Human evolution by global lossless and statistical indexing and optimization, without global monopolies

Richard K Collins All knowledge, All Languages June 1, 2024

Ricard Solé @ricard_sole How does complexity arise in (macro)evolution? Is it a continuous or a stepwise process? What about hierarchies? Check this new @Trends_Ecol_Evo review led by @svalver on the @eldredge and Gould’s Theory of Punctuated Equilibrium across scales. https://cell.com/trends/ecology-evolution/fulltext/S0169-5347(24)00114-9?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0169534724001149%3Fshowall%3Dtrue https://pic.x.com/z7qwsxp1bd
Replying to @ricard_sole @Trends_Ecol_Evo and 2 others

Richard Sole, it seems like your groups are looking to non-human examples. But human groups evolve. And a wide range of (groups making small steps), (groups making large steps), and (many groups all working independently), then having to try to work globally) are going on now. Wrap your head around spending 10 seconds each for 8.1 Billion humans. It would take you (10*8.1E9)/(365.25*86400) = 2566.73511294 mean solar years to do. These are real people and many sizable datasets that can be studied and processed to learn and evaluate different ideas.

When you say (“punctuated evolution”), I see 56,000 entry points on the Internet. And I know that all those entries on many pages on the Internet, the groups are not processing and organizing that topic globally, though it is possible now. All those 56,000 entries takes time for many authors to write, and much of it overlaps, duplicates and is already known. It is a textbook for that topic. An individual like yourself might read a few hundred papers or a few thousand, but it just stays in your head, unless you write out words about your view and try to share. But it is a finite body of material — not indexed, organised, “AI summarized” or “machine algorithms processed”.

Realistically, I would use (“punctuated” “evolution”) with its 4.9 Million entry points. Or (“evolution”) with 2.01 Billion. That is what I call “global scale” where groups, rather than forcing humans to memorize bits and pieces, seriously face the whole of things, have computers process and index it. The lossless indexing is the many lossless methods from computer science, and the lossy statistical indexes are some of the methods that LLM groups apply. But my point, my emphasis, it you find all the people in the world working on those pages and help them work together as a whole when they touch on a common item.

For humans to stay on top of knowledge, enough to survive, we used to be able to do it distributed – each place and group “doing their own thing”. But now a single person in one country can start a war ( armed, economic, financial, trade, education, and others ways of competing and fighting ) and literally cause the deaths or livelihoods) of 100s of Millions.

But global topics can be summarized and indexed and the information shared by many kinds of indexes, including LLM conversations (or LLM and lossless computer methods) globally.

Humans writing text is no longer viable as an organizing method for the human species. Just expanding to multimedia and many kinds of data and visualizations and summaries is not enough. What is needed is an orderly and concerted effort to store and index and share all knowledge – and make it accessible and usable by all. That is possible and it cannot be hoarded and gamed for the benefit of a few.

I classify things like “monopolies”, “proprietary methods” as “internet pathologies”. When they begin to appear, that a clear indication some large groups of humans are operating at less than globally efficient. If you visualize an ant or termite colony, it would be a few groups forming and trying to take over a colony. In a human or organism, it would look like cancer where a few cells are attempting (to put it in human words) to monopolize all the resources. I would content that the most robust survival pathway for humans (and AIs and tool systems) now is for humans to work globally and do that not by having humans do the coordination, but by having a trusted and open system of sharing that is designed not to be gamed and manipulated.

Filed as (Human evolution by global lossless and statistical indexing and optimization, without global monopolies)

Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation

Hi Richard. I am just pointing out that the methods and purposes of the paper are echoed in the human groups. To some extent, people work on things in ways that are governed by their own lives and the world we live in. We are all affected by things in the world, and the things, in the world we see, come about because human societies evolve in certain ways.

Yesterday, my brother Clif reminded me of what George Herbert wrote in 1640:

For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe the horse was lost. For want of a horse the rider was lost. For want of a rider the battle was lost. For want of a battle the kingdom was lost. And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

So I am saying this group writing about evolution might be talking about nails, but the reason they are doing it, perhaps unconsciously, is they are really worried about the kingdom.

Your perspective seemed different than the others mentioned, so I was writing to suggest your concerns and perspectives might be clearer, and the whole group improved some way, if the whole topic were mapped and shared in a different form, more accessible to people working from nail to kingdom level.

Also, I have been working on this particular problem of codifying all knowledge on the Internet for a total of about 30 years now. And looking for “small’ groups of a few hundred thousand to a few million, where it might be possible now to do the map at sufficient detail to show how it works at true global scale.

And I am tired, so it is just getting harder to see many levels and perspectives all at once, all the group methods and purposes in global open form at once, and then write it in compact ways that are understandable by billions of humans.

The map would clarify the labels and issues by scale. Now it is hard to guess when a person writes about molecular or galactic evolution, where their true interests and motivations lie. In LLM terms, it would use real world tokens agreed on by all, to give context and purpose so information could be stored and found again efficiently. Even if the words are “molecular” or “metabolic”, the real message might be “international relations” or “social evolution”. During the cold war it was not allowed to write about fusion technologies directly, so people would write about processes inside neutron stars.

Filed as (Human evolution by global lossless and statistical indexing and optimization, without global monopolies)

Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation

Bogdan, I worked on encryption and encoding when I first started designing neural networks in the 1960’s, so the crypto groups were easy to spot and predict their actions and failings.

I like your use of “governance primitives” because that is the level most governance groups (and many others) are failing. They might say the words, but they have not practiced and absorbed the lessons about what works, and what does not work. So they have many pieces (primitives) that are close to the right pieces but trying to connect them in the wrong ways, sometimes running exactly backwards, or causing harm to many.

I think your “by default global” implies many old groups got there first but did not grow and improve with time. Many groups like Google for instance grow rigid and inefficient, and the people ought to leave and start new industries. Just like farming, you cannot force land to keep producing by mono-cropping. It exhausts the soil and can completely destroy it.

Filed as (Human evolution by global lossless and statistical indexing and optimization, without global monopolies)

Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation

Human evolution by global lossless and statistical indexing and optimization, without global monopolies

About: Richard K Collins

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