speaks of consensus and monarchy. He criticizes classical capitalism.
I feel like the capitalist model would be good if incentives were adequate. Money and personal wealth aren't adequate motivations. Selfless capitalism, where systems are optimized toward making the universe better. A system where we all adopt god's-eye-view. That's what I was referring to with my universal absolute moral truth.
Those entities who don't exist for the greater good will be naturally selected out. The fittest will be the most righteous. We need a system to measure righteousness. I'm working on just that.
TL;DR: We can coordinate through the universal absolute moral truth. We just need better tools to accurately grasp it.
What you say would be a good solution, if we could actually shape incentives like that (and avoid the issue of incentivized incentivizers - an example of which are companies influencing governments to make laws better for those companies). You said that you're working on a part of this problem, on "a system to measure righteousness". This is something I think we could really use, at the very least to express the concept of "a douchebag" within legal system[0]. Can you share some details about your work? I'm interested.
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[0] - Our legal systems try to stick to objective facts and avoid the topic of intent. Understandably so - without a way to read people's minds it turns into walking through a minefield. We can handle quite a lot this way, but in recent times a big part of suffering in this world is being created legally, by people with obviously selfish and malicious intent. We would want to discourage and/or punish such behaviour, but we can't because technically they aren't breaking any laws, even though everyone knows they are douchebags.
In addition, I'm assuming given your distrust for the government and love of markets that all means of communication will be private. Private capital tends to monopoly, so we can expect in your utopia that all means of communication are owned by a small group of people. This group of people has practical control over everyone's data.
This group of people might decide to release everyone's data in order to appease your desire for a post-privacy utopia, but almost certainly they'll keep it for their economic advantage.
The resulting system you are advocating is one in which a tiny percentage of people has near-universal control over the populace.
You can try to equalize things by creating an alternative system in which all data is public, say by having cameras that stream to some publicly accessible resource. But the streaming and the cameras will be the private property of organizations that have a strong incentive for you not to do this. And since the entire infrastructure is owned by such organizations, you would be in violation of your end user agreement to start such a project. It would make you a "liar" when you signed the Internet EULA, which, as you say in another comment, is the worst crime imaginable.
Currently, we are the losers, our governments are the winners.
> The winners have a strong economic incentive to keep their communication private, as has been the case throughout human history.
That's exactly how our govt functions today.
> This group of people might decide to release everyone's data in order to appease your desire for a post-privacy utopia, but almost certainly they'll keep it for their economic advantage.
True, but we are still at the cusp of applications that pay users for using the application and for their info, which could also be made public, but as you said, might not happen.
> The resulting system you are advocating is one in which a tiny percentage of people has near-universal control over the populace.
That's what we have today. Please understand this, the future he is proposing is at worst as bad as what we have today and at best, so much better.
A free market would pretty much eliminate the need for laws. What's wrong to you, might not be wrong to me. Therefore, you might refuse to help or trade with a person that does X, while I might have no problem with it and even help him.
Moreover, do you have any idea what a world with total privacy would look like? Even without total privacy, how do you even decide where to start (what to make public, what to keep private)? Surely, people will live in fear and keep everything they can private. How would that even work? No Google, no Facebook, no phone directory, all authors will use pseudonyms, etc. Basically, no meaningful connection will be made between people and the IoT will never possibly see the day. We'll all wear masks. Evolution will stop, we'll all die.