Guarding our knowledge with Proteus
Some Knowledge Problems of the 21st Century so far:
Online entities know things about us we do not want them to know.
Global disinformation campaigns push false narratives into our collective knowledge making it hard to handle global problems.
“Group-think”, when a group deceives itself to avoid conflict, it can cause dysfunction in our important institutions.
Journals and news sources keep information access restricted to those who can pay
Reporters can be biased, click-baity, or have a specific agenda and it’s hard to tell when.
You can think of more?
Overcoming these problems is complicated by the factors of a planet with billions of people with different cultures, needs, and conceptual frameworks.
It’s not working to store our knowledge in thousands of isolated journals, databases, news reports and text books. Imagine trying to access all that? How many languages would you need to know? You would have to be a computer scientist and a statistician too. Even putting it all online and indexing it with Google won’t work because no single entity can hold that much control of the access to information
A giant knowledge-base won’t work for so many reasons. Who forces people to store their discoveries there? Such a knowledge base would be a prime target for powerful entities who have an interest in controlling what we know. Perhaps the worst aspect of storing our knowledge in a giant knowledge-base is that knowledge is stored in terms of a conceptual framework. Who gets to decide the framework used? We could use the framework of the dominant culture but what about those of us who don’t understand Mandarin Chinese? Or who don’t agree with that framework?
A really successful method of ensuring no one entity controls something has been iteratively improved by the Open Source community to ensure that the Linux operating system remains Free of negative influence but full of positive influence. Anyone who wants to can get the Linux operating system and modify anything they want to improve and then release their new version to the public. Many times a powerful person has tried to exert influence on Linux in a way that some people don’t like. Someone just forks the Operating System and makes a new “distro” designed the way they want it.
We need a system where anyone can put together a knowledge base and make it available. No doubt we will have knowledge bases from a wide variety of frameworks. There will be frameworks where the world is only 6000 years old and evolution never happened. F rameworks where there are an array of interesting genders for humans. Frameworks where only the highest level of rigour applied to verified evidence can get a fact accepted into the model. And there will be frameworks in between where if you tell it your favorite song it will believe you even without a formal peer-reviewed study. Anyone can subject any set of models to analysis and it will be quite clear if any models have contradictions, internally or with evidential data. These three things: 1. Anyone can gather knowledge into a distro using their preferred language or concepts. 2. Anyone can subject those models to analysis using their own computers — a sort of automated “peer” review. And 3. everyone can choose which of these distros they want to use. Many distros will automatically accept knowledge from other distros as long as it meets the requirements specified. Lastly, among the knowledge stored will be information about which sources have been reliable in the past.
To store these distos we need at least one computer language that meets the following requirements:
It can model any system from atoms to biological systems and medicine to democracies and psychology. We need to be able to model all the legal systems on the planet.
Can model the syntax and meaning of other languages in order to be compatible with them. For example, a model of the database language SQL together with a model of the data stored in a database should allow the knowledge the data represents to be accessible as if it had been modelled in the new language itself.
The language should be complete enough that alternative such languages can be modelled. This way there needn’t be only a single language that everyone has to agree on.
We are creating such a language called Proteus that we propose as the first such language to start the system off. Proteus is powerful enough to model any system and any language, including natural languages. Thus, eventually we can all access our collective discoveries in our own language and in our own conceptual framework.
You are invited to help us in creating this ecosystem and soon, to create models of the things that interest you.
Codedog: a programming Language for The Slipstream
If you are a developer in charge of some code or an app, you know an enormous amount of time is spent getting your app to work on a variety of platforms and coping with changing APIs and new features in the platforms you do support. In fact, the problem is so bad that if you write an app then never modify it again, it will soon stop working or be obsolete or incompatible with new releases of operating systems. Once you write an app you have to forever be updating it just to keep up with new API’s — even if you never add more features. And you have to do that for each platform you support!
Think about why that won’t work for the Slipstream. The Slipstream is about using tools that let people add their work together so that a thousand small contributions can be a thousand times more than one person could do alone. But the way software is created today doesn’t allow contributions to add. At best the increase is logarithmic. That means it will take more and more new contributions just to maintain the current level; let alone make progress. Not going to work for the Slipstream!
To solve this problem we had a re-think of the way software is created and maintained. One of our conclusions has to do with the fact that compilers (like C++ compilers) have no information about any other piece of the puzzle that developers have to put together. They don’t know anything about what libraries will be used, what platforms will need to be supported, what kind of user-interactions will be needed, and so on. All of these details are left up to the programmer. So if programmers are to support three platforms, they need to know about the libraries, the app style, the ‘gotchas’, and all the details of making an actual app work for all three platform. There are a LOT of these details and they change all the time.
CodeDog is designed from the ground up to produce apps. Not just the executable part of an app but the entire app; ready for deployment and optimally tailored for each platform needed. We realized that the information needed to make an entire app needs to be integrated into the language itself and not a separate step. If it’s separate, the developer will have to learn how to use it, with each language, with each library and platform and with each new advance. But if the information is integrated all these things can be automated — even if details change in the future.
Here is how it works. Think of all the decisions developers will have to make to get an app working on a platform. They will have to choose which libraries to use and learn how to use each one — for each platform. They need to decide which data-structures to use; list? deque? ArrayList? vector? They all do about the same thing but there are pros and cons to each one. And a hundred more decisions. With CodeDog we asked, what information is needed in order to make an optimal decision in cases like these? We designed a way to integrate general information into the code so that the system will have the information needed to make a decision.
So in CodeDog you can code multiple ways to solve a problem and register the pros and cons and requirements of each one. CodeDog already comes (or will come as more are completed) with a plethora of these “multiple ways to solve a problem”: How to make a sound with SDL. How to do it on a Mac. An Android. How to get a string from the user on GTK or Mac’s Aqua or Java Swing. Which list-like classes have fast insert or fast search? Which will work with Swift vs C++ or Java? Which are superfast on one chipset but not another?
CodeDog can compile code to what ever language you specify. For example, C++, Swift or Java. So you genuinely get an app tailored to each platform. The result can be written in Java for Android (or C++), C++ for Linux, Visual C++ for Windows, Swift for Apple devices, and so on. But the best part comes in the future. When new data-structures or new APIs or even entirely new platforms come out, the Slipstream can collectively update the CodeDog system. Rebuild your apps and they will automatically get new styles, improved data structures, new feature support and use new security techniques. If an entirely new type of device comes out next year, soon your app will work on it as well as if it were a native app. Because it will be!
Our Changing Infrastructure Part 1
When most people hear the word "infrastructure" they think of roads and the internet. We can get a more nuanced conception by asking the question "What are the things we do that are in essence, effortless?"
We can get more specific than just the internet and roads. One thing we can do with shocking ease is contact almost anyone in the world from wherever we are. We can also produce and share content with the whole planet.
An activity that used to be harder is finding a job to apply for. Not long ago it meant waiting until Wednesday or Sunday and paying 25 cents for a newspaper to get the Help Wanted section. Then to apply, type up a letter and mail a resume.
This was replaced by a new infrastructure, the non-profit website craigslist.com. Quickly, it was improved on with for-profit sites such as monster.com and Linked-in. Without such infrastructure, getting a job would be quite hard.
Perhaps even more importantly, consider how easy it is to exchange money for food or other products at a store or on Amazon.com. There is a vast infrastructure at work behind the scenes making it that easy. From people who plant and tend and harvest the crops or mine iron and rare-earth materials to those who deliver them on trucks and ships to processing plants or factories. Other people assemble them into phones or cars and test them. Then they are delivered to other factories or stores or Amazon warehouses. After we buy and use them, more infrastructure takes them to recycling plants or landfills or sewers. We have recently seen how a glitch in this system can reduce abundance for all of us.
But the most crucial piece of infrastructure, the one that makes all the others go is the motivation currency that gets all the people involved doing what is needed.
There is an analogy to this system in the human body. There are a myriad of complex systems in our body that get food and air, break it down into nutrients and distribute the nutrients, water, air and other products to every cell that needs it. And the energy currency that makes it all work is a molecule called ATP. Without ATP, our brains won't compute, our muscles won't contract, so our heart will fail and the entire system grinds to a halt within seconds and can never be restarted. We're dead.
In our system today, instead of ATP we have money. Every single action, from planting, harvesting or mining to storing and transporting, manufacturing and retail actions to running landfills is driven by money. Everyone in the chain gets paid. This fact makes banks and federal banks as well as credit-card companies the most important infrastructure in our system. At least for now.
If banks suddenly failed, and governments didn't bail them out, it would be apocalyptic. Just as our body systems would fail without ATP, within days and weeks stores and the internet would begin to fail. It would be hard to find jobs to get money if even we could. Eventually, electric companies would fail and it would be full stone-age. Without the internet the knowledge of how to rebuild would be hard to come by and recovery could take decades.
So that will never happen. The banks did fail and are apparently failing again, but the government will fix it. However there is another related problem that is pending. We get the money we need by doing tasks that support the supply chain or produce products. But the UN recently quoted a study that, with currently possible technology, potentially 80% of our jobs can be automated. And that is assuming that the technology never gets more powerful.
There are a number of ways this could play out. We can go through the combinations; some are unlikely, but let's at least mention them. First, automation could stop progressing. Perhaps governments ban it or companies decide not to use it for some reason. If automation does not stop and the current system does not change (it will), then it will likely grow to replace ~100% of workers in short order. This is because the companies that resist automating away their workforce will not be able to compete. We can imagine the result being that a few companies control most production and distribution. Perhaps even the CEOs are automated out. Then are they run by the government? In all scenarios that happen organically under the current structure, there will be a few people, whether government or corporations, at the top of a shallow hierarchy.
So if there are almost no jobs how will we buy food and products? Fortunately, since the production is nearly 100% automated, prices can be very low. But with no jobs, how will we get any money? There are many ways it could happen: Universal basic income, companies could offer 'fake' jobs. Or government could require that companies hire and pay people even if the jobs are fake. In that vein, governments could simply take over everything and distribute good to who they believe needs them. Obviously there are other possibilities.
All of these solutions are based on the same model: The driving emotions are greed, survival instincts and fear. For these to motivate people the overall environment must be one of scarcity.
And this points to a paradox. *With automation we have ethical free labor!* Shouldn't that create abundance? The problem is that all the current infrastructure, being based on greed and scarcity, and will fail if there is abundance. If you have everything you need you won't climb into a truck and haul products across the country, or go to the office to work in a cube all day, or show up at the grocery store to clean the bathrooms or go to work in mines or on farms. The Slipstream is a new kind of infrastructure driven by the positive emotions such as compassion, hope and trust. And these emotions work best in an environment of abundance. It isn't just infrastructure, its a way to organize that works like the "invisible hand" of the free market, but with positive emotions. And it's a way to transition smoothly from the rapidly failing system to the new one.
Our task now is to jump start it. At first it won't support us. But as more and more people begin to work this way it will reach a critical mass where suddenly we can trust that the world will work for us and those we love. Actually, there are two critical masses. The first is when we can rely on each other and our bots for our food, clothing, and basic products. The second is when we can rely on it for housing, law, roads, healthcare and so on.
We have spent tens of thousands of hours designing a system that is reliable, won't go Skynet, is troll resistant, very hard to hack or manipulate but where hacks are easy to detect and recover from. Rather than specifying how some system should work it adapts to what people need. In other words, we don't trust our own ability to design a system that works for everyone so we made a simple self adjusting, distributed, decentralized system that adapts as needed.
Our Changing Infrastructure Part 2
The story of infrastructure is the story of how we get what we need to survive and thrive. I find it surprising how much this changes over the generations and from place to place. I want to tell the story of changing infrastructure from my own point of view but this is not about me it's about examples of infrastructure. The whole story would include many different places and times, but there is enough in my experience to at least illustrate how infrastructure changes and how there are pro's and con's to different situations. My grandfather died fairly wealthy but how did he do that? He was an orphan during the depression in the Southern US. Begrudgingly raised by an uncle and kicked out when he turned 15, his highest education was 8th grade. His only advantage was that he was a good-looking white male. Here is how he did it; and this simply would not work today. He befriended a barber who, for free, taught him the trade and helped him get a license. The tiny amount of money he got from that was enough for him to rent a shop and start his own business cutting hair. In the shop he began to have jewelry for men to buy for their girl friends and finding that the single sale of a ring provided more income than a whole day of barbering, he found someone to teach him how to grade diamonds and repair watches. Later he would teach other men. But even before the jewelry store he made enough money cutting hair that he could buy, not rent, a house and provide for his wife and 2 kids. The story goes that when my father wanted to go to college my grandfather took him into a bank, went to the owner of the bank and simply said "My boy wants to go to college." My dad swore that the banker just pulled out a wad of cash and gave it to them. My dad paid it back as he could, on no particular schedule. When I first heard this I was shocked but later I realized that it was because granddad had sold the banker and the banker's son wedding rings. Rings that he had personally chosen to buy for his shop and had personally helped the banker choose. If dad had not been a white male, factually, this would not have happened. For comparison, my mother's college was paid for by her father.
For my father, renting a shop and plying a trade would not have been that easy. Things had changed. He worked in oil-fields and factories. Even so, on his death he had worked up to a 4000 square foot house near Boulder Colorado. According to him, his rent on "the hill" in Boulder when he attended Colorado University was $15 per month. As of this writing, I rent a room in a house for $800, and I feel I am lucky to get that rate.
Because my dad's experience getting a loan for college seemed so effortless, and because at 18 I was pretty clueless about how the world worked, I took out $30,000 in loans for college and got a credit card. I remember, as a kid, reading the terms of the loan and thinking that I must not understand it because no one would do that. $30k was worth it. I got an education in computer science and a master's degree in philosophy. I regularly paid my payment on the student loans but there were some times I didn't have money and I had to let interest accumulate. When the amount reached $85K I panicked. At this point I had already paid more than $30k but I owed $85K. I mustered as much resources as I could, paid off my credit cards and brought my student loan balance down to $20k. But after the year 2002 I again experienced a down turn and had to let the balance accumulate. Today, there is no way I can ever pay it down. The minimum payment is more than my rent or health insurance. I have paid well over $100,000. My education isn't worth that much. I owe over $200k. For a $30k education. By the time I die it will likely be over a million dollars. I'm not complaining; I'm happy. But "whatever."
There are countless such stories and such a variety of experiences. Once I did volunteer work at an orphanage in rural Russia. The stories of how people got what they needed were very very different. The infrastructure that supported the orphanage was very different.
In the stories there are pro's and con's to each situation. Some are racist but provide community to white people. Others are efficient; Today it is really easy to learn new things, contact people around the world or share content with nearly everyone.
If we could design any infrastructure we wanted, what features would it have?
#1, Fairness. Everyone should be able to thrive with a similar level of effort. Race, gender, sexual orientation, religion or any other attribute should have no bearing on how we thrive and find community. If I work 8 hours a day and someone else works 16, I'm personally fine with them getting more money than I do. If they want a billion dollars, lets see... they need to work 40,000 hours per day for it to be fair. In our current system, some people have that much money accidentally; they weren't manipulative but the system just dumped money on them. But in our ideal infrastructure these money dumps wouldn't happen to that extent. If you get the value produced from 40,000 hours of labor per day, that is 40,000 people who could spend an extra hour with family or friends each day. We want that time back.
#2, The amount of effort needed to thrive should be minimal. Today most of the value we each produce goes to someone else who isn't doing that much labor. Often it is someone who is more willing to manipulate than we are, although, again, some people are accidentally rich. With the efficiency of production that is possible with automation, if all the value we produce went to us, I estimate that we would only need to work 4 hours per month for the same lifestyle. With 10 hours per month we could support a few friends or our kids.
#3, Dignity and community: Despite my grandfather's humble beginnings he was able to build a sense of dignity. When he walked down the street he saw his jewelry adorning his community and he knew that he had contributed. Today we don't make products and sell them to people we can see or talk to. Importantly, we do not want to "go back" to that time. Not only was it structurally racist, he and the people he knew were racists. As a white male, he had dignity, but the majority of people did not. Fairness is more important than dignity.
#4, Safety. Imagine living without fear that you will be harmed or that you will not be taken care of if disaster strikes. For many poor or non-white people there is also a real possibility of being falsely imprisoned. That's scarier than the possibility of being robbed or beaten up. If you are robbed or beaten up you can recover. But if you are falsely imprisoned, or even unfairly imprisoned, you can never really recover. You won't make payments so you can lose your home and car and family and career. And more importantly, your reputation. Even though the whole thing was false or exaggerated. An analog for non-poor white people is the fear of being canceled; even if you didn't do it, no one will believe you.
#5. Troll-resistant, propaganda resistant, psychopath resistant. What if misinformation was extremely hard to sustain.
#6. What else?
No. Not by itself. No more than the Web can, by itself, be YouTube or Amazon. The Slipstream protocol makes it easy to cooperatively gather, vet, and use knowledge. This can become a system for cooperating to manage resources and execute large projects. By modeling systems such as social and legal systems it can loudly point out things like legal crimes or systemic unfairness and it can measure progress toward fixing them. The Slipstream will provide robotic, DIY or friend-based solutions before money based solutions. In this way it is more likely to evolve toward abundance-based infrastructure rather than scarcity based. It is important to establish a small group of cooperative people to start the system off on the right foot. Once the system is established in an ethical, abundant environment it can stay that way in the face of viral growth.