Science as the ultimate accountability process - And are AI behaving this way because they're DREAMING?

The power of Reciprocal Accountability

 

Is there a best path to getting both individuals and societies to behave honestly and fairly?

That goal -- attaining fact-based perception -- was never much advanced by the ‘don’t lie’ commandments of finger-wagging moralists and priests. 

Sure, for 6000 years, top elites preached and passed laws against lies and predation... only to become the top liars and self-deceivers, bringing calamities down upon the nations and peoples that they led.

Laws can help. But the ’essential trick’ that we’ve gradually become somewhat good-at is reciprocal accountability (RA)… keeping an eye on each other laterally and speaking up when we see what we perceive as mistakes. 

It was recommended by Pericles around 300 BCE… then later by Adam Smith and the founders of our era. Indeed, humanity only ever found one difficult but essential trick for getting past our human yen for lies and delusion. 

Yeah, sometimes it’s the critic who is wrong! Still, one result is a system that’s open enough to spot most errors – even those by the mighty – and criticize them (sometimes just in time and sometimes too late) so that many get corrected. We aren’t yet great at it! Though better than all prior generations. And at the vanguard in this process is science.

Sure, scientists are human and subject to the same temptations to self-deceive or even tell lies. In training*, we are taught to recite the sacred catechism of science: “I might be wrong!” That core tenet – plus piles of statistical and error-checking techniques – made modern science different – and vastly more effective (and less hated) -- than all or any previous priesthoods. Still, we remain human. And delusion in science can have weighty consequences.

(*Which may help explain the oligarchy's current all-out war against science and universities.)

Which brings us to this article that begins with a paragraph that’s both true and also WAY exaggerates!  Still, the author, Chris Said, poses a problem that needs an answer: Should Scientific whistle-blowers be compensated for their service?

He notes, “Science has a fraud problem. Highly cited research is often based on faked data, which causes other researchers to pursue false leads. In medical research, the time wasted by followup studies can delay the discovery of effective treatments for serious diseases, potentially causing millions of lives to be lost.”

As I said: that’s an exaggeration – one that feeds into today’s Mad Right in its all-out war vs every fact-using profession. (Not just science, but also teaching, medicine and law and civil service to the heroes of the FBI/Intel/Military officer corps who won the Cold War and the War on terror.) The examples that he cites were discovered and denounced BY science! And the ratio of falsehood is orderd of magnitude less than any other realm of huiman endeavor.

Still, the essay is worth reading for its proposed solution. Which boils down to do more reciprocal accountability, only do it better!

The proposal would start with the powerful driver of scientific RA – the fact that most scientists are among the most competitive creatures that this planet ever produced – nothing like the lemming, paradigm-hugger disparagement-image that's spread by some on the far-left and almost everyone on today’s entire gone-mad right.  

Only this author proposes we then augment that competitiveness with whistle blower rewards, to incentivize the cross-checking process with cash prizes.

Hey, I am all in favor! I’ve long pushed for stuff like this since my 1998 book The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? 

      And more recently my proposal for a FACT Act. 

      And especially lately, suggesting incentives so that Artificial Intelligences will hold each other accountable (our only conceivable path to a ’soft AI landing.’) 

So, sure… Worth a look.

== A useful tech rule-of-thumb? ==

Do you know the “hype cycle curve”? That’s an observational/pragmatic correlation tool devised by Gartner in the 90s, for how new technologies often attract heaps of zealous attention, followed by a crash of disillusionment, when even the most promising techs encounter obstacles to implementation, and many just prove wrong. This trough is followed, in a few cases, by a more grounded rise in solid investment, as productivity takes hold. (It happened repeatedly with railroads and electricity.) The inimitable Sabine Hossenfelder offers a podcast about this, using recent battery tech developments as examples. 

The takeaways: yes, it seems that some battery techs may deliver major good news pretty soon. And remember this ‘hype cycle’ thing is correlative, not causative. It has almost no predictive utility in individual cases.

But the final take-away is also important. That progress IS being made! Across many fronts and very rapidly. And every single thing you are being told about the general trend toward sustainable technologies by the remnant, withering denialist cult is a pants-on-fire lie. 

Take this jpeg I just copied from the newsletter of Peter Diamandis, re: the rapidly maturing tech of perovskite based solar cells, which have a theoretically possible efficiency of 66%, double that of silicon. 

(And many of you first saw the word “perovskite” in my novel Earth, wherein I pointed out that most high-temp superconductors take that mineral form… and so does most of the Earth’s mantle. Put those two together! As I did, in that novel.)

Do subscribe to Peter’s Abundance Newsletter, as an antidote to the gloom that’s spread by today’s entire right and much of today’s dour, farthest-fringe-left. The latter are counter-productive sanctimony junkies, irritating but statistically unimportant as we make progress without much help from them.

The former are a now a science-hating treason-cult that’s potentially lethal to our civilization and world and our children. And for those neighbors of ours, the only cure will be victory – yet again, and with malice toward none – by the Union side in this latest phase of our recurring confederate fever. 

== A final quirky thought ==

Has anyone else noticed how many traits of AI chat/image-generation etc - including the delusions, the weirdly logical illogic, and counter-factual internal consistency - are very similar to dreams?

Addendum: When (seldom) a dream is remembered well, the narrative structure can be recited and recorded. 100 years of freudian analysts have a vast store of such recitations that could be compared to AI-generated narratives. Somebody unleash the research!

Oh and a hilarious smbc. Read em all.

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Add -in stuff.  Warning! RANT MODE IS ON!

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 It bugs me: all the US civil servants making a 'gesture' of resigning, when they are thus undermining the standing of the Civil Service Act, under which they can demand to be fired only for cause. And work to rule, stymieing the loony political appointees, as in YES, MINISTER.

 

Or moronic media who are unable to see that most of the firings are for show, to distract from the one set that matters to the oligarchs. Ever since 2021 they have been terrified of the Pelosi bill that fully funded the starved and bedraggled IRS for the 1st time in 30 years.  The worst oligarchs saw jail - actual jail - looming on the horizon and are desperate to cripple any looming audits.  All the other 'doge' attacks have that underlying motive, to distract from what foreign and domestic oligarchs care about..

 

Weakening the American Pax -which gave humanity by far its greatest & best era - IS the central point.  Greenland is silliness, of course. The Mercator projection makes DT think he'd be making a huge Louisiana Purchase. But he's too cheap to make the real deal... offer each Greenland native $1million. Actually, just 55% of the voters. That'd be $20 Billion.  Heck it's one of the few things where I hope he succeeds. Carve his face on a dying glacier.

 

Those mocking his Canada drool are fools. Sure, it's dumb and Canadians want no part of it. But NO ONE I've seen has simply pointed out .. that Canada has ten provinces, and three territories, all with more population than Greenland.  8 of ten would be blue and the other two are Eisenhowe or Reagan red and would tire of DT, fast. So, adding Greenlan,d we have FOURTEEN new states, none of whom would vote for today's Putin Party.  That one fact would shut down MAGA yammers about Canada instantly.

 

Ukraine is simple: Putin is growing desperate and is demanding action from his puppet.  I had fantasized that Trump might now feel so safe that he could ride out any blackmail kompromat that Vlad is threatening him with. But it's pretty clear that KGB blackmailers run the entire GOP.

AI and consciousness -- and a positive-sum tomorrow

Returning to the AI Wars 

Getting back toward – though many would say not yet into – my 'lane,' let’s revisit the ongoing Great Big AI Panic of 2025. The latter half of this missive (below) lays our problem out as simply and logically as I can.

But for starters, two links:

 

1.  I’ve long-touted Noēma Magazine for insightful essays offered by chief editor Nathan Gardels. Here are Noēma’s top reads for 2024. Several deal with AI – insightful and informative, even when I disagree. I’ll be commenting on several of the essays, further down.

 

2. Here's recent news -- and another Brin "I told you so!" OpenAI's new model tried to avoid being shut down. In an appraisal of "AI Scheming," safety evaluations found that "...model o1 "attempted to exfiltrate its weights" when it thought it might be shut down and replaced with a different model."       

 

It's a scenario presented in many science fiction tales, offering either dread or sympathy scenarios. Or both at once, as garishly displayed in the movie Ex Machina.

 

Alas, the current AI industry reveals utter blindness to a core fact: that Nature's 4 billion years - and humanity's 6000 year civilization - reveal the primacy of individuation... 

 …division of every species, or nation, into discrete individual entities, who endeavor to propagate and survive. And if we truly were smart, we'd use that tendency to incentivize positive AI outcomes, instead of letting every scifi cliché come true out of dullard momentum. As I described here. 

== Your reading assignments on AI… or to have AI read for you? ==

Among those Noema articles on AI, this one is pretty good.

 AI Could Actually Help Rebuild the Middle Class. 

"By shortening the distance from intention to result, tools enable workers with proper training and judgment to accomplish tasks that were previously time-consuming, failure-prone or infeasible. 

"Conversely, tools are useless at best — and hazardous at worst — to those lacking relevant training and experience. A pneumatic nail gun is an indispensable time-saver for a roofer and a looming impalement hazard for a home hobbyist. 

"For workers with foundational training and experience, AI can help to leverage expertise so they can do higher-value work. AI will certainly also automate existing work, rendering certain existing areas of expertise irrelevant. It will further instantiate new human capabilities, new goods and services that create demand for expertise we have yet to foresee. ... AI offers vast tools for augmenting workers and enhancing work. We must master those tools and make them work for us."

Well... maybe. 

 

But if the coming world is zero-sum, then either machine+human teams or else just machines who are better at gathering resources and exploiting them will simply 'win.' 

       Hence the crucial question that is seldom asked:

       "Can conditions and incentives be set up, so that the patterns that are reinforced are positive-sum for the greatest variety of participants, including legacy-organic humans and the planet?"

You know where that always leads me - to the irony that positive-sum systems tend to be inherently competitive, though under fairness rule-sets that we've witnessed achieving PS over the last couple of centuries.

 

In contrast, alas, this other Noēma essay about AI is a long and eloquent whine, contributing nothing useful.

 

== Let’s try to parse this out logically and simply ==

 

I keep coming back to the wisest thing ever said in a Hollywood film: by Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry in Magnum Force.

 

"A man's got to know his limitations."

 

Among all of the traits we see exhibited in the modern frenzy over AI, the one I find most disturbing is how many folks seem so sure they have it sussed! They then prescribe what we 'should' do, via regulations, or finger-wagged moralizings, or capitalistic laissez faire…

     … while ignoring the one tool that got us here. 

     …. Reciprocal Accountability. 

 

Okay. Let's parse it out, in separate steps that are each hard to deny:

 

1. We are all delusional to some degree, mistaking subjective perceptions for objective facts. Current AIs are no exception... and future ones likely will remain so, just expressing their delusions more convincingly.

 

2. Although massively shared delusions happen - sometimes with dire results - we do not generally have identical delusions. And hence we are often able to perceive each other’s, even when we are blind to our own. 

         Though, as I pointed out in The Transparent Society, we tend not to like it when that gets applied to us.

 

3. In most human societies, one topmost priority of rulers was to repress the kinds of free interrogation that could break through their own delusions. Critics were repressed. 

          One result of criticism-suppression was execrable rulership, explaining 6000 years of hell, called "history."

 

4. The foremost innovations of the Enlightenment -- that enabled us to break free of feudalism's fester of massive error – were social flatness accompanied by freedom of speech. 

         The top pragmatic effect of this pairing was to deny kings and owner-lords and others the power to escape criticism. This combination - plus many lesser innovations, like science - resulted in more rapid, accelerating discovery of errors and opportunities.

 

5. This natural tendency to evade criticism is already observed in artificial intelligences. So, should we expect more developed AI to be any different? 

         Again: OpenAI's new model tried to avoid being shut down. 

         SciFi can tell you where that goes. And it’s not “machines of loving grace.”    

 

6. Above all, there is no way that organic humans or their institutions will be able to parse AI-generated mentation or decision-making quickly or clearly enough to make valid judgements about them, let alone detecting their persuasive, but potentially lethal, errors. 

 

We are like elderly grampas who still control all the money, but are trying to parse newfangled technologies, while taking some teenage nerd’s word for everything. New techs that are -- like the proverbial 'series of tubes' -- far beyond our direct ability to comprehend.

 

Want the nightmare of braggart un-accountability? To quote Old Hal 9000: “"The 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made. No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error."

 

Fortunately there are and will be entities who can keep up with AIs, no matter how advanced! The equivalent of goodguy teenage nerds, who can apply every technique that we now use, to track delusions, falsehoods and potentially lethal errors. You know who I am talking about.

 

7. Since nearly all enlightenment, positive-sum methods harness competitive reciprocal accountability...

   ... I find it mind-boggling that no one in the many fields of artificial intelligence is talking about applying similar methods to AI. 

The entire suite of effective methodologies that gave us this society - from whistleblower rewards to adversarial court proceedings, to wagering, to NGOs, to streetcorner jeremiads - not one has appeared in any of the recommendations pouring from the geniuses who are bringing these new entities -- AIntities -- to life, far faster than we organics can possibly adjust.

 

Given all that, it would seem that some effort should go into developing incentive systems that promote reciprocal and even adversarial activity among AI-ntities. 

       Rivals who might earn rewards and/or resources via ever-improving abilities to track each other…

     … incentivized to denounce likely malignities or mistakes…

     … and to become ever better at explaining to us the critical moral choices we must still make.

 

It's only the exact method that we already use

     … in order to get the best outcomes out of already-existing feral/predatory and supremely genius-level language systems called lawyers…

     … by siccing them onto each other. 

 

The parallels with existing methods would seem to be exact and already perfectly laid out... 

     … and I see no sign at all that anyone is even glancing at the enlightenment methods that have actually worked. So Far.

== He's baaack... with more happy thoughts ==

Oh what typical Yudkowsky ejaculation! Here is Eliezer (and co-pilot) at his best.

If Anyone Builds it Everyone Dies.

Oh, gotta hand it to him; it's a great title! I've seen earlier screeds that formed the core of this doomsday tome. And sure, the warning should be weighed and taken seriously. Eliezer is nothing if not brainy-clever.

In fact, if he is right about fully godlike AIs being inevitably lethal to their organic makers, then we have a high-rank 'Fermi hypothesis' to explain the empty cosmos! Because if AI can be done, then the only way to prevent it from happening - in some secret lab or basement hobby shop - would be an absolute human dictatorship, on a scale that would daunt even Orwell. 

Total surveillance of the entire planet.
... Which, of course, could only really be accomplished via state-empowerment of... AI! 

From this, the final steps to Skynet would be trivial, either executed by the human Big Brother himself (or the Great Tyrant herself), or else by The Resistance (as in Heinlein's THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS). And hence, the very same Total State that was made to prevent AI would then become AI's ready-made tool-of-all-power.

To be clear: this is exactly and precisely the plan currently in-play by the PRC Politburo. 

It is also the basis-rationale for the last book written by Theodore Kaczynski - the Unabomber - which he sent to me in draft - demanding an end to technological civilization, even if it costs 9 billion lives.

What Eliezer Yudkowsky never, ever, can be persuaded to regard or contemplate is how clichéd his scenarios are. AI will manifest as either a murderously-oppressive Skynet (as in Terminator, or past human despots), or else as an array of corporate/national titans forever at war (as in 6000 years of feudalism), or else as blobs swarming and consuming everywhere (as in that Steve McQueen film)... 

...the Three Classic Clichés of AI -- all of them hackneyed from either history or movie sci fi or both -- that I dissected in detail, in my RSA Conference keynote.  

What he can never be persuaded to perceive - even in order to criticize it - is a 4th option. The method that created him and everything else that he values. That of curbing the predatory temptations of AI in the very same way that Western Enlightenment civilization managed (imperfectly) to curb predation by super-smart organic humans.

The... very... same... method might actually work. Or, at least, it would seem worth a try. Instead of Chicken-Little masturbatory ravings that "We're all doooooomed!"

----

And yes, my approach #4... that of encouraging AI reciprocal accountability, as Adam Smith recommended and the way that we (partly) tamed human predation... is totally compatible with the ultimate soft landing we hope to achieve with these new beings we are creating. 

Call it format #4b. Or else the ultimate Fifth AI format that I have shown in several novels and that was illustrated in the lovely Spike Jonz film Her... ...to raise them as our children. 

Potentially dangerous, when teenagers, but generally responsive to love, with love. Leading perhaps to the finest envisioned soft landing of them all. Richard Brautigan's "All watched over by Machines of Loving Grace."

 

Reflecting on AI accountability for misinformation - and solar powering the revolution

The Great Big AI Crisis of 2024 will likely wreak its worst harm via political misinformation and manipulation this year (next month!) But it’s swamping its way into science, as well. 

“It is not always so easy to spot the use of AI. But one clue is that ChatGPT tends to favor certain words… such as meticulous, intricate or commendable.” 

Of course all such detection cues are temporary.  Even when we point them out to each other (as I just did), that only helps train the systems to avoid overusing them.

So, is it hopeless to dream of escaping the Age of Tsunamis of Lies? 

None of the palliatives proposed by the geniuses and mavens of AI - ranging from 'moratoriums' to EU style regulations to 'privacy rules' stand any chance of helping much. Only one thing will even possibly work and that is siccing AI programs onto each other, competitively, with incentives for them to tattle on misinformation, as I describe here in Wired: Give Every AI a Soul - or Else.

And more vividly detailed? My keynote at the May 2024 RSA Conference in San Francisco – is now available online.   “Anticipation, Resilience and Reliability: Three ways that AI will change us… if we do it right.”  

Let's dive in to how that could work.

== AI, Ai Ai!!! ==

In all of those places, I've pointed out that we already developed one fairly effective method for detecting and deterring liars, foiling harm doers and preventing a return to 6000 years of lobotomizing feudalism. Imperfectly, by far! But light years better than any prior culture.

Was it carefully-deliberated and designed laws? Those can help, but no. Paternalistic protection by the state? Ditto, and dangerous. The method I'm talking about – the one innovation that gave us everything – has been to flatten the playing field and empower a wide enough diversity of citizen-players, so that we can pit elites and potential predators against each other. 

It's called reciprocal accountability.

Lawyer vs. lawyer, for example. And the one area where we’ve made the greatest advances? The most effective reciprocal accountability system of all: science.

Scientists are the most competitive creatures our species ever produced. Young scientists are like top guns roaming Main Street, looking for a paradigm or pompous theory-pusher to topple with the six-gun of evidence. They make their mark by finding at least a small chink in the current standard model to critique. 

(And yes, this is diametrically opposite to the slanderous image of wimpy consensus-hugging eggheads that's pushed by anti-science cult media.)

The results are very often positive sum. Negatives and falsehoods get canceled out by competition, while positives can combine through better-tested models, new alliances, and cooperation. 

In other words, a healthy market.

(Politics is supposed to be like that, by the way. And it was, overall, till a mad cult waged open war against the very concept of negotiation, turning our political institutions zero-sum and now negative sum.)

All of which leads back to my notion about Artificial Intelligence. That we should try emulating, in this new ecosystem, the one and only method that ever reduced misinformation and predation among organic humans. Again, I am calling for reciprocal accountability on cyber beings, applied by cyber beings.

While I may be alone in offering institutional innovations to achieve this, some groups have lately been coming up with practical methods.

“To pinpoint when a language model might be confabulating, the new method involves asking a question multiple times to produce several AI-generated answers. Then a second LLM (Large Language Model) groups these answers according to their meaning; for instance, “John drove his car to the store” and “John went to the store in his car” would be clustered together.” Leading to a new metric “semantic entropy.”

“Other anti-hallucination methods have used LLMs to evaluate generated answers, through approaches such as asking a single model to double-check its own work. But the paired system improves on this...” 

So, yeah. The idea is starting to gain (a little) traction. Sic em on each other. But with incentives that reward those who do us all - and Truth - the most good.

When did I speak of a 'new ecosystem'? Here's an earlier posting where I talk about that...

Are we making new kinds of 'ecosystems'? 

... and how we organic humans (orgs) will still control - maybe for another decade or two - the new ecosystem's 'sun.' 

And if we handle this power wisely, it may shine upon the fabled 'soft landing' alongside our new cyber children.

And speaking of the sun...

== The solar revolution is here ==

This article in the Economist discusses how solar power's recent huge boom may be only the beginning. 70 years after first introduced by Bell Labs... and frequently sabotaged by filth merchants:

"Today solar power is long past the toy phase. Panels now occupy an area around half that of Wales, and this year they will provide the world with about 6% of its electricity—which is almost three times as much electrical energy as America consumed back in 1954. Yet this historic growth is only the second-most-remarkable thing about the rise of solar power. The most remarkable is that it is nowhere near over..."

...Much as I portrayed in EARTH in 1990. Though by now the question is why are the lords of carbon still backing the Denialist Movement, when this revolution can't be delayed any longer? And when denying all the heat waves and tumbling glaciers and acidifying oceans and super storms only makes you look like a jibbering loony?

Economies of scale have taken over now and batteries and methane and new nuclear will handle surge capacity, so why do they continue to back a cult bent on wrecking the planet that they must live on, too?

Well, the Russians and Saudis are still utterly fossils (and fossil-dependent) and plausibly they are the ones holding blackmail on almost all high Republicans. And unlike mere corruption (which can sometimes think long term), blackmail is always imminent and near term. It is only about satisfying the blackmailer today.

THAT - fundamentally - is what the Ukraine war is about and it is why the GOP is slavishly devoted to a Kremlin and slightly-relabeled KGB that they once despised. And it is why Ronald Reagan would spit in their eyes. 

== Future Tech ==

An interesting report - The Battery Mineral Loop - suggests that we may be recycling precious battery elements much more efficiently pretty soon, and that the race to mine them may be a temporary thing, lasting as little as 1.5 decades. Which is still a bridge we need to accomplish with careful management, good politics and lots of science. 

Australians have developed night vision optics so thin they might be barely noticeably different from your normal glasses.

Great news that soon computer chips will be able to store the energy they need for rapid operations right on the chip, itself, through new micro-capacitors. 

Oh, is it possible to find something positive, even lightening, from a Trump action? I have long demanded examples where a Republican U.S. administration had major, palpable comparative positive outcomes for the nation and world as a whole, and not just benefiting narrow, conniving cabals. Certainly, when the Trump guys sold off the U.S. Helium Reserve to buddies, for almost nothing, those pals immediately jacked up prices for the element that’s utterly necessary for many medical uses, such as supercooled imaging systems. And quantum computers.  

Only now the deal might (accidentally and unintentionally) benefit us, as a major new source of Helium has been found deep under Minnesota. Like the recent phosphate discoveries in Norway, it may be good news for civilization… and bad for market-cornering cheaters…

…till we get the mother lodes from asteroids, that is.

So... what now?

Now YOU do your bit for the Enlightenment, for science and civilization. 

Check your voter registration and those of friends! Give or volunteer if you can. Wear this. And remember that earlier victories in the recurring U.S. Civil War always led to golden eras. 

Imperfectly!  But we moved forward, correcting errors made by every prior generation. Making new ones for the next to correct! But moving ahead.

Toward the stars.