Manifesto on indirection and transparency

Root of all Evil

introduces the idea that there’s a concept called “indirection in the real World”, derived from a programming concept, which is good in principle, but also hides behind all evil. It then explores how the latest developments in AI might present an opportunity to challenge some of the adverse effects of it.

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For the most part, we no longer do anything end-to-end by ourselves.

There was a time when humans didn’t indirectly depend on other humans for:

• Food: we don’t plant it, grow it, harvest it, package it. We don’t even know how to.
• Shelter: perhaps thousands of people involved in building a house, keeping it warm, lit, having a sewage system.
• Safety: an emergency service a call away that deploys police, firefighters or ambulances to your location in minutes!

When incentives are misaligned, pathology ensues..

Robert David Steele, although later quite a controversial figure, was an American CIA officer who wrote a book called The Open-Source Everything Manifesto. In it, he advocates for the transition from top-down secret command and control to a world of bottom-up, consensual, collective decision-making as a means to solve the major crises facing our world today.

… read this book in 2014, and this idea resonated with me, because I interpreted it as “removing indirection from information-based decision-making”, and letting everyone collaboratively “audit” the World.