Cyber Republic by George Zarkadakis

Author:George Zarkadakis [Zarkadakis, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Liberal democracy; Representative democracy; Deliberative democracy; Artificial Intelligence; Robots; Euro Crisis; Coase's theory of the firm; Platform capitalism; Job deconstruction; Gig economy; Process digitalization; Displacement effect; Compensation effect; The machinery of government; Socialist calculation problem; Cybersyn; AI ethics; Cyber Republic; Universal Basic Income; Asymmetry of wealth; Asymmetry of knowledge; Meeting of Minds; Citizen Assemblies; Principal-agent problem; Epistocracy; Noocracy; Popularity and Consensus; Majoritarianism; Constitutional Law; Reflexivity; Cybernetics; Autopoesis; Conversation theory; Theory of mind; Blockchain; Cryptocurrency; Cryptonetwork; Cryptoeconomics; Distributed Ledger Technology; Tokens; Web 3.0; Internet of Things; Machine Intelligence; Polanyi Paradox; Data ownership; Data Trust; Augmentation; Web 3.0 ecosystem; Decentralized Platform Cooperatives; Decentralized innovation; Sortition; Elinor Ostrom; Common Pool Resources; Cryptogovernance;
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2020-08-28T00:00:00+00:00

Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

Artificial intelligence was born out of the dominant scientific and engineering movement of those postwar times called “cybernetics.” The goal of cybernetics was to understand how self-organization occurs in complex systems, but also how emergent systemic behaviors affect the parts that make up those systems. A system is generally described as “complex” when its behavior is different from the behavior of its parts. Take, for example, a flock of starlings; each starling has a certain way—or pattern—that it follows when in flight, but the flight pattern of the flock is completely different, as everyone who has had the joy of watching this beautiful phenomenon knows. The flock exhibits an emergent behavior, something that would be impossible to predict if one knew only how any single starling flies. Such emergent phenomena of self-organization occur all around us and at every scale, from colonies of microscopic algae to the neuronal networks in our brains, the physiology of animals and humans, weather systems, biological ecosystems, and, of course, the economy. They can also occur by design in complex engineering systems. Cybernetics studies the relations between the parts and the whole by analyzing how communication takes place between the parts of the system, looking into what are the various communication pathways that signals have to travel between the parts, what are the messages carried by signals, and how the messages or other characteristics of the signals change over time, and why.6

One of the most profound ideas in cybernetics is “feedback.” Cybernetic systems exhibit emergent behaviors because the communication signals between the parts are traveling in feedback loops; output signals are often mixed with input signals from the environment or other parts of the system and are fed back into the system and so on. Thus, a cybernetic system operates in a recursive way. There can be numerous feedback loops at play in complex systems. What makes feedback loops significant is that they change the internal structure of the system. Take, for example, the human brain, which is made up of billions of interconnected neurons. In order for the brain to make a decision (conscious or not), it processes input signals from the senses, as well as signals from inside the brain that continuously alter the strength of the interconnections between the neurons. The “brain system” is constantly reconfiguring itself as it interacts with the environment, with itself, and with the rest of the body. Like the brain, all cybernetic systems adapt their behavior to changes in their environment and in themselves through sensing and processing multitudes of signals traveling in feedback loops. Cybernetics’ great insight was that this process of adaptation by feedback loops is in effect a process of “learning.” In the case of the human brain this is quite obvious: the mechanism of memory is based on how our brain’s internal structure modulates over time, and how the interconnections between the billions of neurons are either reinforced or weakened.7 The strength and pattern of

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