Transparent Society & Sousveillance | David Brin, Author of The Transparent Society

2:03PM Aug 7, 2021

Speakers:

Allison Duettmann

Keywords:

surveillance

reciprocal

big brother

people

notion

cooperation

enlightenment

systems

accountability

speak

existential risk

risks

answer

alternative

allison

intellectuals

viscerally

chapter

stupidity

enforce

Welcome to posit an intelligent cooperation group. I'm really happy to be with two fantastic speakers here today. Kittles will be speaking on NF T's for engineering property rights, and David Byrne, who will be speaking on surveillance. First one up, we have a new set of questions on D QE, the Curie is a platform that you can that we can basically use to incentivize you to submit the answers to questions that we think are relevant to the group. And the one of the prompts of the previous round was, what is the most exciting cooperative arrangement that could be unlocked with zero knowledge proofs? And you've answered and a $250 bounty was one for an answer. And then the next question with a deadline on September 8, is what would it take to secure civilizations computer infrastructure, and that is based on the chapter that we just released. And so we also released the new chapter, it will be really lovely to have your comments on that is on computer security as a way to secure a civilization. And so today, we will start with a weapons presentation. And to kind of see the context of the presentation, on surveillance, maybe it's good to go back a step to the chapter on on existential risks that republished and that in the chapter, we basically argue that we face a conundrum, we're standing between two kind of quite scary risks. One is the risk of small kills all on the one hand, and that basically means that with technological proliferation, that will soon lead to scenarios in which a smaller number of people will have the chance to create ever larger destruction. using technologies such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, even computer insecurities can just be easier exploitable exploited by a smaller number of actors. And in the future, that risk was more, because more kills all. And then on the other hand, you often kind of hear the alternative scenario discussed, that basically calls for in the face of those of this technological proliferation, we need powerful governments that can monitor a potentially dangerous activity, and can physically intervene in people's lives on a really fine grained scale, that is required really to monitor and to and to protect against those risks. And so this creates potential existential risk on the other side, which is that of a Rotarian dictator and a single point of failure, which we call a power suicide. And so on the long run, you know, we need to kind of create systems that are in between, and that can avoid both of those risks. And we propose to do this with a fabric that we call multiple active shield. And that will basically be an encrypted mechanism in which you'd have mutually watching watchers, monitor each other's activity, and can then also enforce defense when necessary. And we have a lot more on that in the chapter. But it is somewhat take inspirations from from a book by David. And that book is on transparent society. And he basically he calls for a state of surveillance, so as surveillance but from below, in which we can make sure that we also watch the watchers. And he goes from the premise that surveillance will already be inevitable, and on the long term, on the long term. Because just as the economics of it going down, and because of how useful it is, to know information of how much people crave, people crave for it. And we then take it a next step and also suggest that potentially robotic enforcement may be something that we cannot avoid. And and just because of the economics of it, and so we need to make sure that it's secure if we cannot avoid it. And so super happy to have David speak on surveillance here. And David, please take it away.

All right. I have just 10 minutes. So I'm going to dive right in. I because of this I am skipping out on the last part of the Festschrift for Roger Penrose on quantum consciousness. So it's highly related. Very, very interesting stuff. And I'd like to congratulate you, Alison, and your colleagues on the intelligence voluntary cooperation manuscript that you're circulating. It's, it's quite brilliant. It explores the possibilities of positive some thinking, which is the the great concept underlying the all of the Enlightenment experiments, the puroclean, one that lasted a couple of 100 years about 500 BC, the Da Vinci's Florence, all of them, triggering immune reactions from the surrounding oligarchies. And the parallel that I make is between a pyramid shaped human culture which has an oligarch At the top whose top priority is to keep everyone down below and take other men's women and wheat. And the sexism is a deliberately accurate part of that. Versus the diamond shaped social structure which is emphasizes a vastly empowered middle class with merit based individual churn that is unafraid of the rich and outnumbers the poor and is constantly rising. I can talk I have email me if you'd like. Links to, to that, where I go into that. Now, Allison referred to the Fermi Paradox obliquely, because of course, one of the great filters would be if small kills off, we if everybody out there comes across a technology that even the rare exceptions in a society could use to destroy the ability that society to be to become noticeable across the galaxy. I have spoken of this regularly at some of our protector casts agencies, there are some of the agencies in our protector cast, this is the first year and six I haven't spoken at CIA, who are very concerned and who asked science fiction authors to scare them. And we always succeed. But the the reflexive answer that is given by the Chinese court intellectuals is and you find this all the time. Funds young and other court intellectuals, rationalized and this is one of the reasons why they must have a centralized pyramid ol oligarchic led state only they call it led by the people, people's Vanguard, you know what, whatever magical incantations and religious dogmas are used to justify no return to the standard. May male reproductive success notion of the pyramid all social structure and the destruction of the perfectly and alternative happens if you look upon heatedly across human history, it's absolutely proved that these have one advantage. They are stable, they work with human reproductive patterns. And they have one big disadvantage. They are always stupid, incredibly stupid. And what you get is the dismal litany, and it's called history. And the puroclean alternatives are unstable, and sometimes topple into stupidity, as we saw happen to periclean Athens Da Vinci's Florence, but they are so vastly creative that they are able to dance upon the future. Now, small kills all who the answer recommended by Vaughn Zhang and the other Chinese court intellectuals. And write to me if you want my essay about that, is that you need a centralized control or you're not going to catch these, these anomalies that can kill everybody.

Unfortunately, that is answered by the incredible grotesque stupidity of all pyramidal systems. There's a smarter than all other pyramidal systems, I'll grab that they have learned from all the others, including Japan, Incorporated from the 1980s that we thought was going to conquer the world, but make mistakes. However, it's still stupid. Inherently, what you have as an alternative is reciprocal accountability. And so I finally got to what Ellison wanted me to talk about. And that is the basic notion that underlies the great enlightenment experiment. And that amazingly, and miraculously, most Americans and most Westerners this really understand, but simply cannot seem to grasp in a way that that recapitulates and that is that 90% of our error detection systems are flat and reciprocal. And that is how science works. The scientists are the most competitive humans our species ever made. And that is how science gets forward not by some declarations from Central authorities. And it's true about all of our systems. And so, one of the things that is touched upon I haven't read the whole book yet in Allison's book, is the notion that we have to open up cooperation but cooperation is joined at the hip co joined at the hip with competition. You can't get creative competition without cooperation in the creation of systems that combat cheating. And you can't get proper cooperation among humans unless you have competitive systems, but that dynamically correct errors in real time. So reciprocal accountability is inherent in this notion of the self preventing prophecy. We all share visceral fear of Big Brother. But the main thing to fear about Big brother is the incredible stupidity of Oceania as portrayed by Orwell. Ah, and, you know, it's one thing if Big Brother governed well. But Big Brother governs abysmally. And the great benefit of the Western enlightenment is not democracy and freedom. Those are tools by which we get the unstrapping defying effects of reciprocal accountability. And how we got to this is in my latest book, vivid, vivid tomorrow's about how science fiction movies have ingrained generations of Americans with suspicion of authority and this notion, Allison, how many minutes do I have left?

Three to four,

therefore, okay. So while we viscerally fear, big brother, the biggest reason to come back Big Brother, and the biggest answer to Fung, Zhang and the other courts, intellectuals of China, is that history shows that this method, this pyramid of method is stupid, transparency, universal transparency, surveillance, answering surveillance with surveillance aimed upward at all elites and having the reflex to strip them naked. That is the method by which we can avoid Big Brother, if we do that, and it is the great fear of all the oligarchs around the world who are joined in a push against the western enlightenment as we speak. If we do that, we'll have a society that is immune to Big Brother. But we'll have a society that is in danger of the second tier, and that is the one they are building in China with social credit, and that is getting all the people to enforce conformity on each other laterally. In other words, the great innovation of the west of reciprocal accountability can be turned cancerous and turned against us and turned into a tool for enforcing homogeneity. In replacing Big Brother with a 51% majority who openly and honestly vote oppression of the 49%. That is also to be feared, and it's viscerally behind a lot of the people who reject reciprocal accountability surveillance notions, like those I recommend, but there's an answer to that. And the answer to that is cultural. That is that if you have a culture that detects everything, and detects all behaviors, but among the worst behaviors that are dissed and disliked and pounced upon is nosiness and judge mentality and gossip. Then those who say my mind your own business will be empowered and those who say you're not you're not conforming, will be pounced upon as bullies. If you have that and we have that. If you have that, then the secondary level of failure mode ought to be answered.