Economic Devastation

[CoinCube]

I should rephrase.  I mean 99.99% of all humans will have no occupation which is not better fulfilled by a machine.

Are you arguing

1) That in the near future it will be possible to build a robot capable of doing most jobs better then a human can.

Or

2) That in the future most of humanity will be unable to find any form of employment at all because machines will do all work.

If your argument is #1 then I probably agree with you.

If you are arguing for #2 however consider the following factors in favor of human workers.

Human Advantages
1) Cheep labor $100-$200 a month currently in many countries
2) Self replicating (minimal initial capital costs)
3) Energy efficient...(just add food)
4) Replaceable (large surplus labor pool to draw from if someone dies)
5) Evolved (preprogrammed to function reasonably well in most terrestrial environments)
6) Tax Advantaged. (Governments are going to tax robotic production at a higher rate.)
7) Multipurpose (Can be transitioned from one activity to another with reasonable ease)

Just because a job can be done better by a robot does not mean all jobs will be cheaper for a robot to do. Robots are expensive and require expensive knowledge workers to build and maintain them.

Labor is likely to bifurcate in the near future. The high skilled knowledge workers will do very well. The rest will be left to compete for the low knowledge labor work with the machines. Their future is not so bright.

[AnonyMint]

I don't have time to develop a well articulated post. I will quickly add that as I argued in my blog article Information Is Alive!, the creativity of humans is both locally annealed and systemic globally over space, time, and (historical) consciousness, so humans will always be needed to advance the entropy towards maximum per the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Unless the robots are fully integrated into that systemic process of life, they will always be slaves of human creativity not vice versa. If fully integrated, they would need to be individually unique in which case, they wouldn't collectively attain superiority, rather excel and fail individually. It is crucial to note that without (granular, e.g. individual) risk of failure, there can't exist excellence (i.e. fitness). A uniform distribution allows no fitness, no change, no adaption, and is thus the antithesis of life.

Note what entropy is. It means maximizing the orthogonal probabilities, i.e. maximizing degrees-of-freedom which is potential energy and is the antithesis of top-down organization.

As always, there are many human slaves. We have a 1/3 of billion of them at least in India where you can still buy a child.

P.S. Apologies for the ego. It really doesn't help relay the information. Its frustration, which is a failure mode. Vacation recharged my batteries.

[Xav]

"Computer says NO."

[aminorex]

1) That in the near future it will be possible to build a robot capable of doing most jobs better then a human can.
2) That in the future most of humanity will be unable to find any form of employment at all because machines will do all work.

If your argument is #1 then I probably agree with you.

"Aw, you're no fun anymore."  I don't see it as argument so much as a dialectic pursuit of a more accurate predictive model.

If you are arguing for #2 however consider the following factors in favor of human workers.

Human Advantages
1) Cheep labor $100-$200 a month currently in many countries
2) Self replicating (minimal initial capital costs)
3) Energy efficient...(just add food)
4) Replaceable (large surplus labor pool to draw from if someone dies)
5) Evolved (preprogrammed to function reasonably well in most terrestrial environments)
6) Tax Advantaged. (Governments are going to tax robotic production at a higher rate.)
7) Multipurpose (Can be transitioned from one activity to another with reasonable ease)

Most of these seem to be temporary conditions, technologically determined (most obviously 2,4,5).  Some are arguable either on relevance (1,7) or math (3). 

(6) seems wrong.  In the developed world, the cost of adding a human is quite remarkable, in regulatory terms.  It's like science:  Human experiments are absurdly difficult to do.  You hire in France at your own risk.  Technological unemployment spreads from centers of technological advancement.

On (1,2): In the under-developed world, the material conditions are often pre-industrial, and of course most of these technological considerations don't apply strongly at  present, but as China has shown, focused management can push the clock forward by centuries in a decade or two (or backward).  It has also illustrated limits to sustainable population growth.  These don't apply to robots.  Some dissimilar limits do apply.

Just because a job can be done better by a robot does not mean all jobs will be cheaper for a robot to do. Robots are expensive and require expensive knowledge workers to build and maintain them.

For the immediate future, yes.  For the long-term, this is where we appear to disagree most sharply.

Labor is likely to bifurcate in the near future. The high skilled knowledge workers will do very well. The rest will be left to compete for the low knowledge labor work with the machines. Their future is not so bright.

And capital will do much better than either, apparently.  Welcome to Elysium.

[CoinCube]

"Aw, you're no fun anymore."  I don't see it as argument so much as a dialectic pursuit of a more accurate predictive model.

No no that won't do at all. Supposed to be fun.

What happened to the corruption of AI by porn tangent.
Dang it where is Rassah when you need him  

Human Advantages
1) Cheep labor $100-$200 a month currently in many countries
2) Self replicating (minimal initial capital costs)
3) Energy efficient...(just add food)
4) Replaceable (large surplus labor pool to draw from if someone dies)
5) Evolved (preprogrammed to function reasonably well in most terrestrial environments)
6) Tax Advantaged. (Governments are going to tax robotic production at a higher rate.)
7) Multipurpose (Can be transitioned from one activity to another with reasonable ease)

Most of these seem to be temporary conditions, technologically determined (most obviously 2,4,5).  Some are arguable either on relevance (1,7) or math (3).  

(6) seems wrong.  In the developed world, the cost of adding a human is quite remarkable, in regulatory terms.  It's like science:  Human experiments are absurdly difficult to do.  You hire in France at your own risk.  Technological unemployment spreads from centers of technological advancement.

Seems we agree that at least to some degree factors 1-5 and 7 will slow or limit mass adoption of robot labor ln the short term.

You are correct that #6 is wrong currently. I should have clarified that #6 will be true in the future as governments respond to ever increasing unemployment due to automation. Government response in this area is sadly predictable.

Long term is harder to predict. Will technological advancement eventually be able to overcome those human advantages above?
Sure but to do so you may have to build a robot that is self replicating, energy efficient, preprogrammed to function well in most terrestrial environments, multipurpose, and capable of dynamic learning.

"Computer says NO."

And capital will do much better than either, apparently.  Welcome to Elysium.

In the short term I agree with you. That looks exactly were we are headed. In the long term I am optimistic that the coming Rise of Knowledge will break us out of that futile cycle.

 


 

[CoinCube]

No quibbles that we're all unique
But your only evidence for the rest is your entropic argument. Further, your interpretation of creativity is unsatisfying from a philosophical point of view, because:
-of your reluctance to address the phenomenon of consciousness (and by extension, all that hard-to-explain stuff that goes along with it, like qualia).

I've got nothing to contribute on entropy (not my area) but with regards to consciousness the leading theories in the medical literature are

first-order representationalism
biological theory
higher-order representationalism
recurrent processing theory
information integration theory
global workspace theory

Of these first-order representationalism appears to have the best evidence currently

The core idea of first-order representationalism is that any conscious state is a representation, and what it’s like to be in a conscious state is wholly determined by the content of that representation. By definition, a representation is about something, and the content of a representation is what the representation is about.

First-order representationalism can account for qualia

First-order representationalism argues that consciousness consists of sensory representations directly available to the subject for action selection, belief formation, planning, etc.

As far as I can tell first-order representationalism is not incompatible with Anonymint's work and may be synergistic.

A nice summary of all of these theories and the evidence in favor of First-order representationalism can be found in the following paper

General and specific consciousness: a first-order representationalist approach

[CoinCube]

Popper stated that falsifiability is both a necessary and a sufficient criterion for demarcation.

The inability to perform empiric experiments on the brain (lack of volunteers in this area) means there is definitely a demarcation problem in all current medical theories of consciousness. Most of these theories acknowledge this deficiency.

Of course they are both compatible with each other -- they both assume a materialistic world-view as a starting point. In other words, they're both wrong.

Very broad statement there. Although the ancient philosophical conflict of idealism vs materialism has been brewing for some time I would dispute your assertion that materialism has been proven "wrong".

I agree that both AnonyMint's work and first-order representationalism have their roots in materialism. The entropic theory of knowledge may or may not be correct. However, as it stands it is compatible with the current leading medical theory of consciousness.
 

[cdog]

Definitely one of the better threads on this site, I wish I could contribute but at this time Im content to sit back, read as much as possible and learn.

Keep it up gentlemen.

[CoinCube]

OK, I must reluctantly concede defeat at this time

I don't know about defeat. Perhaps just outmaneuvered You are absolutely correct that all theories of consciousness including first-order representationalism have a demarcation problem so there is plenty of room for alternative views at the moment.

The political/economic theory outlined in Understand Everything Fundamentally will not be crystallizing into doctrine anytime soon. Its prediction of mega-death cullings and critique of collectivism pretty much guarantee that if nothing else.

What worries me greatly is the consequences of the proposed solution (an anonymous cryptocoin). It’s hard to understate just how much chaos and social upheaval this innovation will cause. Dacoinminister summed it up best in his post Bitcoin's Dystopian Future.

bitcoin could create massive social upheaval due to governments’ rapidly degrading capability to fulfill their core functions of taxation and regulation of commerce.
…
It may take a few years for everyone to realize it, but there will come a point when the ever-increasing outflows of money from fiat money into untaxable, unseizable decentralized currency will reach a tipping point, and we’ll have a financial panic like the world has never seen. Frightened lawmakers and banks will try to stop people from cashing out, but that will just increase the panic.
…
Has it ever occurred to you that hyperinflation can happen while the printing presses are off? The value of the money in your pocket is not ultimately guaranteed by your government, but by simple supply and demand. If demand falls precipitously, we have hyperinflation without ever needing to print another dollar or euro. If people start fleeing government currencies en masse, hyperinflation is the inevitable result.
…
All the world’s wealth has essentially been stolen, but by whom? By you, dear reader… We’ll be very lucky if we aren’t all rounded up and summarily executed.
…
This is where things get really bleak. Currently distributed currencies facilitate money laundering, black market commerce (the Silk Road), and insider trading (TorBroker)... they get MUCH bigger, but we will see applications which are much less savory.... the “Dark Net” accessible by Tor and private networks...is quickly becoming the platform of choice for large-scale illegal commerce.
…
Does anyone really expect the government to sit back quietly and watch...The only question is when and how they will strike back against these forces. While the government does have a lot of options, ... At some point, …our governments face a difficult choice between trying to survive this deadly storm or attempting to destroy all decentralized computer networks (including the internet). The former seems unthinkable, the latter, impossible.
…
I wouldn’t be surprised if this chaos gives rise to a strong, centralized, one-world government which gets its revenues by tightly reigning in freedom of commerce in order to collect taxes.

[AnonyMint]

I urge readers to click the following link and read my post at the related thread as I make some relevant points there:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=365141.msg4701370#msg4701370


Great discussion which I can't address fully at this time. I quote something I wrote at another blog:

http://blog.mpettis.com/2014/01/will-the-reforms-speed-growth-in-china/#comment-12371

Michael recognizes the point I made in my prior post up the page, wherein I said all the problems are due to top-down control which of course concentrates wealth due to the Iron Law of Political Economics.

Now we have confirmation in the recent China news.

I explained in my prior post (readers please click that link because it expounds in much greater detail on the coming chaos) that the only way the problem is resolved is chaos which results from elimination the top-down control. The unemployment occurs because the system is misallocated due to this top-down control.

The chaos restarts the system from the bottom-up wherein employment will grow again after the bottom in 2032 of this increasing global crisis.

The growth in employment will be hitech and is ongoing now. For example much of this medical transcription (dictation) BPO outsourcing will be replaced by highly integrated speech recognition software.

So the programmers get the jobs.

We programmers realize we are going to envied and hated and the governments will try to tax us to death.

So we are doing something about this too.

Goodbye to this system we have now. I am sitting in the driver's seat and you should brace for impact with chaos.

There is absolutely nothing the governments can do to stop this. It is technological and structural.

Long term is harder to predict. Will technological advancement eventually be able to overcome those human advantages above?
Sure but to do so you may have to build a robot that is self replicating, energy efficient, preprogrammed to function well in most terrestrial environments, multipurpose, and capable of dynamic learning.

I want to reiterate the critical point I made in my prior post:

It is crucial to note that without (granular, e.g. individual) risk of failure, there can't exist excellence (i.e. fitness). A uniform distribution allows no fitness, no change, no adaption, and is thus the antithesis of life.

Let me quote again from my blog article:

http://unheresy.com/Information%20Is%20Alive.html#Knowledge_Anneals

The knowledge creation process is opaque to a single top-down perspective of the universe because to be omniscient would require that the transmission of change in the universe would propagate instantly to the top-down observer, i.e. the speed-of-light would need to be infinite. But an infinite speed-of-light would collapse past and future into an infinitesimal point in spacetime— omniscient is the antithesis of existential. In order for anything to exist in the universe, there must be friction-in-time so change must propagate through resistance to change— mass. The non-uniform mass distribution of the universe is mutually causal with oscillation, which is why the universe emerges from the frequency domain. Uniform distribution of mass would be no contrast and nothing would exist.

Thus there can never exist a perpetual top-down control or superiority.

Creativity is diversity. Period. Technology has nothing to do with it.

So unless robots are designed to fail often as humans do, they will never be producing creativity. And if they do fail often, they won't be ubiquitously superior. It follows that superiority can never be a ubiquitous quality, rather fitness is always granular to the level of diversity. To visualize how fitness applies to diverse needs of real life, imagine an infinite number of uniquely shaped objects and finding matching shapes that interlock. There is no superior shape, rather most shapes fail to interlock and only those which are well matched achieve fitness. You can imagine the failure of attempting to place a government regulator every where to make decisions for billions of unique events (situations) happening all over the world each minute. Rather the local actors (whether they be people or atoms, etc) need to make the decisions in real-time. This threat of failure in the free market of local actors is what drives fitness and resilience.

We are alive because we are diverse. Period.

Entropy is existence. The game needs ever increasing entropy else it ends. If the universe has a bound, we would eventually know everything and there could be no more failure, friction would be eliminated and past and present would collapse into each other and we would cease to exist.

[glendall]

AnonyMint thanks for your documents and your thoughts.

I agree with much of it.

Regarding economic devastation particularly though, I think you may be over-complicating things.  Not to say you incorrect. Just saying our global financial environment has so many fundamental fabrications and flaws that it isn't even necessary to go beneath the surface of them much to prove that devastation is coming.

The fractional reserve banking system, and the fact that our currency is not backed by anything, added to the fact that a private investment bank run by a dozen people creates the American 'reserve note'  -- and that every country's own currency is pegged to this currency -- just alone shows how bad things are.

Hardly anyone even knows that the Federal Reserve private bank gets a 6% profit from all the money they make out thin air.  Think about that for a second. Let that sink in. The strongest currency, the world's most dominate currency, is printed by a private company whoser member bank [owners] automatically profits 6% on whatever they print. Think of much money that is. It is beyond illegitimate; it is treasonous, but has been going on so long that it is just accepted as 'the way things are'.  It's even almost a state-secret who even runs the private bank that prints the country's money supply. Red flags anyone?

Then you just look at the charts of much money is being printed, and at the ever-increasing rate it is.   This cycle is not new at all, its happened hundreds , thousands of times since the creation of the concept of money. And it never once has ended without the currency collapsing.

Basically it's a house of cards just waiting for a strong wind, and analysis of the charts and history shows this.  

tl:dr    :   Good stuff, but I don't think anyone really needs to look beyond simple, basic economics to realize that the world economy is built upon on a poor design that'll inevitably and unavoidably collapse.  NONE of the stuff that made 2008 Great Recession have been fixed, and in fact, the situation is even worse now from all the funny money being printed. We are 'quantitatively' easing one step close to the Great Collapse.  Not trying to be a doomsayer, I'm just applying logic. 

[AnonyMint]

glendall, conceptually (not sure about the 6% specifics, etc) yes I agree but unless we incorporate a systemic understanding, we won't achieve a solution. Again I refer readers to the following post in a related thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=365141.msg4701370#msg4701370

Try to follow the discussion about M and P and all that Quantity Theory of Money discussion and the links to the posts I made in the Peter Schiff thread, etc..

It is a lot to absorb but the basic point is that without bottom-up (i.e. locally annealed) fitness we don't have a solution. And without anonymity, we can't eliminate the power vacuum that gives the rich the ability to control taxation and take over Bitcoin and central banking. And thus without anonymity we can't get bottom-up fitness, we won't have a solution and we stay on the same hamster treadmill.

I have explained in my archives how Bitcoin can be easily subverted by taxation. So the elite are still in control. I even believe they created Bitcoin (but that is irrelevant to my point herein).

[thaaanos]

Just to spice the things up, some of my thoughts back on 2007 seem relevant, notice how cryptos can cut in and save the day

Service Capitalism in Selfdestruction
With the establishment of industrial capitalism the machine was the capital, and it was privately owned. The machine as means of production is for quite some time now -unexpectedly?- replaced by mind!
So in Service/Information Capitalism the capital is now the information and the mind. Mind as the machine, and information the currency (and patent offices the banks), though we could well be already shifting to its financial counterpart, the "Patent" Capitalism.
But these evolutions pose a paradox, what about the individual interest the self pursuit and privacy? the other pilar of capitalistic systems. Are we in for another transformation? Back to the feudal age? keep the capital privately owned? or keep self pursuit and publish the capital? The capitalists of old had never such problems, their machines stayed where they placed them, their machines didn't join the competition, their machines didn't work for free for a third party, and generally their machines had no other agenda.
The third way could be to stage the drive for the privacy of capital and self pursuit in one man shows, ie freelancing as the only way to make bussiness in the service industry, but that would stress the current exchange infrastructure to the point of paralysis.
Either way capitalism is about to retire.

Concerning the tech singularity yes that is in my mind irrelevant as there are already "Organisms" that use humans as a cell substrate, having their own collective inteligence and plans, that we poor cells cannot fathom.

Here is a treat that can give you a diffrent perspective
http://whatislife.stanford.edu/LoCo_files/What-is-Life.pdf

[CoinCube]

Here is a treat that can give you a diffrent perspective
http://whatislife.stanford.edu/LoCo_files/What-is-Life.pdf

Interesting and quite ahead of its time if a bit long.

For those without time to read it all the author Erwin Schrödinger (one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics) wrote this in 1944.
The first half pages 1-23 are a basic description of entropy and a complete coverage of genetics as it was understood in 1944
Essentially they knew that chromosomes somehow determined physical traits but did not know how.

Schrödinger postulated that the genetic information must be carried on a stable molecule of some kind and that mutation and evolution was the result of changes in the quantum state of this molecule to another form. This is pretty impressive and was later proved correct. We did not know DNA was that stable molecule until The Hershey–Chase experiment in 1952. It's structure was not known until Crick and Watson proved the structure of DNA was a double helix in 1953

Schrödinger argued that life feeds on negative entropy aka "it directs a stream of negative entropy upon itself, to compensate the entropy increase it produces by living and thus to
maintain itself on a stationary and fairly low entropy level." He argues that life is a process of creating order from order different from the 'statistical mechanism' which produce order from disorder (things like Brownian motion and diffusion) and that life is essentially a purely mechanical event. Consciousness he argues is therefore the mind/individual/operating system that runs the individual and controls the 'motion of the atoms'.

Now the theory that life is a purely mechanical event cannot be completely true because there is disorder in life both in random mutations and in the infinite variations that are produced via reproduction. Life without enough variation/entropy is deterministic (like the clones produced by simple cellular division) and prone to be wiped out by changing environment or threat. However excessive disorder/mutations/chaos also leads to tumors/death/extinction of the organism.

Perhaps there is a happy medium?

 

[thaaanos]

Here is a treat that can give you a diffrent perspective
http://whatislife.stanford.edu/LoCo_files/What-is-Life.pdf

Schrödinger argues that life feeds on negative entropy aka "it directs a stream of negative entropy upon itself, to compensate the entropy increase it produces by living and thus to
maintain itself on a stationary and fairly low entropy level."

He argues that life is a process of creating order from order different from the 'statistical mechanism' which produce order from disorder (things like Brownian motion and diffusion) and thus that life is essentially a purely mechanical event. As a consequence consciousness is the mind/individual/operating system that runs the individual and controls the 'motion of the atoms'.

From a Information theory point of view, negative entropy is Data stream, mechanical events are computations.
So the same mechanism that gives rise to Life, is the one that gives rise to intelligence, then society, and more scapes.

If you exchange negative entropy for Money, and mechanical events to transactions you get more fancy lifeforms

IMHO The definition of Life can be expanded to include societies, markets, corporations. So there already are super-structres aspiring at life, will , intelligence of their own, since we operate almost? mechanical.

The real singularity to fear will be when we accept Law as Force of Nature (as operating system), then we will become trully mechanical and will have surrender our will to a super conciousness.

EDIT:

Now the theory that life is a purely mechanical event cannot be completely true because there is disorder in life both in random mutations and in the infinite variations that are produced via reproduction. Life without enough variation/entropy is deterministic (like the clones produced by simple cellular division) and prone to be wiped out by changing environment or threat. However excessive disorder/mutations/chaos also leads to tumors/death/extinction of the organism.

Accumulating entropy in the living systems is what death is about.
Even mechanical systems can tap entropic sources for reasons say rand()

[CoinCube]

Accumulating entropy in the living systems is what death is about.
Even mechanical systems can tap entropic sources for reasons say rand()

Yet it is also what evolution, adaptation, and perhaps creativity are about.

If a system has been formed by and relies on entropy to survive (and does so in a non-deterministic manner) is it truly a mechanical system?

[thaaanos]

Accumulating entropy in the living systems is what death is about.
Even mechanical systems can tap entropic sources for reasons say rand()

Yet it is also what evolution, adaptation, and perhaps creativity are about.

If a system has been formed by and relies on entropy to survive is it truly a mechanical system?

It relies on negative entropy to survive, a potential must be present, a flow.
The origins or other inputs do not matter as long as there is structure within the system.

If the system can produce more entropy than the ambient environment processes, it can evade the 2nd thermodynamic law.

So the question for tech singularity is can a machine produce more entropy than a human?

[LostDutchman]

When it gets right down to it, do the elite care?

No.

Become one of the eilte through crypto and fuck it all!

My $.02.

[CoinCube]

Here is a treat that can give you a diffrent perspective
http://whatislife.stanford.edu/LoCo_files/What-is-Life.pdf

Thank you for this. It has helped me to put together some thoughts that were floating around in my head and develop my defense of socialism.
As I can think of few things more amusing then defending socialism in this particular forum I cannot resist posting it here.

Socialism is both inevitable and necessary. Furthermore, this fact is both consistent with and can be derived from the economic theory discussed up-thread.
The anarchist philosophy undervalues the utility of socialism. This is unsurprising because anarchism it is the antithesis of socialism. The anarchist critique focuses on the current problems of socialism in our era. Socialism today has many flaws the worst of which is the power vacuum that allows special interests to capture government and force their losses onto the collective. Indeed socialism is currently growing unrestrained. It is a system out of balance and if not brought into equilibrium it must inevitably collapse. Nevertheless, despite our current socialist excess, it must not be overlooked that some degree of socialism is needed both to find optimal fitness and improve the human condition.

The anarchist questions if socialism has any utility. Indeed any defense of socialism must show that socialism is more then simply chains on our individual ankles. Socialism at its heart involves taking from the productive/fit and giving to the less productive or less fit. What could be lost by discarding it so that individuals can optimize more freely?
The religious among us might argue that socialism is morally required. The idealist might argue that it is needed because of social justice. However, to challenge the anarchist regarding the need for socialism we must battle him on his own turf. We must show that socialism is needed using materialism and empiricism.

The need for socialism arises from the flaws in unrestrained anarchism. Anarchism if left unchecked leads to an excessively steep fitness curve (extreme survival of the fittest scenario). Why is this sub-optimal? The problem with a steep fitness curves is that it forces convergence to the nearest optimal state. This improves immediate population fitness, but it does so at the cost of long term adaptation and progress. Steep fitness curves have been shown to reduce the rate of evolutionary change (link below).

http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000187

The proper role of socialism is to help ensure trailblazers survive long enough to eliminate economic friction. In a landscape with a steep fitness curve these individuals may not survive or succeed (crossing these barriers involves significant cost). We can get stuck in a higher valley (of the N dimensional solution space).    

In its most extreme form anarchism can drive the entropy of society past the error threshold at which point information is destroyed rather than created.  This is a dark age and is indeed possible. Dark ages arise from the death throes of excessive socialism. Like a spring pushed too far in one direction a system trying to find equilibrium is likely to overshoot in the opposite direction when the unstable order dissolves. The backlash against anarchism in the industrial era lead to communism. The collapse of socialism may lead us to the next dark age.

Error threshold was developed from Quasispecies Theory by Eigen and Schuster to describe the dynamics of replicating nucleic acid under the influence of mutation and selection.
life like civilization requires entropy/anarchy to exist, but critically such entropy must be limited and contained. If life was without entropy no change would arise and evolution would cease. On the other hand, evolution is also be impossible if the entropy/error rate is too high (only a few mutation produce an improvement, but most lead to deterioration). Error threshold allows us to quantify the resulting minimal replication accuracy (ie maximal mutation/entropy rate) that still maintains adaptation.

This can be shown analytically at its clearest in the extreme example of a simple replicating organism that lives on a fitness landscape which contains a single peak of fitness x > 1 with all other variations having a fitness of 1. With an infinite population there is a phase transition at a particular error rate p (the mutation rate at each loci in a genetic sequence). This critical error rate is determined analytically to be p = ln(x)/L (where L is the chromosome length). When this mutation/entropy rate is exceeded the proportion of the infinite population on the fitness peak drops to chance levels.

The can be thought of intuitively as a balance between exploitation and exploration in search. In the limit of zero entropy/change successive generations of selection remove all variety from the population and the population converges to a single point. If the entropy/mutation rates are too excessive the evolutionary process degenerates into random search with no exploitation of the information acquired in preceding generations. Thus the optimum entropy rate should maximize the search but is subject to the constraint of not losing information already gained.

In the end our goal is congruence or harmony. We must eliminate all necessary barriers to finding global optima. Increased degrees-of-freedom in one sub-area such as the convergence forced by unrestrained anarchism is potentially sub optimal, ineffective, and perhaps counter-productive. Unrestrained anarchism does not eliminate all necessary barriers. Instead it forces conformity to the nearest local optima effectively raising barriers to distant more global optima.

Socialism and anarchism can be thought of as two opposing extremes in constant opposition. Anarchism is needed to combat the evils/suboptimal outcomes of unrestrained socialism (This is convincing demonstrated in the economic theory up-thread). However, it is also true that socialism is likewise needed to combat the evils/suboptimal outcomes of unrestrained anarchism. Neither socialism nor anarchism is superior they are simply opposing forces. The optimum result requires us to balance these forces. The solutions of the anarchist are the right ones in our time only because we live in an era of excess socialism. As human history has a tendency to repeat there will likely come a time in the future when the solutions of the socialist are superior.
    
References:
Eigen, M., & Schuster, P. (1979). The Hypercycle: A Principle of Natural Self-Organization. Springer-Verlag.
Ochoa G., Harvey I, Buxton, H. Optimal Mutation Rates and Selection Pressure in Genetic Algorithms. Proc. Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference 2000
Clune J, Misevic D, Ofria C, Lenski RE, Elena SF, Sanjuán R. Natural Selection Fails to Optimize Mutation Rates for Long-Term Adaptation on Rugged Fitness Landscapes. PLOS September 26, 2008


Edit: I wanted to post the conclusion achieved in another thread regarding how the above thoughts on socialism fit in with the economic theory discussed upthread

Is a Madmax outcome coming before 2020? Thus do we need anonymity

I posit that socialism is both inevitable and necessary.

I posit socialism is a relic that will no longer be needed

We have both thesis and antithesis. Lets see if synthesis can be achieved.

I agree with your economic analysis above.
We also agree that failure to converge to an optima will occur if a dynamic system is entirely unconstrained.

You state that socialism cannot provide this constraint because of the power vacuum. You likewise argue that for similar reasons socialism cannot be used to smooth the fitness curve.

However, I contend that you have already proposed a working solution to the power vacuum (anonymous cryptocurrency). The iron law of political economics aka power vacuum breaks down once governments lose the ability to debase the currency.

In a post fiat Knowledge Era government would be forced to live on a fixed income (taxation of the physical economy). Government can try to increase taxes on the physical economy but this would be self limiting once the ability to debase the currency is lost.  Socialism would thus be limited in size to a portion of the physical economy. With the power vacuum solved socialism is freed to play its proper role of required constraint on the dynamic system and smoothing of the fitness curve.

Nothing in your analysis presented so far demonstrates that the physical economy must shrink in absolute size. You have only shown that it must progressively shrink in relative size. It is entirely possible that both the physical economy and the resources consumed by socialism will continuously grow while simultaneously fading into insignificance.

If you argue for the complete death of socialism then some other model/social contract will be needed to provide our required constraint. Any system developed is likely to look a lot like socialism.

As this is your fundamental insight we are exploring it is only polite not to claim the last word. I will now bow out and leave it to you.

CoinCube, excellent summary. We are now entirely in agreement.

However, note it appears that the socialism will attempt to overshoot before it stabilizes in diminishing role. I don't know if anonymity will rise sufficiently fast enough to provide extensive relief from (and thus limit) this overshoot.

I recently had the epipheny upthread (see quote below) that the coming world government and world currency are a way to increase the economy-of-scale of the diminishing socialism component, so it can survive and be more efficient. This insight is similar to the logic I applied in 2010 to predict the European Union would not disintegrate. Note the developing world is still predominately physical (not knowledge) economies.

[thaaanos]

Some things to consider:
1. Entropy has 5 definitions, we must be carefull when we use that word I prefer the definition as "Non available Information"
2. The landscapes you discused are static, but the world is a dynamic terrain not to mention that it shifts under the "explorers" weight, the search for a maxima (local/global) is an ongoing (never ending) progress.

This is why propably we have extinction events...

To get your train of thought further...

If we follow life's example within an multicell organism we could see a socialist structure, while the organism itself could behave anarchic.

I think that those strategies in nature are not neccesary competing, rather layered, and the apparent competition maybe nothing more than the formation of a new top layer. It could well be that only the top layer can behave anarchic (has more degrees of freedom), but all the supporting layers are "socialist" .

It could be that the "head" needs more freedom to explore, but the body needs more efficiency to sustain

Examples: the wild west, Internet, Web, when they formed they behaved anarchic but as they were burried under (becoming infrastructure) they became socialized (standarized)

Right now the top layer of human societies is not the Citizen, but the Corporation. That was evident in the "European Constitution".
So I could conclude that a socialist citizen layer/scape, and an anarchic Corporation layer, is very close to how nature works. That of course until super-corporations form ie clusters/funds that will try to impose themselves as the anarchic layer. and so on...

That doesnot mean that there is an not an interlayer powergame over who is on top and enjoys the most freedom. Power to the people actually means citizens on top