[extropy-chat] The Golden Transcendence

[Anders Sandberg]

Rafal Smigrodzki said:
> I just finished reading the third part of John C. Wright's Golden Age
> trilogy, and I am awed.

I couldn't agree more. It was a wonderful feeling to see that Wright
managed to get the story to wrap up in a nontrivial manner.

It is one of the few books where one gets the feeling that characters that
are described as smart actually are smart and not just playing. The plot
twists have a nice logic and also managed to dispell the risk of having
the hero solve everything thanks to his amazing willpower and absolute
moral corectitude. Phaeton might be right, but that doesn't mean everybody
will automatically obey or believe him or that he will not put himself
into deep trouble thanks to his personality. There were several times I
was truly afraid that Wright was doing an Ayn Rand channeling, only to -
fortunately - have the solemn arguments punctured by sceptic comments by
listeners or intercepted by reality.

Personally I found the description of Helion's character interesting.
Phaeton is in many ways just the opera hero, while Daphne, Atkins and
Helion are much more nuanced. Wright manages to make identity engineering
and its consequences believable (and very thought provoking; we are going
to need an entire vocabulary for the family and emotional issues around
it).

I was a bit surprised by the length of the historical eras (there is an
appendix describing much of the setting, although not in excessive
detail); I had the feeling the setting was maybe just a few tens of
thousands of years in the future, but it appears to be nearly half a
million years ahead.

> The one issue I don't understand are the IP laws in the Golden Ecumene -
> are
> they statutory or merely contractual? If statutory, why are they
> (apparently) time-unlimited, which might result in inefficiencies (and
> Wright doesn't say how inefficiencies are avoided), and if they are
> contractual, how do they become universally enforced?

Could it be a mechanism similar to the Hortators, but so low-level that
people no longer took notice? Imagine an opt-in economic system where you
contractually agree to accept the IP of others and the penalty of breaking
it is expulsion. AI maintains the actual fund transfer, control of who
owns what IP and so on, so participants do not have to care much about the
details. This system becomes just as popular as the Hortators, in fact
even more popular: the benefits of joining are so great that everybody and
everything joins it, and hence breaking the IP becomes just as bad as a
total Hortator ban. Most likely people get various kinds of insurance and
insulation from this risk, making it less likely to happen by accident.
Over time this system becomes so ubiquitious that it is viewed as the
natural way things are.

I'm thinking about modelling hortator-like structures in Axelrod's Norm
Game. So far there seems to be some interesting effects due to the
topology of the social networks.


-- 
Anders Sandberg
http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa
http://www.aleph.se/andart/

The sum of human knowledge sounds nice. But I want more.