Sunday, November 18, 2018

Freedom and Democracy as a Welfare Service

Freedom is not free. It has an economic cost that depends on the material conditions that enable it. The same is true for Democracy. At the same time Freedom and Democracy are fundamental human rights. Without exceptions, all must afford those rights. Thus, any proposed social system must create mechanisms that provide those rights to its participants.
 
My exposition will start by analyzing previous movements on freedom and Democracy and possibly discuss their limitations.

Digital Freedom and FSF

 

One cannot discuss Freedom without talking about the Free Software Foundation. FSF supports the freedom of the users of Software It believes that the users have the right to understand how the software works and to modify it to better support their needs. It is important to understand software as an intermediary between the hardware and the user. It gives the user an interface to interact with the machine. It enables the user to perform certain actions or it restricts him. In this sense, the interface that the software provides is similar to a legal system that allows or disallows certain actions.
  Thus , one could say that FSF supports the right of the users to change the digital system, rather than simply picking among the actions that are possible within the provided software. In this sense, FSF is consistent with revolutionary thought.

  From a materialistic point of view though, this is not possible. Users almost never change the software to suit their needs. In fact, proprietary software might even be more perceptive of its users needs, because the users are also the customers. Free Software provides freedom as long as you are a hacker, and even then , it is very difficult to perform a change. Only the writer of the software and a select few that maintain it are able to make changes. As software becomes more and more complicated, developers only understand parts of the software and only together can they support it.
  In order to have actual democracy and freedom, we need to create a welfare service that is free for all to use, that allows users to vote on changes about the software (or fork it and create alternatives) and provide funding so that the developers of the software will perform them.
  In conclusion, digital freedom requires the existence of a welfare service.

Material D&F : Democracy and Freedom viewed from the Revolutionary Left.


The revolutionary Left had always had Democracy and Freedom as the goal. For the RL , social relations and the economy should be determined by the will of the people. But similarly to the digital case, there is an intermediary between the citizens and the execution of actions. The interface here is the rules that each community , group or society has demanded to be respected.

  The type of rules can depend greatly on the context. In production, there is a specific workflow that must be respected. The use of machinery requires specific handling to avoid damaging it. Coordination in a community about social issues requires specific methods of decision making and types of actions to choose among.

It is in this context that the RL supports the right of the citizens to change the rules, the interface that each user will need to respect. Here though, we have the same problem, the citizens know what they want , but they have no knowledge how to acquire it. Can citizens change the rules themselves?

Consider the case of a nuclear plant. A community might decide that it wants to reduce the nuclear waste that goes to the environment. The community perceives the externalities of the nuclear plant. For the change to happen, it must interact with a group of nuclear scientists that will provide the new rules about the functioning of the nuclear plant.
Similarly, assuming that you eat at a restaurant, the customers can vote on changes of the food quality or provide directions on what type of food they prefer. Only a trained chef will be able to turn those directions into rules of cook-making that the cooks must abide by.
  In conclusion, material freedom does not only require the right to vote but also the support of trained professionals that will provide the solutions, and will create the new rules that certain members of society must follow to have the desired results.
  Since freedom and democracy is a universal right, this service must be provided to everyone, thus it must be a welfare service.


Cyber-physical systems : The elimination of the cyber physical barrier.


I have discussed digital and material freedom and the need for the existence of a welfare service that enables them. Digital freedom has been proposed by the FSF, material freedom by the Revolutionary Left. The interesting thing is that the cyber-physical barrier is starting to collapse. (And one of the goals of my work is its collapse.) The examples are many. ERP systems had been used in production for many years. Our interaction with the State has been digitized. New p2p systems start to emerge, such as airbnb and Uber, that use software to determine the interactions between the customers and the providers of a service. Blockchain and smart contructs promise to digitize part of the interactions we have as a society.
  Software starts to determine our social relations and the economy. The interface that citizens use start to increasingly become digital.
The rules are written in software.
  It is in this context, that the notion of Digital Freedom and Material Freedom start to blur and start to become the same thing. The RL has to start thinking about Free Software and Digital Freedom and translate its ideas to this new world.

Freedom as a welfare service


Any group that supports freedom as a universal right needs to understand that freedom requires maintainers. It requires a service that takes user input and produces changes to the rules and the software that create that user interface. That service needs to be free and it needs to be productive.
We need to measure the productivity of the service in order to determine the degree of freedom that it provides. If users propose changes, the service needs to interact with the users, provide guidance and actually perform the changes that the users want.

The group must find ways to support such a welfare service. In order to understand the magnitude of the cost, Research for new products or production methods need to be part of this welfare service, thus the cost is greater than the current cost on Research. This amounts to 2% of the GDP.


Freedom is not free but it must be free for everyone.

Saturday, August 25, 2018

Multi-level selection and Cultural Evolution

I recently had the chance to learn of a new theoretical model on Evolution called multi-level selection. I will try to describe it and provide my first impressions on the different interpretations / uses of that theory from the community and its rejection from mainstream social sciences.
( I wanted to make a more thorough research on the subject, but currently it is not possible.)

Now, the main idea of multi level selection is very simple but this simple idea has profound implications for our society. It goes against mainstream theories that were built to support the premises of Capitalism, basically, the notion of the individual selfish actor. Social sciences have thus been victims of the system they belong to.

Let us first describe the mainstream mechanism of Evolution.

A. The actor is an individual organism to whom we attach a fitness function with which we measure its ability to survive.

B. We perform a simulation and then compute the fitness results with which we remove actors that have not performed well. This could mean for example that those actors have not been able to acquire enough food to survive.

C. We introduce random mutations that change the behavior of actors.

D. We perform the above multiple times.

We assume that natural selection works in the same way. Actors that have favorable mutations increase in number while others perish.

The important thing to note is A. The fitness function applies on the individual. This means that behaviors that increase the fitness of the individual are the ones selected. This leads us to conclude that only selfish behaviors are evolutionary selected.

This is consistent with the mainstream economic theory of an actor that is super rational and selfish. Since it is on our nature to be selfish, any other  theory that does not conceive the individual as the actor leads to failure.

Consider the case where we have a common piece of land where everyone can herd his sheep. Since the amount of grass is limited, it is best for each individually to overgraze his sheep. This eventually leads to the destruction of the land, not providing grass to anyone and the whole economy around it collapses. It is because of this that it has been suggested that individual property is the only way to govern resources.

Now, this is not true. Let us start with genetic evolution before switching to cultural evolution. Random mutations can propose any form of behavior, and it is selection that promotes those that increase survivability. Consider then the case that a specific mutation leads to an increase in the fitness of another organism whose behavior also increases the fitness function of the other. An increase of of the population of one organism leads to an increase of the other and vice versa. This is an example of a selection process that promotes a non-selfish behavior.

Mainstream evolutionary scientists will tell you that this is reciprocity, thus this only proves the selfishness of the individual actor. Note though that this is incorrect. Organisms do not necessarily have the capacity to judge actions. A selfish action here is defined as an action that directly increases the fitness of itself.

Multi-level selection thus proposes that a specific number of individual actors interact in such a way that their survivability depends on other. In such a case, we could consider the group as an actor that behaves in a specific way and which has its own fitness function. Individual mutations that increase the fitness of the group are thus selected while those that that do the opposite perish because the group perishes.

This formulation of evolutionary theory allows the existence of altruism, something that obviously exist in Human Society.

If we now return our gaze into culture , we will see that the main ideas of multi-level evolution also apply here. Elinor Ostrom's work is important here. Elinor studied communities whose livelihood depended on a common pool of resources like the one I described before. She found that depending on the case , the members created rules to govern the common resource. They imposed restrictions on its use and they checked that each member behaved accordingly. Some groups were more effective than others. This lead to an evolution of the rules of governance based on a group fitness function.

Let me now link the above ideas with my work. It is only recently that I learned about multi-level selection but it is directly related to what I am searching.

In essence, I am searching for a digital language that describes the rules of a group / community , that will have the same functionality as the DNA in organisms.

A. The DNA is interpreted so as to determine the structure of proteins
    This language will be compiled to create communication tools that permit the behaviors that the rules allow.
B. DNA can be copied and transfered into another organism.
     The digitization of the rules will permit a group to copy the institutional rules of another without any errors.
C.  DNA contains information about the organism that is subject to the effects of evolution.
      Similarly, each group will be able to mutate its rules and will be subject to a fitness function.

What I hope with this is that the complexity of the rules of community institutions will increase to the point that their effectiveness will surpass that of the state or the undemocratic corporations.
This digital language is hoped to increase the speed of the cultural evolution of institutions.

Unfortunately for me, the rules describe the concurrent interactions of agents and there isn't any widely accepted theory around distributed concurrent execution.
Thus my main research is on Computer Science rather than on Social Sciences.

Thursday, April 26, 2018

Financing Research in a non-profit Economy - a distributed solution.

For a long time now, I have been thinking about ways to finance research in a non-profit economy like the Ryaki Economic Network. The only method I could find was a centralized one. Here I will propose a decentralized one. Since this is a new idea , I except it to be revised in the future.

Let me first define how a non-profit economy functions. In a non-profit economy, the revenue from the sales of a commodity is distributed to the workers that participated in the production process of that commodity.
  In contrast, in capitalism , a percentage is kept by the firm which constitutes its profits.


Thus, in a non-profit economy, two problems arise.

A. How do you finance new capital expenditures?
B. How do you finance research?

The solutions we find need to distribute the decision making to as many people as possible. Thus, they need to be distributively democratic.

The first problem has been solved by Ryaki. New capital expenditures are financed by workers because they are the only way of storing value in the system. The value  is retrieved back in the future as production uses the capital to produce goods.
  This solution works because identifying the processes that took part in production is easy, Secondly, the risk of investment is low enough to attract investors.

Can the same be done with research? No it can't.

Scientific research is characterized by the search into the unknown. Predicting the outcome of a research inquiry is most of the times impossible.
Many fail to produce any results at all, while others do not produce anything other than new knowledge that has no applicability to production. The usefulness of a research project can be found after many years when a composition of scientific results creates a new method of production, or a new product.

Any financing of research needs to take into account that research failures and practically useless new knowledge are important in the long run They need to be financed.

Here lies the problem. In a non-profit economy, workers are compensated the total amount of revenue. At the same time , we cannot use ryaki, because the risk of investment is too high.

Let us look at one solution. One solution to this problem is to have people democratically decide on the percentage (per) of value that is to be spent on Research. For any product bought at price (p),
per * p is to be spent on research. One could then say that this amount is kept in an special account that belongs to the consumer. The consumer can only use the money to finance research.

This solution depends on the centralized democratic choice of the people with regards to the percentage. At the same time, the decision might not be optimal. Which percentage is the optimal one? If we don't spend money on research, then we reduce our current costs as a society. At the same time, we abandon the probability of future reduction in production costs due to automation.

Is there a way to remove the centralized part from above and find a somehow optimal way to spend money on Research?

Let us assume that the optimal ratio of total research to productive research  is (rs).

Then let us suppose that we have a productive research of value (vr).
The change in production cost of a commodity due to this research is (d).

old price =  op
new price = np
 d = op - np

(Our research here decreases the production costs.)

Then one could finance research by increasing the price by (fr) such that

fr < d

for an amount of products (q) such that

fr * q = rs * vr .

Given that research is unpredictable, productive results can not be guaranteed to arrive when we need them, One could create a buffer of financing of new research. Secondly, if the reduction of costs is higher than
the cost of research we need to increase research. We do both by adding a multiplier (bf).

fr *  q = rs * vr * bf


The outcome of this equation is that research increases when it reduces costs. Financing is constant for many years and it allows researchers to fail, or in other words try to solve difficult problems.


I think that one more question needs to be addressed here. How is this different from the capitalist firm that extracts value in the form of profit?


The difference is that firms extract value through exclusion. They maintain exclusive control over resources and research results is one such thing. The patent system is used to maintain that dominance. On the other hand, the wages of researchers is determined by the labor market. Given that they cannot produce research on their own, it requires laboratories and numbers, their wages do not reflect the value that they create for the firm.

Given that in an open value network, resources are democratically shared as long as they are used to produce useful things, anyone can be a researcher if he has the qualifications. Anyone can use a lab and form research teams.
The customers decide on the direction of the research but not on the individuals that will perform it, individuals will be selected purely on effectiveness.

Thus, the income of researchers will not vary substantially from other professions. Their income is independent from the total reduction of costs in production due to their work. (though the total reduction of costs consitutes an upper limit).


I have described a distributed democratic method of research financing that determines both the intensity and the type of research. At the same time, the model is dynamic because it reacts to the effectiveness of research to reduce production costs. This is just an initial version which will eventually need to be improved upon.

Wednesday, April 25, 2018

A reverse ripple network that links the right to Work with Consumption.

One of the tenets of Keynesian Economics is that the current crisis is the result of Under-consumption. I disagree. I think that the problem is low profitability.

The basic idea can though be repurposed in an economy that does not allow profits to be an incentive of production, such as in my proposed Ryaki Economic Network .

The main idea behind under-consumption is that because income equals expenditure in the macroeconomic level, reducing the expenditure leads to a reduction of income. It is for this reason that Keynesians propose to increase public spending during crises.


  

In this video, Varoufakis tells the audience that austerity in the scope of a household works because if you spend money on a beer , you will not have money to spend on other things.

The reason is that workers do not control the amount of work that they can do to replenish the money they have. Even though, Workers have the right to work , someone needs to offer them work. Thus individually, they can do little to increase their income. Thus the income can be considered as a constant constrain that determines economic choices.

If I = Income , and bc = beer consumption , then the remaining income is
I - bc.

 In the ryaki network, or in general an open value network, openness means that anyone has an equal right to participate to the network and thus create value for himself.
In other words, each worker has an equal right to work, assuming he is fit for the job. All created value is returned to the workers themselves, there is no extraction mechanism as in capitalism.

Even though this system is egalitarian, the resources of the system remain finite and thus the amount of income will remain relatively constant and constitute a constrain to economic choice as before.

The reverse ripple network tries to change that. Let us modify our Ryaki system a bit.

Before : Everyone has an equal right to work.
Now : The person who has consumed commodities of value x has priority over someone that has consumed y if x > y. 
After someone has worked z hours, then this is removed from the value of consumed commodities. (x - z).

Now let us look at the constrains of a household income.
 If C = consumption, and I = Income , then I = C.

This means that a person has no restrictions on expenditure. The outcome for the economy will be profound. Work that was before done by household members to save money will now be done by external services. (ex . Cooking, Cleaning) . Given that the external services have  much higher productivity due to the investment in tools, this will decrease the total amount of work performed in Society.

Now, one might correctly ask how the network will provide so much work to compensate for the lost income. The trick here is that one's income is the others expenditure. In other words, when someone spends money in the economy, he creates work for himself.

Here , though, lies a problem. The transformation of expenditure to Income in the macroeconomic level is not automatic. Moreover, there are economic imbalances between geographic regions that do not permit such a transformation from happening.

Let us take two geographic regions (like Greece and Germany) that have different capital intensity and where one has a trade surplus over the other,  (Gemany). Will our naive new rule allow greek workers to work more to compensate for their consumption? Obviously not, their expenditure creates work for the German population. The only option is to immigrate to Germany.

The reverse ripple networks solves this problem by giving an incentive to spend only to products that create Work for the Spender. 

Let us consider 3 different productions. a fishery (F), a brewery (B) and a carpentry (C) . 

When a carpenter buys x fish, a fisherman works x to catch the fish. In a reverse ripple network, the carpenter is awarded x for his consumption and the fisherman (-x). Now the fisherman buys a beer for y. The network now is like this.

c -----> f ------>  b
  x    (-x)  y    (-y)

If a worker at the brewery buys a wood table of value z, then the fisherman has indirectly provided work to the carpenter of value , assuming y > z , z.

The network after the purchase of the table:
 Assuming (x < z)

c -----> f ----------->     b    ------------> c
  0    0  y - x   (-y + x)  (z - x)     - z + x

(Negative values can only exist at the places of work, and positive values can only exist at consumption.)

Now, let us propose our new rule. The workers that want to participate in production are ordered based on the negative value that they have acquired. If they have a lot of negative value, they have less priority.

In our example, considering that we have a computer application that helps the carpenter in his consumption, each consumption choice is associated with an amount of value that will reduce his negative value. In other words, each consumption choice is associated with the amount of new work that he creates for himself.
 The carpenter has (- z + x) negative value. If he buys fish, or a beer, he could create a maximum of (z - x) work for himself. 


In our example with Germany and Greece, Greek workers will select local products for their consumption over cheaper German ones because this is the only way to guarantee their income. Similarly German workers will be incentivized to buy Greek Products. Eventually, it will be beneficial for all if new capital investments occurred in Greece. It would reduce economic immigration and increase the trade between the two countries. An increase in Greek exports will enable an increase in Greek imports as well. 

 To summarize, I have tried to solve two problems here. First the fact that income constrains determine expenditure and secondly, that unequal capital intensity and productivity levels between countries tend to 
create a permanent trade imbalance that leads to increased Debts and bankruptcy by the weaker country.
My proposal can dramatically increase the efficiency of the network.



update

 I do believe that this idea can become better. Workers can decide which jobs they want and accumulate points with their consumption through the use of the ripple network. Then , when they work , they spend those points. This is a much better version.


Monday, March 26, 2018

The Concept of Role in MultiAgent Systems.

In this post, I will consider two types of Processes. Social processes with multiple agents and computational processes performed by computers.
In the first case, the function of the process is the production of a tangible or intangible good. In the second, the computation of a value.

Secondly, this is not just a theoretical discussion. Social processes (as well as computational processes) can be described in a digital specification language, which is then used to create the communication tools that the agents will use to interact with the others to perform their task.
Understanding the concept of role helps us in designing a better specific. language.

Here's what I will try to show. The different roles in a multiagent process do not describe the functionality that each one performs, but rather it devides the work into parts that have fitness functions that can better be fulfilled by the agents, or the system as a whole has material conditions that make it work better with such a division.

Let us look at two examples.

What is the role of the doctor?

One could say that the role of the doctor is to inspect a patient and prescribe medication.The role here would be defined by the functionality of the agent.

In the computational context, the role is described by the type of the inputs and the type of the output.

ex. toString : Integer -> String

In PL, we already have a description Language for such a thing, it is the standard Type System that each language provides to the programmer.
 Could on thus say that a specification language of roles is redundant? If we are to introduce a new specif. system, we need to understand what it describes.
More importantly, if roles describe something different, then the specific. lang should be independent of the type system that describes the functionality of the process.

Going back to the doctor, the description of the work that a doctor does , does not explain the reason that there should be a specific person that is to perform that job. There are material conditions that  explain that.

First of all, the job of the doctor requires specific knowledge that needs to be acquired by a human being. Because of our limitations , we can only understand so much, thus it is necessary to split knowledge in smaller parts.
All doctors need to have that knowledge and there are institutions that train and verify the skill of subjects, medical schools.

At the same time, there are other material conditions that lead to the role of the doctor. There is the problem of locality. Even though drugs can be researched and produced in certain locations, doctors need to be locally found where the patients are. Because of this , we have doctors that are located in each city , individually or in hospitals.
   Doctors at the same time require certain instruments to perform their job. Based on the cost, some are acquired by doctors individually. Costlier ones are available at hospitals. Here we see that the role of the doctor is also determined by the cost of acquiring their medical instruments. People who cannot buy them cannot play the role of the doctor even if they have a medical degree.
At the same time, we have found that higher-level roles, roles that describe a subset of the multiagent system is also affected by materialistic conditions.

Hospitals and the roles they contain cannot be understood in isolation to each other. There are cooks, cleaning personnel , nurses, administration staff that all work in coordination and in parallel.


 Returning now to the case of a Multiagent Computational System, the roles are again created for material reasons.

First of all , certain types of computation require specific hardware requirements. Some require a lot of memory, other require a lot of cpu power, fast double precision arithmetic, fast encryption and decryption modules or ecc memory.

The requirements of hardware and software for a bank, a rocket , a phone or a car computer are quite different.

Next, Agency is an important factor for creating new roles. The client and the seller cannot be the same role. Each one has a different motivation. The first wants to buy something he finds useful and not pay much , the other wants to make money. The seller here, wouldn't be able to decide what the client should buy because he does not know the preferences of the client and his income.

Thirdly, data are owned by specific institutions or people. They do not wish to give them, thus they need to perform the computation that is related to their data by themselves.

Forthly, we have the concept of authority, in which a specific agent is given the task of validating a specific type of information, or authorizing a specific computation.
There are many material reasons why a specific agent needs to be an authority ,which leads us to create that role.


As we saw, the context of the computation, social process, the material conditions in which those processes are performed determine the roles that need to be introduced into our system. Thus, our design would need to allow the change of the schema of roles without affecting the rest of the type system.

How does one do that? That is a question to which I have no answer at the moment. (But I have some ideas).

Saturday, March 3, 2018

Decentralization of Power and Fail-Safe Democracies.

One of the main points of Marxism, Exploitation , is directly related to the idea that an entity that does not take part in production decides how to spend the profits of Production. The same problem arises in Failed Democracies. The only solution is to decentralize Economic and Political Power so that such failures can be overcome.


Let us look at a centralized version of Communism. In this case, the state decides the amount and type of production that occurs. It gives redeemable coupons to workers which they can give to stores to buy products in exchange for the work that the state has assigned them to do.

Let us look at two scenarios. In the first case, the state takes decisions democratically. The population is given the ability to decide about the Economy. This can be done with local assemblies or with the internet. The decisions are then processed and the result is then passed to the individual sectors of the economy.
  Keep in mind that there is a bureaucracy that handles the democratic procedure , produces a solution and sends the signals back.

The second case is the same as before but there is a problem in the democratic procedure. It does not have to be a big problem. Simply the state starts to decide on things that it shouldn't. Some actors have a disproportionate ability to influence Production. It is at this moment that the concept of exploitation that Marx used to describe Capitalism starts to also apply to this scenario, to degenerate Communism.

Can we recover from such a scenario? It is very difficult. The reason for that is that all the processes that organize society are controlled by a single entity. The only solution is a Revolution by the whole of Society. It requires the subversion of big parts of the economy/Society in a scale big enough to be sustainable and to cripple the previous economic system. Small scale uprisings will simply fail unless they inspire others to follow.

There are many Revolutionary parties who want to create a Communist Society. None of them realize that such a Society can be very easily subverted into an Exploitative one.

There is a reason why most Communist Visions are centralized. The rejection of private property in production requires someone to take care and expand the means of production. And this requires that Society decides on the economy as a whole, since the means of production belong to all. Since the public property belongs to all, they all need to contribute in its production. This , thus, requires a centralized way to extract value from Society that is to be spent on the public property.

 Another solution is to provide local rules that prohibit exploitation , maintain the means of production as a public property and at the same time have a decentralized way to invest in Capital goods. In this case, there isn't a centralized control of residue value / profits. In fact there are no profits. All the value is returned to the workers / producers. It is then up to them to invest in capital goods. The capital goods are used by Society and customers only need to give back the cost of investment. The investors have no claim on the product of production and they have no control of production at all. Investments are simply a store of value.
In this case, there can still be and should be democratic structures , both local and centralized. Since the method of value accounting is decentralized, if a centralized democratic structure becomes undemocratic, part of the network could simply split from the rest. The social productive relations depend on this decentralized method of accounting to continue functioning.
The ability to invest will continue to exist since it is local peers that perform it.

As long as economic power is decentralized , the democratic structures that are built on top will need to abide to Society's will.

For the same reason, the Capitalist states need to obey to the economic actors that control the productive forces of the economy. Firms have full control over their production, over the accounting of their revenue, and over the investment opportunities that they could pursue. Capitalist democracies can either obey to the economic actors or be overthrown.

If one needs to create a Society where there is no money, then there is a generalization to the previous solution. You need to build a Society where Societal Power is decentralized. Previously, power was based on money or credit. In a moneyless Society, the democatic structures need to be decentralized and self-healing. If one fails, the other can continue to work and eventually overpower the failed one. This does not mean that Centralized Structures should not exist but that they are powerless without the support of the decentralized Social structure.

Assuming that you believe in a reformist transformation of Society, you need to check that you maintain the political power locally at your political organization, or your trade union. If you allow a secondary party to hold the political power, then that party can do what it wants, and it will most probably succumb to the Economic pressure of the Capitalist class.