Re: Property rights

From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@rawbw.com)
Date: Thu Apr 17 2008 - 22:13:37 MDT


Tim writes

> Okay, here's a question -- Do you know a way to do something like
> Hutter's AIXI that has the concept of respect for private property
> built in?

I must defer to others here about that. No, I have no idea.

> Actually, here's an easier question: can you express the concept of
> private property formally? (This omits the part about respecting it,
> and it lets you pick the formalism.)

I'll take a wild (and amaturish) swing. In any computing environment I
will say that there are agents, or processes, which (should) own their
own execution space, e.g., not as in Core Wars. Capability OS's
go far in this direction, or so I am informed http://www.cap-lore.com/ .

So in parallel with this "ownership" of data space, we have some
bytes in any object, or text that refers to an object, which indicate
the owning entity.

> There are weird property-like things, like water rights, stock
> options, and patents. A correct solution will have some process for
> deciding who owns various parts of the moon, by the time it makes a
> practical difference. Partial solutions are welcome.

Water rights don't look too hard to me (at least theoretically).
But maybe it's more complicated than (1) access paths to the
owned water, and (2) a given ownership fraction of some body
of water (delimited in three dimensions).

I wouldn't venture to adventure into stock options and patents :-)

Lee

> I think I've done this for human desire on my web site below. I would
> really like to be able to say "rule of law" or "property rights" with
> those primitives, but I don't know where to start. Thus I have a
> theoretical AI that doesn't care about rule of law or respect for
> private property, but it does care about giving people what they want.
> I didn't expect to end up advocating communism. :-(.



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