AGI and the Emerging Peer-to-Peer Economy: Ben Goertzel Interviews AI Researcher Mohamad Tarifi

Mohamad:
With the guidance of my advisers Dr Meera Sitharam and Dr Jeffery Ho, I’m pursuing a mathematically rigorous integrated theory intelligence from the perspective of computer science that builds upon ideas from neuroscience, machine learning, and many areas of mathematics and theoretical computer science such as approximation theory and computational learning theory. We put a preprint of the very first steps towards our integrated approach online at arxiv.org. The paper introduces a fundamental circuit element for bottom-up processing that generalizes and formalizes existing hierarchical/deep models in the literature. Of course, the model will be extended and formally analyzed, along with new algorithms and experiments, in future publications.

Ben:
Great, thanks.  Of course that interests me a lot, and maybe we’ll do another interview digging into that sometime.  But for now let’s focus on the economic side of things.  What do you think is happening to the world economy, and how do you see AGI fitting into that?

Mohamad:
The limitations of the assumptions of traditional economic theory are increasingly manifest in our society through economic inequalities, over-competitiveness, selfishness, short term thinking, and instability. Traditional currencies suffer from inherent structural instabilities, with cycles of inflation followed by crises, a pattern of samsara. To cope with the divergence between theory and reality, economists are attempting to isolate and formalize economically significant human behavioral patterns into their models. For instance, Ernst Fehr’s research incorporates ideas from neuroscience to model agent behavior in various economic games. What is needed, however, is an alternative infrastructure.

Ben:
A “pattern of samsara” – that’s a choice phrase!

Mohamad:
As you know It is as a metaphor for cycles of death and rebirth. I can go on about how this relates to the dynamics of Jungian archetypes in the collective subconscious of society, but this interview will probably never end. Plus these types of metaphors are best left a bit ambiguous since that generalizes their scope of applicability by allowing multiple interpretations. This is why for instance the ancient Vedic scripts are intentionally cryptic. You see how this discussion can quickly become too interesting to end? So I’ll stop here.

Ben:
Heh – but I find that, unlike you, I can’t resist the urge to explicate the obvious at this point! Presumably you mean to imply that AGI has the potential get us beyond this sort of cycle into a realm dominated by the pattern of nirvana? 😉

Mohamad:
Ahahaha, yes!

Ben:
Well, it’s tempting to riff more about AGI and nirvana, but I suppose I’ll take your cue and steer back toward our agreed thematic of the future of economy!  So could you say a little more about the practical specifics of his work.

Mohamad:
This is a link to his research summary and some of his articles. According to his webpage, his research “focuses on the proximate pattern and the evolutionary origins of human altruism, and the interplay between social preferences, social norm and strategic interactions”.

For instance, he analyzes the impact of inequity aversion in bilateral ultimatum games. In that setting, a proposer has to split a predetermined amount of money with a responder. If the responder accepts the percentage share offered by the proposer, both parties retain their share, otherwise both loose. It turns out that human responders will generally not accept the proposer’s offer if it deviates far from equality, and correspondingly proposers generally offer reasonable cuts. The traditional utility function of material self-interest does not explain this behavior. By adding the assumption of inequity aversion to the utility function, he shows that the Nash equilibrium can be shifted to account for the observed human trials.

Recently one of my friends wrote a really nice paper on P2P economies along these lines, along with proofs of liquidity.

Ben:
Yes, I see.  This network of ideas is rapidly advancing and we’re understanding more all the time, both practically and theoretically.

Could you say a little about how you see the mid-term future of alternative currency systems?  Do you really think they’ll become a practical alternative for a large variety of economic  transactions soon?  What segment of the economy do you think they’ll seriously invade first?

Mohamad:
Alternative currency systems are already being used on small and medium scales in niche markets, local communities and businesses (please see bellow, and Lietaer’s site for some references)

What is needed is to raise global awareness in order to mainstream them and better integrate them to our legal and economic infrastructure. For instance, in some cases, voting to allow taxes to be collected in alternative currencies.

By adding a new class of abundant connections to the economic network flow, specifically those derived from P2P and social interactions, these complimentary currencies increase the stability of the entire system. For example, the relative economic stability of Switzerland can be partially attributed to WIR independent complimentary currency system employed by medium and small sized businesses. The volume of transactions in the WIR increases in periods of global periods of economic stress, providing the liquidity required to keep the businesses running.

Ben:
That’s an intriguing claim.  How exactly would these alternative currencies promote more ethical interactions?

Mohamad:
I prefer to keep value judgments on the moral issues to a minimum, in order to avoid people’s predetermined views on morality from interfering with the natural process of assimilating this research. On the other hand, the research results in themselves shed clear light into morally significant conundrums.

This was just one example of a candidate model for a P2P economy. The government can continually distribute rights to newly discovered scarce natural resources equally to it’s people. These resources can then be traded among the community with a Barter system. This does not mean that we trade the actual resources themselves, but the rights to them, in a P2P manner. Algorithms can then be implemented to find the most efficient series of exchanges than can maximize a collective measure of utility.

The P2P Foundation explores several of interesting alternative models that either compliments or replaces traditional social, economic, and political infrastructure. These include Ripple pay for P2P money, P2P governance, P2P manufacturing, and so on. While these models are not yet fully mainstream, they are already being implemented on large scales. The open source community is a great example of P2P production that significantly affects our daily lives.

Ben:
Ah yes, I see. And I suppose open governance and open source government tie into all this as well.

Mohamad:
Yes indeed! But I’ve already talked too much today, so perhaps we can leave this for another discussion some time in the future?

Ben:
That’s fine. But there’s one more thing I have to bring up before I let you go.

All this discussion about the future of the economy seems to assume a fairly optimistic future scenario where Hugo de Garis is wrong and the artilects don’t simply squash us all and co-opt our molecules for their own purposes! What is your reaction to that sort of darker, more violent future vision?

Mohamad:
I think Hugo de Garis’s thinking on the topic is a bit immature. While I agree there is a threat of unfriendly AGI, I think we will respond to this threat with corresponding security precautions. These concerns affect the lives of real humans, and no less than the fate of our species. The gravity of these issues will be addressed with appropriate scrutiny and depth, rather than merely wild fantasies.

I personally like the word “human” better than “transhuman”. The technological revolution is interesting precisely because it will allow us to tap into our vast potential and fully explore our humanity.

Ben:
Well, I agree that Hugo’s proclamations on these topics can be a bit oversimplistic sometimes (though knowing him personally, I’m aware his thinking is subtler than his proclamations sometimes make it seem). However, nevertheless, there seems some validity to the fear that an AGI with general intelligence 10x or 100x that of a human [and yeah, I know there’s no accepted practical measure of general intelligence, but I’m speaking qualitatively here], might find little use for humans, and treat us in a manner similarly to how we treat, say, gnats.

Mohamad:
I do agree unfriendly AGI is a concern, especially if the AGI is designed to be actively hostile.

There will be various protection mechanisms designed along side with the system. For instance, we can directly monitor the progress and thinking patterns of an AGI in real time, or preemptively by performing simulations in controlled environments. In my work, I favor embedding AGI in a virtual reality world. This has many advantages including better control, duplicability, and better security.

The core premise of my view here is a bit more subtle, though, than previous distinctions made by AGI enthusiasts. To begin with, I think that reinforcement learning is not a good model for action. Action is better thought of as Active Inference. With active inference, an AGI is motivated do nothing besides minimize a bound on the entropy of its sensorium. That is, without a “body”, goal oriented behavior quickly breaks down. The key to sustainable behavior is to infuse some of the “soul” of humanity with AGI. I’m speaking in metaphorical terms, of course. There are many interesting concepts that we can explore here, but I think the details of this argument deserves an independent treatment, perhaps in a future interview.

Ben:
Hmmm…. I don’t see any guarantee that massively superhuman AGIs would treat
us badly or dismissively, but I don’t see how one can be confident of “security measures” against such a possibility. Unless you mean security measures to stop people or human-level AIs from developing to a significantly super-human level of intelligence — some kind of panopticon-powered nanny mechanism…

Mohamad:
Ahahaha, I think people hopefully know by now that such protectionism does not work. It is simply too unstable a scenario.

Ben:
I’m not so sure of that myself – but let’s move on. I want to go back to your statement that you like the word “human” better than “transhuman”. What exactly do you mean by that?

I mean, AGI technology may allow us to create “virtual humans”, but it may also allow us to create powerful intelligences that are quite different from humans — don’t you think? And if these are also dramatically more generally intelligent than humans, perhaps they would deserve the label “transhuman”. And if humans somehow hybridize their brains with such non-human AGIs, doesn’t this make them
“transhuman” rather than merely “humans exploring their humanity”? At what point is a cyborg no longer a human and something else instead?

Mohamad:
I agree with you on all the points above.

I think the sort of advanced beyond the current human level that you describe is possible, and in many different ways. Simple arguments can show that this can be done, trivially, as in one example: just build a human level AGI but with the capacity to replicate itself, you can then do many tasks in parallel, that the attention bandwidth of a single human can not do. As someone who has managed working up to 70 hour weeks in the industry, while attending graduate school, and keeping a relatively healthy and social lifestyle, I know how much easier things would be if I could simply fork copies of myself!

I think we’re just comfortable with different words to describe the same process. To me, “Transhuman” feels detached from human concerns. I think of the future changes as a self-actualization of our human destiny. This process is continuous, I can imagine if the two of us were to have this conversation back in prehistoric times, you might have preferred to call humanity now as “Transhuman”. This touches on the ancient and ever-so-interesting debate between Monism, Dualism, and Dualistic-Monism outlooks in spiritual philosophies but this is another topic that will stretch this interview.

Ben:
Yes, we’ve covered a lot of ground already, and I thank you for taking the time to share your views with me and the readers of H+ Magazine. I look forward to following your work and your thinking as they develop!