[extropy-chat] The Golden Transcendence

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Anders Sandberg" <asa at nada.kth.se>

> 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.

### Yes, this is the implausible part of the story - I hope to upload to a
Phoenix of my own in no more than three-four hundred years :-)
--------------------------------

>
> > 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.
>
### Yes, but the Parliament seems to tasked with setting the limits of IP
(according to the appendix). I'll write the master himself, and if he
answers, I'll forward it here.

--------------------------------------

> 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.

### Tell us more. I found the idea of Hortation (maintenance of second-order
public goods by the threat of ostracism) to be exceedingly interesting, even
though I wasn't unfamiliar with some historical precedents. I would think
that a graded form of ostracism (e.g. quoting higher prices to customers
undergoing censure, in collusion with other private providers) would be even
more efficient, while less harsh. Wright's books opened my eyes in this
respect.

Rafal