__MatrixMan__

In order to keep the data distributed in a way that maximizes availability, we're going to need routing protocols that tell us things like:

> don't seed this, both of your neighbors already have it, instead seee this which is rare in your region

That same metadata system can handle:

> don't share this with people who you don't trust in domain foo

Where foo indicates a group of people that won't participate in censorship.

It would get switched according to the same logic that ensures that people do end up with data nearby that is relevant to their interests.

Like, if there's only one university in the world that studies a certain kind of bacteria, info about it should travel in that direction and stay nearby (but not too nearby, we don't want a single node failure to wipe out the data). So "keep this away from Putin's goons" could be a routing predicate subject to the same rules, though people would need to exercise some trust hygiene for that, but combined with a bit of steganography I think it's solvable.

I dunno, incentives are an application layer problem. I'll depend on the users relationship to that data. Maybe...

- The publisher finds a way to pay you for it.

- You get free fries if prior gossip indicates that you've been seeding the restaurant's menu and open hours data.

- You just seed data that you care about keeping available for your community, like if you expect the mechanic to be able to fix your car you should seed the service manual.

- It's a tit-for-tat thing, peers remember who seed and seed themselves in return.

Yes. It's content addressed instead of server addressed. We can serve content to each other from our browser caches. The original server doesn't even have to stay up, just as long as there's sufficient saturation among the clients. The internet also doesn't have to stay up so long as somebody on your local mesh has what you need.

We just gotta rethink the application layer to make it easier to reference by hash instead of by name, and a few other tweaks.

I didn't realize it was a fad. I figured it was ancient. Anyway I don't think I am everything, not at the moment anyway, I'm just cautious about shutting out the possibility that something else is someone else.

I'm not sure about your linkage of memory to consciousness either, buy even if we grant it, the world is a very stateful place, there are plenty of systems lying around that might be supporting memory faculties which we fail to recognize as such because we're too different from it. Is the movement of electrical energy in the brain really so different than the ping pongging of neutrons in a stellar core? I mean obviously it is but, when it comes to the ability to store, transmit, and process information, maybe not.

I'm not trying to convince anyone that the sun has thoughts. My point is just that it's knowably unknowable. People are free to chose to believe whatever they want to believe about consciousness and they'll never be proven wrong. If we want to have useful conversations about AI, we need to develop ways of talking about the consequences of our actions which do not require us to first agree on the nature of consciousness.

When I think about the experience that these AI models have, I often wonder if they know that we exist. I mean, it took us a very long time to discover mitochondria, despite the fact that we like... live together and work out together and eat together and die together. When the first eukaryotic cells formed, the mitochondria probably thought they were in charge too--just like we think we're in charge.

I just pointed it out because I wanted to dodge the same old AI debates. They're very narrow. Like, people have been arguing about whether general intelligence exists for decades, and now that some VC wants to use AGI as a buzzword, we ignore that GI is not a settled issue. And consciousness... golly that's like THE intractable philosophical problem. It's a bottomless pit. Ain't nobody knows what they're talking about when it comes to consciousness.

I'm sympathetic to the reflex: this guy has beliefs that he doesn't realize are dangerous. Let's help him. I'm usually on the opposite side of this one. I just think we need to find ways to address the potential harms without actually winning a debate about consciousness. Beliefs about it are too varied and too tightly held. People don't win debates about consciousness. If they work super hard maybe they get a tenured position as a philosopher so they can continue the debate, but they never win.

I don't know, we don't communicate in a way that I could ask it.

But the principles of biological organization are often fractal. If you observe a phenomenon at one level (selection acting on an organism, say) you can often zoom out and see it again (acting at the ecosystem level) or you can zoom in and see it (at the organ level, the tissue level, or even on certain macromolecules).

It's not necessary for me to be able to strike up a conversation with my kidney for me to see that it's well situated to experience changes in my diet a bit like how we experience el nino, the machinations of my immune system might be like politics to it. I'll never know for sure, so I err on the side of caution.

I've been a panpsychist for a while now. I think that trees and fungus and rocks are conscious. It has not yet manifested as attack surface, so far as I'm aware.

But if I were to practice indifference, I think that would have a negative effect immediately.

And while we're enumerating failure modes, it's also possible that what was supposed to be a deterrent ends up being an accidental prompt injection: I just enabled "deep research" and now it's telling me how to make ricin?

That would make for a pretty funny read once you realized it was a program and not a rant.

On the other hand I try to be nice to the AI's. They may or may not feel it, but I feel it.

I thought that individual anecdotes would be less convincing than evidence that "economically motivated adulteration" is an entire classification for such crimes used by the FDA, which was created to prevent them.

Its not hard to find specific examples. 5 minutes of searching will find piles and piles of them.

If you must have a name, Stewart Parnell was convicted of knowingly distributing salmonella contaminated peanuts in 2015. 9 People died. He got 28 years in prison.

You don't have to trust the news either. Just ask around. I know a teacher who has lost two students to surprise fentanyl. I'm sure there are similarly affected people in your community. Unregulated markets are a slippery slope towards deaths by poison. It happens all over the world (but more in places without an FDA equivalent).

I hope somebody turns this concept into a programming language with keywords that make you look like a terrorist. Then we can use it for coding challenges.

I like where you're trying to go, but I'm afraid that you might have a chicken/egg problem on your hands. You need an oracle for the soulbound identities, which requires a widely supported coalition, but to get such a coalition despite incumbents who would divide it, you need the tool to already work.

I figure the tools of the successful revolutionary become the tools of the new government, so whatever it is it's gotta be useful for a small minority that wants to coordinate in the face of a sophisticated adversary, and then once it grows up it's gotta be useful for carrying out the bureaucratic business of a government. Unless it survives that transition with its trustworthiness intact, it won't be seen by the masses as trustworthy enough for the job. People just aren't that keen on trusting computers on the say-so of nerds like us, they need to see it succeed under stress.

So for starters I imagine an ocean of Sybil identities controlled by an enemy. Some of these will be trying to get info about your intentions so they can interfere (polling of one kind). Also you'll need to coordinate with comrades without making your entire trust graph known to all parties (polling of the other kind).

It'll never get to the point where coalitions are large if it doesn't function well when they're small, and at that phase you gotta be choosy about who you share info with because you're not yet a government but rather a threat to the existing one.

Maybe it's the same probability of being a problem, but it would be a problem introduced by different kinds of threat.

If you're worried that you'll be targeted as an individual by somebody who cannot coerce a CA but can tamper with the channel you're using to get the public key, use https.

If you're worried that you'll be targeted along with many others by somebody who can coerce a CA, use ssh and ensure that some folks are comparing key fingerprints such that at least one is close to the source.