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Friday, December 31, 2010

Will Decreasing Scarcity Allow us to Approach an Optimal Meta-Society?

Will Decreasing Scarcity Allow us to Approach an Optimal Meta-Society?: "When chatting with a friend about various government systems during a long car drive the other day, it occurred to me that one could perhaps prove something about the OPTIMAL government system, if one were willing to make some (not necessarily realistic) assumptions about resource abundance.

This led to an interesting train of thought — that maybe, as technology reduces scarcity, society will gradually approach optimality in certain senses.

The crux of my train of thought was:

Marcus Hutter proved that the AIXI algorithm is an optimal approach to intelligence, given the (unrealistic) assumption of massive computational resources.
Similarly, I think one could prove something about the optimal approach to society and government, given the (unrealistic) assumptions of massive natural resources and a massive number of people.

I won’t take time to try to prove this formally just now, but in this blog post I’ll sketch out the basic idea…. I’ll describe what I call the meta-society, explain the sense in which I think it’s optimal, and finally why I think it might get more and more closely approximated as the future unfolds..."

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