Mikkel Fishman

Yeah no problem! Glad you are taking the time to consider and I look forward to your thoughts.

I'd like to throw in a bit of grist for your thinking around humans and symbiosis. I would argue for most of human history we were consciously symbiotic, meaning we saw ourselves as an extension and in relationship with the environment. Whether that was seeing ourselves as equal with (brother wolf, etc) or above (stewards of the earth) the emphasis was on working with our surroundings to cultivate advantage. What is domestication other than symbiosis?

I won't say that our disconnection from this is exclusively modern, it has existed in other time periods, but it is... (read more)

Thanks!

"I'm wondering whether the potential internal competition pressures also might collapse for internal systems in AI?" 

I'm not sure what you mean by this? By "collapse" do you mean will the internal systems collapse as they are in competition over different subgoals, or do you mean will  the competition "collapse" and the internal systems will harmonize? Because the latter is generally what occurs and there is strong evidence that multi-cellular life and then organs arose from a similar process. Reorganizing into symbiosis is the best way to resolve internal tensions and reduce energy needs, which is why it occurs both within organisms (plus) and between them on an ecosystem level. 

Just as a point... (read more)

This is a great post. Let me suggest a few concepts that I think will accelerate your formulation.

In open-systems theory, on way to look at "life" is that it is a self organizing structure capable of evolving to most effectively dissipate free energy. 
Maximum Power Principle is an observation of "effectiveness" as a dissipation strategy under competition. 

Your argument that an agent will use power seeking to minimize the environmental energy, creating more predictability is a natural deduction. The consequence of this is that agents will organize their environment/relationships to gain exponential power, however there is a critical point missing from your argument: the agent's organization and processing requires free energy, therefore leading to... (read 540 more words →)