I have recently come across a very practical example of a kind of "tragedy of the commons" - the unwillingness to invest in assets that benefit stakeholders indiscriminately. Specifically, on large strata-title apartment projects there is a reluctance to implement such measures as:

- central hot water heating (~ 10% lower all-up costs, ~20% lower operating costs)

- Solar hot water heating (>20% ROI)

- Solar electric power (~10% ROI)

UNLESS some kind of user-pays system is implemented, which would use up pretty much all of the gains.

The concern is of course that providing the above systems would create a "commons" that would tend to be exploited.

I am curious if there are any ideas on a usable solutions, perhaps some kind of workable protocol that would enable the above, or existing success stories - what made them work?

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/under.htm?2. 15-30 min read time, rated "pretty good" by me.

There are a couple of interesting features of this story that I would like to discuss - but I don't want to introduce any spoilers, so I'll just leave this here for now.

I read an interesting article today: ["Your app makes me fat"](http://seriouspony.com/blog/2013/7/24/your-app-makes-me-fat). Key quote:

"Researchers were astonished by a pile of experiments that led to one bizzare conclusion: Willpower and cognitive processing draw from the same pool of resources."

Now, when we tell people to behave rationally, we often tend to ask them to consider short term sacrifices for long term gains and act to maximise the overall "utility"; to run through a process of evaluation and taking action that uses up both cognitive processing and willpower at once.

I observed on many occasions that it is easy to make the "right' choice when you value the fact that you are trying to live your life in the right manner. The nice feels that you get when making the right choice compensate for the willpower expended in taking the corresponding actions.

And perhaps this is the value of "rationality" as a value.

I am very curious what will come out of this. Does Kurzweil really have some insightful ideas that will help advance AI? He used to be quite the technocrat, but I have the feeling that he is more a philosopher these days than a technical person. But maybe progress toward a new philosophical approach is exactly what the AI needs... comments sought!

http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2013/04/29/interview-how-ray-kurzweil-plans-to-revolutionize-search-at-google/

If it is... I hope they do not crash the system with the test.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/12/12/physicists-universe-simulation-test-university-of-washington-matrix_n_2282745.html

Be sure to check out the actual reseach papers linked in the article! I would have linked to them directly, but the article is full of follow-on links of considerable interest.

This rather serious report should be of interest to LW. It argues that autonomous robotic weapons which can kill a human without an explicit command from a human operator ("Human-Out-Of-The-Loop" weapons) should be banned, at an international level.

(http://www.hrw.org/reports/2012/11/19/losing-humanity-0)

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0041812

Here is a rather curious paper describing psychology researchers' attempts to investigate "spitefulness" - I think they define spitefulness roughly as "hurting others without any benefit to oneself". References the Stanford Prison Experiment. Concludes, more or less, that some people are spiteful, sometimes.

I have many reservations about the methodology used in this experiment (main one: not sure if the entire process really reflects any real-world motivations, and hence results might not mean much), but I thought it might be of interest to people on this site. Also, of the 30-odd references cited at the end of the paper some sound rather interesting and many are available online.

http://www.nih.gov/news/health/mar2012/nimh-29.htm has images of human and monkey brain scans which reveal an amazingly grid-like pattern of neuronal connections. What are the implications? Could brain scanning, emulation etc be simpler than would appear from images of tangled up neuronal cells (eg here: http://www.willamette.edu/~gorr/classes/cs449/brain.html)?

(My mother is a retired neuroscientist... I'd ask her for comment, but she is on holidays.)

The Age, one of the most widely read Australian newspapers, has published an article on "the Singularity". Mostly features Jaan Tallinn, but SI gets a mention and a link. Comments section makes for interesting reading.

http://www.theage.com.au/technology/sci-tech/rise-of-the-machines-20120718-229ev.html

Here is  presentation from a researcher at MIT on a novel way of designing computer processors. It relies on performing approximate, rather than exact, mathematical operations (like the meat-based processor in our heads!). Claimed benefits are a 10,000-fold improvement in speed, while the errors introduced by the approximations are postulated to be insignificant in many applications.

http://web.media.mit.edu/~bates/Summary_files/BatesTalk.pdf

Slide #2 of the presentation offers a fascinating insight: We currently work around the limitations of the processing substrate to implement a precise computation, and it is becoming increasingly difficult:

------------------

THE MOTIVATING PROBLEM:

Computations specified by programmers are implemented as behavior in physical material

• Hardware designer’s job: 

efficiently implement Math (what sw wants) using Physics (what silicon offers)

                              (near) perfect arith                           noisy, approximate                 

                                   uniform mem delay                          delay ~ distance

• Increasingly difficult as decades passed and transistor counts exploded

• Now each instruction (increment, load register, occasionally multiply) invokes >10M transistor operations, even though a single transistor can perform, for instance, an approximate exponentiate or logarithm

--------------------

The parallels and contrasts with our own brain are what interested me the most. Perhaps one day the most powerful computers will be running on "corrupted hardware" of sorts.