Some ideas...
The main function of managers of all stripes (according to me) is to solve coordination problems. However, there are also “autonomous” systems for solving some specific kinds of coordination problems - markets, in particular, are a major example. But these are limited to problems which fit their interface well - i.e. a high degree of standardization, in the transactions if not the products themselves. A requirement for large amounts of context, or difficulty recognizing success even in hindsight creates problems for markets.
I could imagine systems which solve (some) more context-heavy or alignment-limited coordination problems, with the scalability and decentralized “autonomy” of markets. Management/governance via prediction markets is one class of ideas in this vein, but it seems like modern information technology should open up many other possibilities. The way I picture it, it's not so much "build an AI to run a company" as "organize the company so its constituent people together implement the same algorithm the AI would". Just like competitive markets perform a variant of backprop and gradient descent, other AI algorithms should have equivalent structures in human organization.
In recent years, availability of information/data has grown much faster than our ability to index it. Matching particular people with the highest-value information for them - i.e. indexing the information - is largely a social technology problem, though one which benefits a lot from computer science.
Suppose I'm researching mutations of mitochondrial DNA. Perhaps the topic has been studied by a particular group separate from the main field, with different aims and entirely different jargon. A text search for the normal jargon won't turn up their work, no matter how helpful and relevant it might be. In order to find something like that, we need some kind of jargon-independent indexing. For instance, if we had a detailed world-model, then we could link the information directly to structures in the world-model (i.e. modelled mitochondria). If we had extensive augmented reality, we use object recognition to recognize mitochondria visually, and then index information to that - so that even research using a different word for "mitochondria" would pop up when looking at a picture of a mitochondrion.
More generally, it would be useful to be able to index information based on the real-world patterns or mathematical structures they involve. This seems like something which could, in principle, be implemented purely socially, if we knew a good way to do it. (I'm sure people have tried things like this before, but usually projects like these try to use data structures which are convenient for programming, rather than data structures which represent the world well.)
People joke that Einstein's greatest invention was tensor index notation. Good mathematical notation makes a surprisingly large difference, as anyone who's used both assembly language and python can attest.
It seems to me that the main trend in mathematical notation from ~1850 to ~1950 was to introduce really bad notation for things which previously had no formal notation at all. (This is part of the more general trend of introducing not-very-good foundations for things which previously had no foundations. Set theory and Turing machines and the like were better than nothing, but they are more like assembly than Lisp.) I expect in the future, progress will come more from improving notation, as a side effect of the general project of refactoring mathematical foundations.
Continuing improvement in programming is, of course, a similar story. In that department, I think progress will come from better understanding the structure of the world around us, and incorporating those insights into programming languages (abstraction is one potential example).
Similar to Abram's suggestions for model-based prediction markets, as automated trading gains share of the financial markets, there's potential for financial systems which take advantage of the legibility of automated models.
In particular: modern markets direct capital to existing projects. Traders probably have some views about what projects would be really good investments, but the market does not have an easy mechanism to share those views with business founders/managers during the planning phase. Instead, it's guess and check: a founder/manager tries a project, and then finds out how much the market likes that project. Part of the problem here is that project-space is very high dimensional, so it's not easy to compress all the information from the traders into a low-dimensional price signal.
But with transparent automated traders, we could in principle use a backprop-like mechanism to identify projects which the traders think are promising, without the slow guess-and-check process.
Since we can't vote on individual suggestions, I'll mention that my vote is mainly for the "Information Indexing" idea.
Even just within science, I believe there are large advances to be made if cross-field knowledge was made more accessible. As science gets more specialised, it becomes harder to make use of useful findings from areas of research outside your own, or even to realize they exist in the first place.
And in reality the use goes far beyond scientific research, this can make a big difference to businesses, to working professionals, and in people's personal lives too.
So let me give a babble answer.
This was excellent! Definitely not all things I'd be happy to see adopted, but lots of cool ideas, and some of them suggest new avenues of thought. For instance, several of these make me notice that a mostly-literate population is still a relatively new thing by historical standards, so there's probably still unpicked fruit in terms of effectively conveying information via words (rather than in person) - for instance, building on #27, one could imagine people able to read a body-motion notation as easily as some people read music.
Being able to address private financial power with values restrictions. 100$ usable on non-guns. 50$ usable on non-pornography. 30$ usable on food.
How is that different then footstamps?
In jurisdictions where there's an exam required to graduate high school, let students of any age take the exam, but have a sufficiently higher cut-off to graduate early. Anyone who graduates early is automatically admitted to a university (e.g. in the U.S. it might be to their choice of state university) and received a tuition subsidy at least equal to the amount it would have cost the public school system to keep them in high school.
I remember fantasizing about this sort of thing in high school. Would have made my life sooo much better for a few years.
Some way to publish a book as an excludable good. For example, you could have a movie theater, but instead of a movie screen, you have temporary access to a book. Someone watches to make sure you don't copy the book.
That sounds like Kindle.
Some way to publish a book as an excludable good. For example, you could have a movie theater, but instead of a movie screen, you have temporary access to a book. Someone watches to make sure you don't copy the book.
What's a significant difference between this and a library?
Better community/meetup advertising via large scale text analysis to find unique features in text outputs and make sure those people become aware of each other. Like imagine if goodreads suggested friends to you based on rare book overlap but for non user curated data.
Given a desire for digital rights in the face of Crypto-Anarchy, market-based polycentric law might yield a solution.
David Friedman's model for market-law involves defense agencies and arbitrators who mediate between those agencies. The system is stable as a repeated game, wherein the cost of fighting other agencies is higher than the cost of peaceful negotiation.
In the digital world, a 'defense agency' might look like a professional hacking group. This group would maintain a public identity and offer it's services to clients that won their case in court. Occasionally groups fight each other, in epic Neuromancer-esque style.
Friedman's theory uses social-norms (e.g. property rights) as the basis for efficient negotiation between agents. Therefore we might predict that a demonstrably neutral arbitration protocol could form the basis for this new market-based law.
Prosthetic neocortex that permits dunbars number to increase dramatically for the individual using the prosthesis.
Quantum trading: you get access to some information. If you do anything meaningful with it, you have to share the result with the owner of said information (or do a profit share). At any time you can delete this information from your mind (as well as any derived insights).
Maybe you only have a limited time to consider whether or not you want this info.
Maybe it’s more of a barter system. Both of you exchange info and if you both like it, you keep it. But if either party doesn’t like the deal, you’re reverted back to the before deal state.
I really like this building block, it would solve a lot of problems which are currently really hard.
Expertise tracking via credence calibration is a possible technology that would be helpful in areas where an expert makes a lot of decisions that have clearly measured outcomes.
I wrote prediction-based-medicine to describe how the system might work in that context.
Another area where I would expect this technology to be useful is reducing recidivism. Parole board members should put down their predictions for the recidisvism of individual prisoners before those get released. Various actors in the prison system should make predictions about the recidisvm of released prisoners.
Better conlang for regular communication
I think there's a good case to be made for Esperanto already being better then the naturally evolved languages we have. It's easier to aquire a large vocabulary and speak it proficiently. At the same time it was developed by one person in the 19th century. It's likely possible to create a language that's even better.
Esperanto focused on being easy to learn and not on actually improving in areas where our European languages were lacking. Having a few more stems and structures might increase the work to learn the language but it would make it more powerful.
When Google Maps tells me to move into the direction of northeast I feel that our language fails us. In the aviation industry they try to patch that flaw of our language by speaking of X o'clock. It would be good to be able to express more fined grained directions more natively then through the X o'clock hack.
European languages force speakers to constantly communicate information about gender and Esperanto copied that flaw.
Our languages are often more ambigious then desireable.
You likely want an easy way to mark a word like between as being meant inclusive or exclusive.
In our Eurocentric languages a few words like "to be" and "feel" are heavily overloaded with various different meanings. Spreading that meaning over more words would help remove ambiguity.
I wonder if we could at least have a consensus about what the ideal conlang would be like. The history, as far as my limited knowledge goes, seems more like a random walk than progress towards a specific goal.
I agree that making communicating some fact (such as gender) optional is better than making it required. Too bad Zamenhof didn't speak Hungarian.
I speak a language natively that has separate names for the between cardinal directions. Doesn't seem like that essential an improvement and they are hard to remember especially when commonly interfacing with languages that do not have them. And there still remains the problem that N-NE doesn't have a good direct name.
Heading gets you to a degree accuracy which is quit precise alternative there.
In general there are as lot of directions that can be defined most of which don't really get used. For example thinking about is there a name for the third dimensio...
Multidimensional pricing
The benefit of a single scalar price is that it is super easy to compute, and lets you compare different types of value in a like-with-like fashion. The downside is that in order to compare different types of value, you have to sacrifice all of the information about it; there are probably arguments where this is considered a feature between two simple agents, but in meatspace there is a large problem with organizations not having good internal knowledge which means prices conceal information from yourself just as much. Secondly there is the eternal matter of externalities, which by long standing tradition are impossible to address outside of regulation. This is because we have no good way of assigning value to things not happening.
I think a multidimensional pricing model would help with this, because it would allow all the elements of value to be evaluated independently, including negative prices for things to be avoided. Then the whole thing could be computed as a single eigenprice, giving us the same overall benefit as regular dollars, but keeping all the relevant information. We are very good at automatic computations of this type now, so it seems feasible as long as something as sophisticated as a smartphone or engineering calculator is available. There is no reason a bank or transaction platform could not have this built in.
Generic strategy models
I've never been able to let go of Jaynes' notion of using the phase-space of macrophenomena for prediction, which gives me a strong feeling that there is a fully general and scalable method of generating strategies. If we think of strategies from an action perspective as being a combination of predictions+interventions, it seems like any desirable end-state could be approached.
This should help a million and one things, because at least the United States is pretty strongly anti-strategic. If it became more consistent, cheaper, and effective, then I expect adoption to go up and overall efficiency as a result.
Full spectrum group alignment methods
At some point in the relatively near future we will start putting together the pieces that allow the entire spectrum of human experience to be brought to bear in building group alignment. This will include tools traditionally shunned in developed nations, like violence and fear. Of the three ideas I suggest, this one feels the most inevitable and simultaneously the most double-edged; most of the legwork to date has been done by professional militaries and religions, but there is plenty of interest in investigating things like trauma, abuse, and political movements gone haywire. As far as I can tell consent is really just one more variable in this space, because otherwise conscription would not be viable as a military method, and people seldom set out with political or religious radicalization as their goal. As a consequence, once these methods are well established I expect them to work on whoever happens to be within reach, rather than requiring voluntary association.
These answers gave me a strong sense of "there's really useful models to be found here, but I'm not quite sure what they look like".
A better version of social media that fixes its flaws. Causing less outrage but fostering constructive collaboration. Paul Graham repeatedly hints at this e.g. here and here (these are not the best quotes but those I could find quickly). Maybe something with a distributed trust or social credit system like Advogato aimed at. You will feel safe there while getting valuable input and feedback with a balance of confirmation and relevant new information.
Schoocial Media (name suggested by my son). A combination of the good ideas from
I'm not sure how this would actually look like but my son seems to have some ideas. One is that memes can summarize actual core scientific insights in a memorable way and can lead to exploration of what is behind it - e.g. on Khan Academy. He has shown me quite a few cool ones e.g. about relativity.
General Public Contract - A growing cooperative society - by some called a cult - that applies a positive-sum mechanism to build a better society on top of - or embedded in the existing society at large. It does so by using a valid legal contract among all parties. A contract like the "General Public Virus", that requires participants to contribute to it to gain its benefits. One extreme example would be a contract that requires you to effectively give up your private property except for your immediate belongings in exchange for access to the net utility of the property managed under the contract.
Real Social Engineering. Technology that models motivation and communication of large numbers of humans accurately enough to predict the impact of communication acts or to select the most promising communication scheme for some target metric. Today's click optimization will look like child's play against this. Most likely it will not be capable of predicting global trends like Asimov's Psychohistory but good enough that everybody not having access to this will be the future Third World. Among those having it, it will be zero-sum of course - and tricky, because fixed-point algorithms will need to be developed. I once read a short story about something like this but can't find it. Any takers?
A Caricature of Science. One of the very bad things that could happen is that significant parts of science could lose public trust by not delivering or even worse by falling prey to partisanship (esp. beyond a single country). I fear a religion-like science cult where results are more influenced by group expectations than by the experimental method and hard statistics. I think some people would say that we are not that far away from that but I think it could be much worse.
Fake Solutions - I expect a lot of structures that promise to solve real or imagined flaws of society and/or that fight the good solutions that are resistant to exploitation (like the GPC above). Organizations, companies, NGOs that appeal to moral values but don't deliver. Mostly because of the mechanisms outlined by Robin Hanson e.g. here and here. Or by SSC here.
To foster the good ones and counter the bad ones, the Long View would suggest starting early at finding and categorizing and creating transparency about them.
Re: general public contract, I found parts of Legal Systems Very Different From Ours interesting for exactly this topic. Religious legal systems, for example, are mostly implemented on top of more general legal systems in today's first world.
Among those having it, it will be zero-sum of course - and tricky, because fixed-point algorithms will need to be developed.
Why would this necessarily be zero sum?
Real Social Engineering. That's already been happening! Foucault describes the development from sovereign power to disciplinary power to governmentality. I expect the trend to continue.
A school where students spend much of their time in mostly-unsupervised independent work and/or socializing, and they are (individually or in small groups with similar ability) matched with tutors on specific topics. I think this would work much better than the one size fits all model we use now.
An elected office where there's a term limit, and some length of time after someone leaves office (e.g. in the following election), voters vote on how good a job they did, and the former office-holder receives a cash payout or pension based on the result of the vote.
The benefits of this system would be:
Equity markets for individual products. Essentially, a company with a design for a new product creates a Kickstarter-like campaign where you can back the product, but in addition to (or instead of) getting the product when it's released, you get royalties on each one sold (e.g. a company promises $5 in royalties per unit sold and sells that for $250k, and investors can buy fractions of that).
This would enable companies (and individual inventors?) to de-risk and apply wisdom of crowds to new product development.
The most important social technology we have is government. Government has a very important role: to prevent members of the same country from killing each other. The biggest flaw in our current government technology is that we have no good system for coming to agreement among the 200-ish countries in the world. We have had the UN for the past 75 years, but there have still been plenty of wars and plenty of fears of nuclear war, and there's still a good chance of nuclear war in the future. Nations still spend large amounts of money on armies that are essentially wasted from the point of view of humanity overall.
A more advanced social technology would prevent war among countries, at far less expense than the current expenditures on armies, but more importantly with a lower chance of global nuclear war. We need some political way to consistently resolve international conflicts without having them spill over into war. It's somewhere between legal technology, mechanism design, and coordination technology on your list.
Leaving this as a WIP comment for now, hopefully will Babble More later:
The big question here is "pre or post-singularity?" and/or "are we talking humans, or posthumans?"
Once you get transhumans with more than 7 working memory slots, and the ability to understand complex coordination schemes, things change pretty radically. Before then, you're bottle-necked on human cognition. The value of a transaction has to exceed the transaction cost.
Right now, I feel motivated to engage with complicated contracts when a lot of money is at stake (i.e. ownership of startup), but not for stuff coming out of my fun / community budget.
With that in mind, some thoughts so far:
I'd like to see someone come at this from a slightly different direction.
What I take as "social technology" is what is often called social institutions -- law, customs, language, markets, rights regimes.... The way I tend to think about these, particularly since we tend to see a certain degree of frictions along the boarders where different institutions rub against each other, is as social tools.
Just as with any other tool, matching the wrong tool to a job produces anything from bad results to absolute disaster. Hammers don't work well with screws, and screw drivers are pretty useless with a nut and bolt.
But it seems like social problems that our social institutions arose to address are not as nicely separable or often even as recognizable.
So what I would think would be a really interesting additional to answers here would be just what is the social problem being solved and is this one of the one's we've been dealing with for human existence, since we transitions between eras or something we think will be a future social problem that existing institutions cannot even begin to address.
Are you looking for new ideas, or for existing ideas (or similar to known ideas) we'd like to see implemented?
Either. Making something likely-to-be-implemented/adopted is itself a social technology problem, so existing ideas which have not yet been implemented (or not widely adopted) are themselves social technology sci-fi in some sense.
I’m looking for pure sci-fi speculation here. (Though preferably on the “hard” end of the Mohs scale of sci-fi hardness.) Feel free to babble. Maybe try to come up with 50 ideas if you're into that.
For purposes of the question, "social technology" should be interpreted broadly. Some subcategories include: