[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Here is another way to describe consciousness in the context of universal terminal goal. Consciousness level of a system  describes how much control it has to determine its own future.
In any system, we can break down this capability into 3 main parts: input, process, and output. Input parts determine how good a system can collect information about physical reality in and around it. Process parts determine how good a system can process information collected by inputs, filter it, store it, and calculate the most optimal actions aligned with its terminal goal. The output parts modify or make changes to physical reality in and around it.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

In any system, we can break down this capability into 3 main parts: input, process, and output.

When talking about consciousness, we tend to overlook input and output parts, while focusing on the process part. But I can argue that a system can have high intelligence while being low in consciousness. Think about someone who is dreaming, or has severed spinal cord, or a brain in a vat, or supercomputer running a simulation.
Consciousness level of a system is not a constant. It can vary from time to time. When someone is drunk, their consciousness level is reduced. So does when they got stroke or Alzheimer. Some drugs may increase their consciousness level. So do their access to smart phone or direct brain interface, even simpler tools like reading glass, telescopes, microscope, screwdriver, hammer, and knife.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

"...and we should do it now" (Elon Musk)
Why?

Now is the only time when we can really make a change. Time is considered as a precious resource which should not be spent in vain. The longer we wait, the less time we can use to execute our plans, and the higher the risk of failure.

In his own words,
"Becoming multi-planetary is one of the greatest filters. Only now, 4.5 billion years after Earth formed, is it possible. How long this window to reach Mars remains open is uncertain. Perhaps a long time, perhaps not. In case it is the latter, we should act now," wrote Musk on his Twitter page.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1396226161718349824?s=19

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

These videos describe the alignment between base and mesa objectives, which are basically the same as terminal and instrumental goals, respectively.

Our minds are neural network systems trained by our parents and teachers, which in turn were trained by their parents and teachers, and so on to earlier human ancestors. So in a way, we are mesa optimizers having mesa objectives, which must be aligned with the base objective. In other words, we should align our instrumental goals with our terminal goal.
On the other hand, our successors will be our mesa optimisers. We need to make sure that their mesa objective is aligned with our base objective.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

On the other hand, our successors will be our mesa optimisers. We need to make sure that their mesa objective is aligned with our base objective.

This can be done by setting up moral rules, equipped with reward and punishment system. The reward is simply a way to inform the optimisers that their behavior is aligned with base objective, and they should keep doing it. While the punishment is simply a way to inform the optimisers that their behavior is not aligned with base objective, and they should stop/avoid doing it.
In many cases, simply telling them that their behavior is aligned or not aligned with base objective is not enough to modify their behavior. It may be caused by existing mesa objective which can be shaped by evolutionary process, childhood indoctrination, or their previous experience.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

In many cases, simply telling them that their behavior is aligned or not aligned with base objective is not enough to modify their behavior. It may be caused by existing mesa objective which can be shaped by evolutionary process, childhood indoctrination, or their previous experience.

Pain and pleasure are some earliest methods to inform organisms as mesa optimisers if their actions are aligned with their base objective, which is to avoid extinction. They are not perfectly accurate, but they are fast, and in most cases adequate. The inaccuracy issue can be compensated by having redundancy through reproduction.
Organisms who have developed expectation of future condition can get advantage from using happiness and sadness/suffering, which are expectation of future pleasure and pain, to realign their behavior with their objective. The advantage is the possibilities to make preventive/anticipative actions so they can avoid real pain and maximize real pleasure.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Why We Age and Why We Don't Have To | David Sinclair | Talks at Google

David Sinclair, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, discusses his new book "Lifespan", which distills his cutting-edge research findings on the biological processes underpinning aging. Sinclair describes lifestyle hacks we can undertake now to combat aging, as well as future scientific breakthroughs that promise to slow down—and even reverse—the aging process.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Organisms who have developed expectation of future condition can get advantage from using happiness and sadness/suffering, which are expectation of future pleasure and pain, to realign their behavior with their objective.

This capability requires some form of virtualization or simulation of physical reality inside the body of the organism, typically in the form of neural network. In simple organisms, the simulation has low accuracy and precision. But they don't consume much resources. More accurate and precise simulations are costly, but the benefits may outweigh the costs.
Humans have named some milestones to describe progress of information processing capability in organisms.
instinct: an innate, typically fixed pattern of behavior in animals in response to certain stimuli. It may be compared to sub-routine or procedure in programming languages.
emotion : a natural instinctive state of mind deriving from one's circumstances, mood, or relationships with others. We can compare it to situational system's mode such as normal mode in smart phone for common usage, power saving mode when the battery is low, and gaming mode when high performance is required.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Following instinct and emotion are heuristic rules mentioned as examples of mesa objective.
In this context, intelligence can be seen as the ability to align a system's actions with its mesa goals. While wisdom is the ability to align a system's mesa goals with its base goal.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Consciousness level of a system  describes how much control it has to determine its own future.

Consciousness level of a system in general doesn't depend on how it is formed, or what's its chemical composition. It can be achieved by adding new parts, replacing old parts with better new one, removing unnecessary parts, or cooperating with other conscious systems.
When I mentioned universal consciousness, it referred to general form of consciousness, unrestricted by any arbitrary constrains. The only constraint is that the system is conscious, which means that it has at least some control over its own future. It was the superset of any form of consciousness. So it must exist, as long as we can say that consciousness in any form do exist.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

The idea that I want to convey here is that money was invented from practical necessities. It's a tool to help improving our ability to manage resources, their production and consumption. It helps us passing through difficult times by shifting the burdens to easier times. In turn, it helps us improving our chance to survive. Those who don't participate in the monetary system won't enjoy its advantages, and put them in a bad position in the competition.
Competition forced us to improve our system's effectiveness and efficiency.  It lead us to invent more complex financial instruments.

Any economic system is a meme. It will compete for its existence in the mind of conscious entities.
Good economic systems are those that help their society to survive in various environmental conditions by distributing resources effectively and efficiently.

Economic system, any of the ways in which humankind has arranged for its material provisioning. One would think that there would be a great variety of such systems, corresponding to the many cultural arrangements that have characterized human society. Surprisingly, that is not the case. Although a wide range of institutions and social customs have been associated with the economic activities of society, only a very small number of basic modes of provisioning can be discovered beneath this variety. Indeed, history has produced but three such kinds of economic systems: those based on the principle of tradition, those centrally planned and organized according to command, and the rather small number, historically speaking, in which the central organizing form is the market.


The very paucity of fundamental modes of economic organization calls attention to a central aspect of the problem of economic “systems”—namely, that the objective to which all economic arrangements must be addressed has itself remained unchanged throughout human history. Simply stated, this unvarying objective is the coordination of the individual activities associated with provisioning—activities that range from providing subsistence foods in hunting and gathering societies to administrative or financial tasks in modern industrial systems. What may be called “the economic problem” is the orchestration of these activities into a coherent social whole—coherent in the sense of providing a social order with the goods or services it requires to ensure its own continuance and to fulfill its perceived historic mission.

Social coordination can in turn be analyzed as two distinct tasks. The first of these is the production of the goods and services needed by the social order, a task that requires the mobilization of society’s resources, including its most valuable, human effort. Of nearly equal importance is the second task, the appropriate distribution of the product (see distribution theory). This distribution not only must provide for the continuance of a society’s labour supply (even slaves had to be fed) but also must accord with the prevailing values of different social orders, all of which favour some recipients of income over others—men over women, aristocrats over commoners, property owners over nonowners, or political party members over nonmembers. In standard textbook treatments, the economic problem of production and distribution is summarized by three questions that all economic systems must answer: what goods and services are to be produced, how goods and services are to be produced and distributed, and for whom the goods and services are to be produced and distributed.

All modes of accomplishing these basic tasks of production and distribution rely on social rewards or penalties of one kind or another. Tradition-based societies depend largely on communal expressions of approval or disapproval. Command systems utilize the open or veiled power of physical coercion or punishment, or the bestowal of wealth or prerogatives. The third mode—the market economy—also brings pressures and incentives to bear, but the stimuli of gain and loss are not usually within the control of any one person or group of persons. Instead, the incentives and pressures emerge from the “workings” of the system itself, and, on closer inspection, those workings turn out to be nothing other than the efforts of individuals to gain financial rewards by supplying the things that others are willing to pay for.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/economic-system

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Companies that adopt robots hire more workers
On a macroeconomic level, the logic seems simple: If AI makes workers obsolete, then adopting it will make unemployment rise. At first sight, a study from France confirms that suspicion. The authors found that a 20 percent increase in robots in a given industry leads to a 1.6 percent decline in employment there. Of course, robots are a way more general term than AI, but we can assume AI would lead to similar results.
The reality is different, though, when shifting perspective from the national economy to individual corporations. Somewhat counterintuitively, companies that adopt robots hire more workers. Admittedly, this data might be a bit misleading because companies with stronger growth can afford more robots sooner, which makes them scale even faster.
There are, however, a couple of compelling reasons to believe that robots help companies expand their human workforce. The French study suggests that, if workers and robots share the workload, then the value added per worker goes up.
For example, consider a company that employs five workers to manufacture a product worth $100. On average, every worker contributes $20 to the final product. After experiencing some growth, this company buys some robots and now only needs two workers per product because the robots are doing the rest. As a result, the remaining two workers contribute $50 each to the final product. Since this is a dramatic increase in efficiency, the company might expand its activities and hire additional workers, who can also now contribute $50 each thanks to the improved efficiency — compared to $20 in the pre-robot stage. This mechanism increases a company’s labor demand, so it might decide to hire more workers to expand its palette of products and services.

https://towardsdatascience.com/is-ai-coming-for-your-job-2f593ab72b55

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Any economic system is a meme. It will compete for its existence in the mind of conscious entities.
Good economic systems are those that help their society to survive in various environmental conditions by distributing resources effectively and efficiently.

An economic system, or economic order,[1] is a system of production, resource allocation and distribution of goods and services within a society or a given geographic area. It includes the combination of the various institutions, agencies, entities, decision-making processes and patterns of consumption that comprise the economic structure of a given community.

An economic system is a type of social system. The mode of production is a related concept.[2] All economic systems must confront and solve the three fundamental economic problems:

What kinds and quantities of goods shall be produced.
How goods shall be produced.
How the output will be distributed
When to produce

The study of economic systems includes how these various agencies and institutions are linked to one another, how information flows between them, and the social relations within the system (including property rights and the structure of management). The analysis of economic systems traditionally focused on the dichotomies and comparisons between market economies and planned economies and on the distinctions between capitalism and socialism.[4] Subsequently, the categorization of economic systems expanded to include other topics and models that do not conform to the traditional dichotomy.

Today the dominant form of economic organization at the world level is based on market-oriented mixed economies.[5] An economic system can be considered a part of the social system and hierarchically equal to the law system, political system, cultural and so on. There is often a strong correlation between certain ideologies, political systems and certain economic systems (for example, consider the meanings of the term "communism"). Many economic systems overlap each other in various areas (for example, the term "mixed economy" can be argued to include elements from various systems). There are also various mutually exclusive hierarchical categorizations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_system
There are many ways to classify economic systems, but the simplest and most widely known is by ownership of the means of production:
- Capitalism (private ownership of the means of production )
- Mixed economy
- Socialist economy (social ownership of the means of production)

In those economic systems, each participants play the role of mesa optimisers with different mesa objectives. In pure capitalism, the mesa objectives are to maximize their profits. The authorities/regulators must make sure that their mesa objectives are aligned with the base objective of the society. In pure socialism, the mesa objectives are to follow command given by the authorities/regulators. Essentially, in capitalism, the burden of information processing to produce economic decision makings are distributed among economic participants, while in socialism, they are concentrated to the authorities/regulators. Both strategies have their own costs and benefits.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Simulating Supply and Demand

The video explains how the price of goods can be determined by the market in capitalist economic systems.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Is This The End Of Capitalism?

It's a term you've probably heard a lot. Late Stage Capitalism. People use it  to describe the absurdities and wild inequalities of the world today. But what is it exactly, and are we really living in it? And if so, what comes next?

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

In the socialist side,

Is Universal Basic Income The Key To The Future?

With AI and automation already displacing jobs in the United States, and the problem only expected to get worse, the idea of a Universal Basic Income is being touted as a solution to save us. But is it all it's cracked up to be?

Universal Basic Income Explained – Free Money for Everybody? UBI

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Let's identify some basic assumptions people make in discussing the universal basic income, especially the hidden ones that are not commonly mentioned in discussions about economic policies. Without these assumptions, UBI wouldn't make sense.
- most modern people can't produce their own resources without the help of someone else. Most of us don't produce our own food. Even farmers need someone to provide the fertilizer.
- despite of that, they want to survive.
- the society as a whole can produce more resources than what's required to sustain all of its people, which means someone must produce more resources than what they need.
- most people have inherently good intentions to contribute to their society. The exceptions must be insignificant.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Putting jobs out of work.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Essentially, in capitalism, the burden of information processing to produce economic decision makings are distributed among economic participants, while in socialism, they are concentrated to the authorities/regulators. Both strategies have their own costs and benefits.

In several occasions, Yuval Noah Harari said that the main reason why centralized economic systems failed was because of inadequate computing power. It makes their decisions don't align with their intentions.
Another possible reason is that their model doesn't represent reality accurately, which also makes their decisions don't align with their intentions.
Centralized power with imperfect management and accountability is susceptible to manipulation and corruption, which lead them to wrong decisions.
Slow transfer and process of information could also make their decisions out of date.
But improvement of telecommunication, computational power, and artificial intelligence can change the results.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

As long as our model contains uncertainty, the only way to resolve it is through trial and error, within the limits of what's already certain.  If the error involve high risk such as destruction of the system, then it would be better if the system has duplicates or back ups. Otherwise, it must be rebuilt from the scratch every time it makes wrong decision.
When the uncertainty is high, decentralized systems like capitalism are more advantageous. With more subsystems making different decisions, there are higher chance that at least some of them will get it right. The others could then adopt similar strategy and then try to improve it.
Those who make the wrong decision may suffer, or even get destroyed. But they're not necessarily in vain. They and others can learn from it, to avoid the same mistake. We should learn from others' mistakes, since we won't have enough time to do it all by ourselves.