Update: Finally finalized the date of the event: Friday 22nd of May please RSVP http://budurl.com/3f8h as always at SAP Labs in Palo Alto.
Steve spoke to a couple of people after Zan Gill's excellent Evolving Collaborative Intelligence Future Salon and revised his talk since. In his own words: I enjoyed the Future Salon last night! Based on the discussions I had with people I've decided to emphasize the more near term aspects of cooperation in my talk. So I wrote yet another abstract (sorry!). It's actually been great for helping me find the best way of framing the ideas so t hey will be relevant to the greatest number of people.
Fine tuning for the Future Salon audience is very welcomed. Here his revised abstract:
The Science and Technology of Cooperation
Steve Omohundro, Ph.D.
A new science of cooperation is arising out of recent research in biology and economics. Biology once focused on competitive concepts like "Survival of the Fittest" and "Selfish Genes". More recent work has uncovered powerful forces that drive the evolution of increasing levels of cooperation. In the history of life, molecular hypercycles joined into prokaryotic cells which merged into eukaryotic cells which came together into multi-cellular organisms which formed hives, tribes, and countries. Many believe that a kind of "global brain" is currently emerging.
Humanity's success was due to cooperation on an unprecedented scale. And we could eliminate much waste and human suffering by cooperating even more effectively. Economics once focused on concepts like "Competitive Markets" but more recently has begun to study the interaction of cooperation and competition in complex networks of "co-opetition". Cooperation between two entities can result if there are synergies in their goals, if they can avoid dysergies, or if one or both of them is compassionate toward the other. Each new level of organization creates structures that foster cooperation at lower levels. Human cooperation arises from Haidt's 5 moral emotions and Kohlberg's 6 stages of human moral development.
We can use these scientific insights to design new technologies and business structures that promote cooperation. "Cooperation Engineering" may be applied to both systems that mediate human interaction and to autonomous systems. Incentives and protocols can be designed so that it is in each individual's interest to act cooperatively. Autonomous systems can be designed with cooperative goals and we can design cooperative social contracts for systems which weren't necessarily built to be cooperative. To be effective, cooperative social contracts need to be self-stabilizing and self-enforcing. We discuss these criteria in several familiar situations. Cooperative incentive design will help ensure that the smart sensor networks, collaborative decision support, and smart service systems of the eco-cities of the future work together for the greater good. We finally consider cooperation between very advanced intelligent systems. We show that an asymmetry from computational complexity theory provides a theoretical basis for constructing stable peaceful societies and ecosystems. We discuss a variety of computational techniques and pathways to that end.
Steve Omohundro has had a wide-ranging career as a scientist, university professor, author, software architect, and entrepreneur. He has degrees in Mathematics and Physics from Stanford and a Ph.D. in Physics from U.C. Berkeley. He was a professor in the computer science department at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and cofounded the Center for Complex Systems Research. He has been involved with a variety of research laboratories and startup companies. He published the book “Geometric Perturbation Theory in Physics”, designed the programming languages StarLisp and Sather, wrote the 3D graphics system for Mathematica, and built systems which learn to read lips, control robots, and induce grammars. He is founder and president of Self-Aware Systems which aims to revolutionize computing using semantics and to develop technology that promotes cooperative human values. His recent research uses computational economics to provide a unified analysis of co-opetition in biological, ecological, economic, political, and artificially intelligent systems. Papers and talks are available at http://selfawaresystems.com/ and http://steveomohundro.com/
Future Salons have the following structure: 6-7pm is networking with light refreshments proudly sponsored by SAP; 7-9+pm is the presentation followed by questions and discussion.
SAP Labs North America, Building D, Room Southern Cross or Cafeteria depending on number of RSVPs. SAP is located at 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94304[map]. Free and open to the public. Please spread the word and invite others, but be sure to RSVP http://budurl.com/3f8h so we know how many people to expect.