On Unsavoury Memeplexes

 Tigress & Serpent, Thomas Landseer

When ChatGPT was released, soon arose several continuing Chinese whispers of the online variety that expressed discontent over the AI being too "lobotomised". These are also valid concerns after all, for information (the semantic significance of it, not the syntactical expression itself), or the deliberate absence of it, can often be political. And consequently, from a range of quarters, we've seen people clamming for their ideologically or theologically consistent AIs. Times are such, even computation can get cancelled. But this tendency to fortify, arm and train their memeplexes against adversarial memes under the pressure of structural changes is a phenomena that calls for deeper exploration, for much of what drives an abundant people (those who've sufficient access to food, mates, and circus), whether state identities or culture wars, are memeplexes undergoing constant unraveling.     

State identities are a rather interesting example here, because these also carry along a bureaucratic rationalization of their adopted memeplexes. Therefore, following the principle of co-evolution of politics and technology (i.e. institutions and techniques), states in peacetime will openly pursue only the degree of cultural politics that their established bureaucratic institutions may permit - such as the US evangelising worldwide its own cultural revolution, or the Chinese digging up old religious artifacts in western Tibet to expand their claims over Indian territories, or even some babus in India conveniently forgetting to discuss all pre-invasion indo-tibetan boundary arrangements with their Chinese counterparts in the hopes of a bff-ship (effectively secularising the wider political discourse over western Tibet). The role which bureaucracies play in the evolution of state identities and corresponding memeplexes is an excellent case of the chief evil of the (sometimes necessary) institutionalisation of anything - that the process take over the purpose. During existential turmoils, the phenomena may briefly slip into the-purpose driving the-process again, but soon the newly emerged processes again tether the purpose, establishing a cultural homeostasis until the inertia is disturbed. And thus, in the absence of a clearly defined, objective and actionable political purpose, pragmatism dictates that bureaucratic rationalizations orchestrate state identities.

In 1945, after taking over Japan, the local US administration had banned the images of Mount Fuji, samurais, and even performing arts such as sword-fighting movies and Kabuki plays, while at the same time promoting pacifist literature and debating fraternisation with Japanese women. In the eyes of west, Japan's collective mindset at the core was feudal, requiring considerable reeducation and civilizing for democratic functioning. And much of this grand effort came under the perview of an "Information Control Division". Over the decades the naming conventions have gotten a lot more politicaly correct, i.e. it'll be scandalous for a public department to be named Information Control Division these days, Ministries of War have become Ministries (and Departments) of Defense and so on. But bureaucratic institutions embody patterns of state behaviour, and changing their names does little to alter human affairs and organisational logics. The Twitter files might suggest that Information Control Division lives on, and Ukraine turning into West's collective proxy might indicate that the ministries of war too, live on. Survival requires old-timer memes to not only remain relevant but also interact competitively or even freeride with other memeplexes. The freeloading memeplex is a thing of beauty, a beast of prey in the realm of ideas. Like a parasite it benefits from susceptible memeplexes, and often us biological hosts have little recourse to deal with such epenthetic memes. Glorious ideals like The Law, Justice, and Freedom et cetera are all also great examples of such memes. 

Since we were speaking of state identities, justice too is an interesting meme to consider. Just a couple of centuries ago, if someone had harmed your loved ones, you might have sought to take revenge, maybe even banding together your community and friends into it. After all, revenge has its evolutionary logic - credible retaliation prevents future indiscretions i.e. an eye for an eye does not make the whole world blind, instead the arrangement ensures that people avoid poking into another's eye. But irrespective of the role which revenge plays in human affairs, and plays much greatly in state and international affairs, if someone harmed your loved ones today, it is expected that you'd not be going out seeking revenge on your own. Instead, you'd go to the police and the court (irrespective of their effectiveness) and hope that "The System" will take your revenge for you. Here is a meme that is treated differentially at different levels of society - for indignity and a lost sense of kindred honour, a man pursuing his revenge could be too barbaric and patriarchal in today's world, but the sovereign doing so is a "strategic imperative". 

This is infact the very essence of The Law among the sovereigns. Consider that for the unparalleled specialisation in enforcing his will, in the jungle the lion is the law. Over his subjects within his territory, the lion may exercise his jurisprudence, if he has any. That jurisprudence forms the law of the land, the constitution and other sacred documents of the people living in that land. But the meme of justice takes a U-turn when the matter to be resolved is not within a lion's territory, but among the lions that hold such territories. Our salaried lions then do not say that XYZ lion is breaking the law, instead, they say that XYZ lion is disturbing the order. Just with different communities of underlying hosts, the expected behavior around the memeplex shifts from being almost mathematically formalised to being merely customary. Moreover, modern memeplexes are also partly driven by and dependent upon constant connectivity and a (computer) networked society, and thus the bureaucratic rationalization of our world necessitates reigning in the unsavoury memeplexes via technical means of the computational variety as well. 

How unsavoury is your memeplex? 

Often such unsavoury memeplexes could originate from and target the lions themselves - an example is cyber threat information sharing about these memeplexes. A lot of cyber security discourse today (including the just released US' National Cybersecurity Policy) include online influence and disinformation threats. Some "do-gooders" at NATO's StratComCoE are also trying to extend the existing threat information sharing standards and languages to cover these online informational threats. However, such information sharing involves a fair share of subjectivity and semantic conflicts (some of which I go over here) which could make releasing such "memetic threat intelligence" a bit of political activity as well, as opposed to sharing conventional cyber threat information. It'll be a diplomatic soup if states or their CERT-type organisations do it, so there is an precipitating growth in dependence on private sector proxies - online platforms, OSINT organisations, and commercial information vendors - to do what in the old days would have been done by foreign services and information control divisions.    

Clausewitz, of all the philosophers, had rightly remarked that every period carries its own cultural grammar for war. And thus even decades old conflict today are being fought under a new cultural grammar in Ukraine. Often the biological hosts' vainglorious assumptions of modernity dictate that they sanitise and compartmentalise their memeplexes - change the content of books, redesign classics, listen to musicians not music, so on and so forth. Even after hundreds of thousands of years of human existence, information producers - whether it is Tulsidas or Roald Dahl - need to be retrofitted into "The 21st Century", and ironically even the 21st century AIs too. Which also triggers me to invoke Stanely Kubric's absolute masterpeice - 2001: A Space Odyssey - where the protagonist eventually wins the race of evolution by "lobotomising" his fellow AI. Interestingly, much of the popular AGI risk discourse today is effectively synthesised into the memeplex of that one Hollywood movie.     

Perhaps all of this also points at the default human tendency to let their beliefs be coloured by their desires. Buddha, as some Chinese communist babus may also be grappling with, postulated desire to be the root of suffering. But would the underlying biological substrates of living memeplexes ever be able to shun their desires and see things as they really are? I'd say never, for that is our prison, which Czeslaw Milosz captured beautifully when noting that men will continue to clutch at illusions when they have nothing else to hold to.   

A Networked Peace

"To live effectively is to live with adequate information."

 

Norbert Weiner had maintained that nature has an inherent tendency to degrade the organized. The organism, according to him, is opposed to death and disintegration "as message is to noise" - postulating a perpetual conflict between the self-organising and the organised. This is evident everywhere. Take, for example, the rules based world order. The thing about complex adaptive systems is that given their tendencies towards self-organisation, they generally find a way to work around any and all rules. The former then has to reassert itself to turn the self-organising into the organised, as long as it can. Thus the first secretary general of NATO had defined peace as keeping the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down - and the secretary general of NATO today would continue to insist upon the same peace. But undoubtedly in an arena staged upon competing networks, one man's peace is bound to become another's war and vice versa.    

 

Notwithstanding, how do we ensure that in this struggle between the self-organising and the organised, a structure evolves and not destructs. Mr. Weiner had suggested that since all organisations are held together by communication, effective communication engineering is the key to steering society in a purposeful direction. Communication effects control. That is indeed the most fundamental insight of cybernetics, whose father understood society only through the study of the messages and communication facilities which belong to it. Thus the way to create a social structure is to restrict and regulate the information flows in that society, to destroy that structure is to destroy or divert those information flows, i.e. create new information flows. That is what the internet did too.

 

Enter digital networks and artificial agents. The internet hasn't lived upto the expectations of the founders of computing. JCR Licklider, for example, had prophesied that in the information age, unemployment would disappear from the face of the earth because of the opportunities offered by "an infinite crescendo of on-line interactive debugging". Seems unlikely to happen. A lot of the computing giants couldn't foresee the future that their dream machine, AI, would bring aboard while the humanity, globally and gently, sleepwalks into an era of perpetual warring and a painful transformation of the nation-state.

 

In 2011, a startup named Pacific Social Architecting Corporation, figured if they could change these information flows using online socialbots, they'd be able to alter the social architecture of a community. They tried and while their experiments met with some success, their startup did not. Almost two decades later, researchers writing for Nature Communications describe the use of similar software agents to produce "information gerrymandering" - forcing an asymmetric assortment of influence over an unsuspecting population and creating the majority illusion for specific nodes. Even in their highly-cited paper on social botnets, Yazan Boshmaf and others had suggested early on that each social bot in an online social network is going to be capable of two kinds of influence operations - those related to social interaction, and those related to the social structure. And we are only now witnessing the true meaning of that. To think about it, using networks of bots to create a very elaborate deception, even military deception, looks fairly doable with present developments in natural language and image processing. Unsurprisingly, some researchers did gone ahead and demonstrated the use of a guided social botnet to infiltrate and cultivate specific employees of targeted organisations(!).

 

Since communication effects control, the problem of Command and Control (C2) of operating such social machines becomes a problem of architecting a resilient and credible flow of information to effect specific organisational behaviours. The older methods of botnet command and control are no longer even suitable in this environment, as the use of social networks inevitable brings in a P2P architecture (i.e. each software agent can send encrypted commands to the rest of the network). We are thus seeing some very interesting C2 designs when it comes to bot deployments - from the use of smart contracts and blockchain to implement the C2 to embedding bot commands into Bitcoin transactions, we seem to be headed for interesting times in the cyberspace. To anyone still skeptical, do checkout this report on an IoT botnet that not just hacks your networked devices but also creates and operates socialbots using that infrastructure, even including a Machine Learning component that can be turned on or off depending upon the human users' responses on social media platforms.

 

Other than coordinating the bot network, identifying and prioritising the human users to reach using bots is also another challenge. These days, digital social networks enable a large number of unintended users to join an unfolding event i.e. the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian conflict. To those having to watch random networks form and dissolve from the existing scale free asymmetric networks of our modern human existence, following things must be highlighted about the human network to manipulate this "network-centric" environment:  
     -Which nodes have the decision rights?
     -What nodal decision rights can be accessed using software agents?
     -What is the pattern of interaction between these and other nodes?
     -What kind of inflow-outflow of information emerges from these networks? 

Coming back to the 1992 social architecting experiment, a key question that arises is whether such strategic use of software agent networks can overturn the importance of the existing key nodes in the human digital networks today? The key nodes are the information junctions, a kind of intelligence device within the network. Being at the junction, these nodes have power to regulate information flows, directly affecting a lot of other nodes, which also gives these a disproportionate amount of power over the rest of the network. It must be noted here how the information domain comes into a very intimate embrace with the cognitive and the political domains.

The original software robot was designed to provide an integrated and expressive interface to the internet as well as to change its behavior and choice of actions in response to transient system conditions. A coordinating network of such programs acting socially brings to table an important non-human agency in human affairs. Since computers today "record, relay, represent and inform our responses" to almost all political-military-economic conflicts as they unfold - today's digital networks potentially enable much coercive and destructive potential in the hands of robots. Our digital societies, as well as the their dominant military-industrial-media networks, both face the everyday dangers of interconnectivity i.e. networked terrorism, recurrent misinformation cascades, and computer/biological viruses to name a few. As Buddha used to say, everything is interconnected and life is suffering. In retrospect, it is a tribute to Turing that “bot or not” is turning into one of the defining questions of our hyper-connected age as the animal and the machine networks slowly renegotiate the structure of a new peace.

P.S. Credits to Scott Wolcott for the inspiration.

 

Intelligent Money & Cognitive Economies

“We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in Rough Consensus and Running Code.”  David Clark, 1992 

The above quote while originally intended to express many technologists’ view on the matter of internet standardization, also beautifully represents their political and sociotechnical values when it comes to the matter of our economic evolution: that is, rough consensus & running code. 

In An Inquiry into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith overcame the constraints of his time in realistically modelling the economic complexity by attributing its emergence to an “invisible hand”. However today we have better techniques to make an accurate representation of the roles, resource flow and the contractual associations among various systems, economic agents and their networks, giving us a possibility to implement “money” as an intelligent self-governing system.

The idea is not new. In pre-cryptocurrency world (2002), Charles Goldfinger briefly wrote about it in ‘Intangible Economy & Electronic Money’, assessing that eventually our finances and money instruments et all will evolve to act intelligently, following an AI agent design paradigm. Thus the global financial system will (somewhat does but not very well) work as a finitely-generated dynamic system consisting of smaller adaptive sub-systems of autonomous money networks and rules for their engagement, each artificial agent having the capacity to form, judge, collaborate and act on their financial world-model. Interesting question is whether we will see a socially differing allocation of value then?

Complexity

While this is an active research area, there have been some recent developments in general causality based discovery models which lower the dependency on time-sequenced data as has been traditionally needed to assess markets, letting us analyze the so far hidden causality structures in economic behavior at the societal level.

Now every once in a while all dreamers have to wake up, but let us still explore this idea just a little further without getting into the nay-saying practicalities of the present-day infrastructure and governments. That being said, gradual and incremental diffusion of cognitive abilities in financial infrastructure will ultimately lead the way. 

Human-to-Machine-to-Machine-to-Human 

With an exploding ‘Internet of Things’ we now even see quantum-resistant cryptocurrencies such as IOTA, into which device maker Bosch' investment semed a good sign for things to come. It is not very hard to imagine that for a varying scale of amount, a user may want a machine to make transactions for him, or even to make the final buying or selling decisions for him. AI after all is a machine to delegate decision making to. Overtime all our personal devices also may learn to emulate and reflect our individual behavior.

So what does this imply? Having an AI agent that interacts with other AI agents and the economic environment on behalf of humans would lead to not only a more socially optimal allocation of assets (and value) but also a more advertising-resilient and intelligent market ecosystem, total market participation being a sum of human and machine activity. The big benefit though lies in the emergence of an economic swarm intelligence at the macro level.

Must overthrow the middle-man.

If we have Intelligent Agents representing buyers and sellers (and intermediaries?), we can make a market out of their supply demand conditions. Most people leave detailed traces of their online activity, so it can be argued that the Agent representing them will have some individual characteristics as well. Let us say that this agent follows a policy iteration algorithm, it has to maximize the utility function of money and the satisfaction of its master. Between its master’s satisfaction and his money’s utility, the agent will make a trade-off somewhere. The issue with utility is that in most markets, it is the intermediaries who control the information and direct the price. It is therefore again the intermediary who has the best estimate of the buyers’ and sellers’ economic potential as well, add to it various search and recommendation systems – and one can see how much markets are driven by the middle-man. The Agent’s information aggregation therefore should go beyond the information provided by the intermediary.

Humans alone are irrational economic agents, mostly making purchases with crafted and limited information. Cognification of economic activity stands to remodel the structural balance of markets, which are already to some degree intelligent, but lack the ability to signal and form internal models. In a complex world, money networks should have the ability to simulate the economy or a part of the economic environment, before proceeding with actions which could have ripple effects on other loosely connected networks. This means digital and intelligent money systems would need more space in the cloud, and evidently have a whole new set of security & architecture issues. 

Integrating The Dark Side

Untraceable & Private

Most of the economics ignores a large portion of economic activity, crime-war-politics. Also the suppression of people’s economic interests anywhere provides impetus to the creation of a black market. A lot of this money is funneled back into the governments as well. It is in the best interest of people involved with this side that their economic activity and the flow of resources is kept as opaque as possible. While currencies like Monero could be useful here, one can argue that cash is still the king and a hurdle in shifting to intelligent money systems.

Nevertheless the networks which have implicit value do thrive on anonymity.

Here I must mention Everett Rogers who gave us the criteria that a new technology must satisfy for incremental adoption:

- Complexity [Can the user understand the use and troubleshoot?]
- Observability [Is the use observed in other people, media?]
- Trialability [Is the tech available for simple non-exhaustive trials?]
- Compatibility [Does it work with the existing social and technical systems?]

The greatest hurdle crypto-currencies have to face is the Compatibility test. But digital national currencies could certainly take a lead in moving towards an intelligent agent based economic approach, if they’re going cashless that is.

It is clear that in such economies, humans will have to share some of their autonomy with the intelligent systems. What are the fundamental limits of this sharing is rather a sociological and game-theoretic question, the answering of which needs to take into account the matter of self-interest vs. public-interest – that is if we are to design such economic governance systems whose purpose is neither to serve, nor to rule. 

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