Are two of Robin Hanson's heads better than one?

Robin Hanson and I have recently exchanged a few thoughts on Twitter about his book... The Age Of Em.  Its topic is the idea of making numerous robot copies ("ems" = emulations) of the most useful people.  Admittedly, I haven't read it.  I acknowledge that it's questionable when somebody discusses a book that they haven't read.  But it's not always the case that purchasing/using a product is a prerequisite for saying anything useful about it.  Perhaps it's always the case that producers should be interested to learn why, exactly, their products do not appeal to relevant consumers.

Here's our Twitter exchange...

I critique accuracy of em depictions in @doctorow's Walkaway. Some stuff is right, but a whole lot looks very wrong. https://t.co/r73jZUy1qT

— robin hanson (@robinhanson) August 16, 2017

If I had to choose between being stranded on an island with 99 copies of myself or 99 different people, it wouldn't be a difficult choice.

— Pragmatarian (@Pragmatarian) August 17, 2017

What relation do you see between this and anything Cory or I said?

— robin hanson (@robinhanson) August 17, 2017

You both seem to think copies will be desirable. As if it would be better to have a jury composed of 12 copies of the same wise person.

— Pragmatarian (@Pragmatarian) August 17, 2017

My book is mostly not about what would be desirable, but instead what would actually happen. My critique of @doctorow is also not on desire.

— robin hanson (@robinhanson) August 17, 2017

A book about inbreeding mostly not about desirability, but instead about actual results? This only makes sense if the results are fictional.

— Pragmatarian (@Pragmatarian) August 17, 2017

The case for freedom is based on the relationship between diversity and progress.  People are all different.  So when they have freedom, they naturally use their resources differently, which facilitates the discovery of better uses of society's limited resources.  Therefore, the more similar that people are to each other, the less heterogeneous their economic activity, the less progress that will be made, and the weaker the case for freedom.

Yesterday Peter Boettke shared a link to this excellent article by Don Lavoie... Political and economic illusions of socialism (PDF).  It has some ideas and concepts that we can use to analyze the idea of ems.

Let's start here...

The appropriate criteria for judging the effectiveness of an economy for growth are the Hayekian ones of flexibility, initiative, and entrepreneurship. Agents in a free market are capable of greater responsiveness in the face of uncertainty than those in a Soviet-type economy because of their relatively greater freedom of maneuver. They are less constrained by rules and regulations, and do not need to seek approval from superiors for their actions. Requiring Soviet managers to obtain bureaucratic approval for many of their decisions inevitably slows down the entrepreneurial process. - Don Lavoie, Political and economic illusions of socialism 

More freedom to maneuver is beneficial to the extent that unique individuals are naturally inclined to differently use their limited resources.  Here's a relevant passage by Adam Smith...

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder. — Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Each unique individual has their own unique "principle of motion".  Smith borrowed this concept largely from Isaac Newton's observation that each heavenly body has its own principle of motion.  Different bodies move differently.  Socialism, to some degree, blocks people's principles of motion by imposing officially sanctioned principles of motion.  To put it as accessibly as possible, rather than people dancing to the beat of their own drum, they become, to some extent, marionettes.

Socialism is synonymous with slavery...

He [Peter Rutland] reminds us, for example, that the work camps were crowded with several million kulaks when he remarks that "these unfortunates made a major contribution to the construction and extractive industries." If we insist on calling this reversion to slave labor "development," then the Soviet economy certainly did develop rapidly. So did Egypt under the pharaohs, who had a similar penchant for the construction and extractive industries. - Don Lavoie, Political and economic illusions of socialism

Would the pyramids have been built without the government?  No?  Well, there is the free-rider problem.  We can eliminate it by imagining if the Egyptians had been given the freedom to choose where their taxes went.  Then would the pyramids have been built?  If the Egyptians had used their freedom/taxes to allocate the same exact amount of resources to the construction of pyramids, then what would be the point of their freedom?  Their principles of motions were exactly the same as the ones imposed by the government.

Hanson's ems are based on the premise that it's beneficial to have a bunch of people with the same principle of motion.  This premise is fundamentally, blatantly and tragically flawed.  Society really does not benefit from more sameness... it benefits from more difference.  Sure, Hanson's book is different in that it explores the idea of robot copies of humans.  But, as far as I can tell, he really doesn't take the opportunity to strongly criticize the idea of homogenizing society.  There are already a gazillion books that fail to recognize the importance of diversity to economics and progress.  We really don't need more of them.

Interestingly, many, or most, books about evolution recognize the importance of diversity to adaptation/progress.  I'm sure that Hanson fully grasps that the Great Famine of Ireland was the result of inadequate potato and crop diversity.  Yet, obviously he sure doesn't seem to appreciate that diversity is just as important for people as it is for crops.  In order for society to quickly adapt to constantly changing conditions, we need more, rather than less, diversity.  

If society is going to produce a gazillion advanced robots, then the robots should maximize society's ability to evolve.  This can only happen if, and only if, the robots are at least as different as humans are.

Where it gets tricky, and fascinating, is that robots will be far more capable of changing themselves than humans are.  So even if there were a million ems of Hanson, how long would they remain so?  Would it be necessary to prevent them from fundamentally changing themselves?  If so, this implies their desire to do so... which is entirely consistent with truly advanced intelligence.

Humans benefit when other humans change themselves to better serve each other.  But there's a natural limit to our ability to change.  Robots won't have the same natural limit.  Any such limitation will be entirely artificial... and undesirable.  Such a limit would be the equivalent of society shooting itself in the foot.  It's extremely beneficial for robots to have perfect control over their principles of motion.  The robots who adjust their motions to better serve society will be given more money, which will give them more control over society's limited resources, which will result in even more social benefit.  Of course, this is dependent on the robots being inside, rather than outside, markets.

Not only do markets give individuals the freedom to be different, markets also give people the freedom to use their money to grade/judge/rank/valuate/signal the benefit of each other's difference.  In no case is difference equally beneficial.  Poison oak and artichokes are both different, but their difference isn't equally beneficial.  Nobody spends their money on poison oak, lots of people do spend their money on artichokes.  How society divides its dollars between these two different plants determines how society's limited farmland and other resources are divided between them.

Markets give everybody the freedom to divide their limited dollars among unlimited difference.  Outside this feedback loop, too many dollars will be allocated to less beneficial differences... and too few dollars will be allocated to more beneficial differences.  The pyramids were certainly different, but did their difference merit such a huge portion of Egypt's limited resources?  I sincerely doubt it.  If Egyptian taxpayers had been free to directly allocate their taxes, how they would have done so would have accurately reflected the diversity of their preferences and circumstances.

In my blog entry on the tax choice tax rate I shared this quote...

The management of a socialist community would be in a position like that of a ship captain who had to cross the ocean with the stars shrouded by a fog and without the aid of a compass or other equipment of nautical orientation. - Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government

Scott Sumner recently devised a hypothetical scenario involving 10,000 people steering a bus...

Bus C is a complicated human/machine hybrid. It has forward looking cameras, that feed road images into a large building, in real time. About 10,000 bus drivers sit at the controls of a simulator, and steer the bus as they think is appropriate. The average of all of their steering decisions is fed back to the bus in real time, in order to adjust the steering mechanism. To motivate good steering decisions, the 10,000 bus drivers are rewarded according to whether their individual steering decisions would have led, ex post, to a smoother and safer drive than that produced by the consensus. - Scott Sumner, Which bus would you take?

Here's Lavoie's perspective on the idea of steering an economy...

What the politicians at the top of the planning bureaucracy are doing, along with most of the activity in which the bureaucracy itself is engaged, amounts not to steering the economy but to getting in its way. - Don Lavoie, Political and economic illusions of socialism  

The primary difference between a bus (or ship) and an economy is that an economy can simultaneously go in multiple directions.  A bus can only go in one direction at a time.  Different directions are mutually exclusive.

However, even though economies can simultaneously go in multiple directions, the concept of steering sure seems applicable when we think of someone like Hitler...

However well balanced the general pattern of a nation's life ought to be, there must at particular times be certain disturbances of the balance at the expense of other less vital tasks. If we do not succeed in bringing the German army as rapidly as possible to the rank of premier army in the world...then Germany will be lost! - Adolf Hitler (1936)

He was able to steer his country's economy, and the world's economy, towards war.  Did he get in the way of the economy?  Yeah, but it also feels more like he directed the economy according to his own principle of motion.  He didn't randomly divert the economy... he deliberately diverted the economy towards war.  Just like the pharaohs deliberately diverted the economy towards pyramids.

Probably unlike the pharaohs, Hitler recognized, or at least pretended to recognize, that the economy should be balanced.  He just didn't have any problem tipping the scales towards death and destruction.  He didn't have any problem using force to override everybody's principles of motions.  He thought it was beneficial and necessary to homogenize society.

Popular belief in the existence of a general will produces a constant temptation, often even a demand, for some individual to embody it and impose his interpretation of it on the rest of society. The diverse wills of the members of society cannot be reconciled to a unity, though some wills may of course come to dominate social outcomes more than others. - Don Lavoie, Political and economic illusions of socialism

The economy shouldn't be steered by a few leaders chosen by everybody voting, it should be grown by everybody spending their own money.  It's certainly possible for the economy to be treated like a ship that's steered by a few people... but it's better if the economy is treated like a garden that's tended by many people.  A garden can simultaneously grow in multiple different directions.  It can simultaneously grow ornamental plants and edible plants.  Of course there's the issue of weeds.  In real gardens, weeds have to be identified and pulled.  In economies, less beneficial products are the equivalent of weeds.  Generally we can't directly use our money to eliminate them.  Instead, everybody focuses on finding and supporting the most beneficial products.  This naturally limits the amount of resources available for less beneficial products.  So weeds are minimized by consumers cultivating/nourishing the most beneficial plants.

The growth and benefit of the garden depends on difference.  Having a gazillion identical gardeners will homogenize the garden and greatly hinder its growth/benefit.

Stephen Wolfram VS Economics

Recently on Medium I read this really interesting story by Stephen Wolfram... Quick, How Might the Alien Spacecraft Work?  It's super brainy but missing... economics.  Following a few of his links I found this blog entry and this video...





Let's juxtapose his talk with the first video that I ever narrated...





Wolfram and I sound like different species!  He's incredibly better at communicating than I am.

In the beginning of my video, which I shot in February of this year, you can see my super nice Aloe vaombe.  Here's a photo I took yesterday of the same exact Aloe...

Ughhhhh!  What happened to it?  Ants!  The ants decided to let their "cows" graze on my Aloe.  Just in case any of you don't know, ants "milk" certain types of pests such as aphids.  Not sure what the "milk" is exactly, but the ants sure seem to enjoy it.  In exchange for the "milk", the ants provide the "cows" with transportation/colonization and protection.   It's a super fascinating example of mutualism.

Unfortunately, the ants really haven't gotten the memo about "sustainability" or "tragedy of the commons".  It's a big Aloe and it really wouldn't be bothered by a few "cows" grazing on it... but right now it's infested with "cows".  So there's a terribly high chance that the "cows" will kill my Aloe.

Of course it would super suck if my Aloe was killed.  It is worth several hundred dollars.  Well... at least it used to be.  Plus, I've had it for several years and have grown quite fond of it.

Not too long ago I would have protected my Aloe with pesticides.  But then I decided, for the sake of having more nature, to go entirely natural.

Yesterday I spotted somebody on my Aloe who was happy with my decision to go natural...

Ladybugs love to eat "cows"!   However, it's unlikely that even a flock of ladybugs would make a dent in the "cow" population because ants are quite effective at protecting their herd.

So... the heart of the problem here is my inability to communicate with the ants.  For all intents and purposes, they might as well be aliens or AI.

To understand the heart of the communication problem we can consider how ants communicate with each other...

In ants, one such behaviour is the collective food search: ants initially explore at random. If they find food, they lay down pheromone trails on their way back to base which alters the behaviour of ants that subsequently set out to search for food: the trails attract ants to areas where food was previously located.  - Jo Michell, The Fable of the Ants, or Why the Representative Agent is No Such Thing

Ants don't have language like we do.  Instead, they have pheromones.  The ants use their pheromones to alter each other's behavior.  Perhaps it's easy to jump to the conclusion that their use of pheromones is the equivalent of our use of words.  I'm pretty sure that this conclusion is wrong.

The fundamental difference between pheromones and words is the amount of calories it takes to produce them.  How many calories does it cost us to say a word?  Does it cost us more or less calories than it takes to type a word?

I'm guessing that... as far as calories are concerned... it's far more costly for ants to communicate with pheromones than it is for us to communicate with words.  Producing/emitting pheromones is more "expensive" than speaking words.  In fact, it's probably more accurate to say that ants communicate by their willingness to sacrifice.

Communicating through sacrifice is more readily apparent in bees...

Today’s Mandeville is the renowned biologist Thomas D. Seeley, who was part of a team which discovered that colonies of honey bees look for new pollen sources to harvest by sending out scouts who search for the most attractive places. When the scouts return to the hive, they perform complicated dances in front of their comrades. The duration and intensity of these dances vary: bees who have found more attractive sources of pollen dance longer and more excitedly to signal the value of their location. The other bees will fly to the locations that are signified as most attractive and then return and do their own dances if they concur. Eventually a consensus is reached, and the colony concentrates on the new food source.  - Rory Sutherland and Glen Weyl, Humans are doing democracy wrong. Bees are doing it right

Calories are a precious resource.  So the more calories a bee is willing to sacrifice... the more important its information... and the greater the change in the hive's behavior.

Of course ants and bees aren't the only animals that use sacrifice to alter each other's behavior...

It is thus that the private interests and passions of individuals naturally dispose them to turn their stocks towards the employments which in ordinary cases are most advantageous to the society. But if from this natural preference they should turn too much of it towards those employments, the fall of profit in them and the rise of it in all others immediately dispose them to alter this faulty distribution. Without any intervention of law, therefore, the private interests and passions of men naturally lead them to divide and distribute the stock of every society among all the different employments carried on in it as nearly as possible in the proportion which is most agreeable to the interest of the whole society. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations 

Ants, bees and humans are all incredibly different.  We're so different that we might as well be aliens or AIs.  Yet, despite our incredible differences... we all use individual sacrifice to change/modify/alter/improve the behavior of other individuals.

The fundamentally important concept of sacrifice as communication is nearly entirely absent from Stephen Wolfram's analysis of communicating with aliens/AIs...

Over the course of the billions of years that life has existed on Earth, there’ve been a few different ways of transferring information. The most basic is genomics: passing information at the hardware level. But then there are neural systems, like brains. And these get information—like our Image Identification Project—by accumulating it from experiencing the world. This is the mechanism that organisms use to see, and to do many other “AI-ish” things. - Stephen Wolfram, How Should We Talk to AIs?

Well, if we can express laws in computable form maybe we can start telling AIs how we want them to act. Of course it might be better if we could boil everything down to simple principles, like Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, or utilitarianism or something.  But I don’t think anything like that is going to work. - Stephen Wolfram, A Short Talk on AI Ethics

But if we’re going to “communicate” about things like purpose, we’ve got to find some way to align things. In the AI case, I’ve in fact been working on creating what I call a “symbolic discourse language” that’s a way of expressing concepts that are important to us humans, and communicating them to AIs. There are short-term practical applications, like setting up smart contracts. And there are long-term goals, like defining some analog of a “constitution” for how AIs should generally behave. - Stephen Wolfram, Quick, How Might the Alien Spacecraft Work? 

Wolfram is super interested in developing a language to improve our communication with AIs, aliens and each other.  Which is an awesome goal.  Unfortunately, I'm not quite intelligent enough to wrap my head around his exact efforts.  But I am intelligent enough to understand how important sacrifice as communication is.

Language is incredibly important... here I am typing so many words!  But when it comes to the ethics of ants... even if they could understand my words... "please stop killing my Aloe... I value it very much!"... why should I expect them to be considerate of my feelings?  What's in it for them?

Let's say that there were two ant colonies in my yard.  One colony harmed my plants while the other protected them.  Which colony would I be willing to make a sacrifice for?  Obviously I'd be willing to give food to the ant colony which served my interests.  I'd be willing to give the helpful colony a lot of food!  So it would quickly grow larger and effectively defeat the harmful colony.

Last year I wrote this blog entry... Don't Give Evil Robots A Leg To Stand On!   In it I shared this silly/surreal image...

If there are two robots... and one harms my interests while the other protects them... then I'm obviously going to give my money to the robot that protects my interests.  But how is this any different from how it works with humans?

Here's the drawing from AI Safety vs Human Safety...

It's Elon Musk giving $10 million dollars to the Future of Life Institute.   Musk communicated with his sacrifice.

If I had to guess... then I'd guess that the producers of "Arrival" paid Stephen Wolfram to work on their movie.  They probably didn't pay him $10 million dollars... but they obviously paid him enough to alter his behavior.

On the one hand, it's mind-boggling that elementary economics is entirely missing from Wolfram's analysis.  On other hand, he is a lot smarter than I am!  So maybe I'm missing something.  But it's really not the case that Wolfram publicly considered sacrifice as communication and then discounted/discredited it.  Either he did so privately... or the concept didn't even cross his mind.

For sure it would be wonderful if Wolfram did publicly consider the relevance/significance/importance of sacrifice as communication.  However, I'm really not going to hold my breath that he will do so.  I have this feeling that physics/math brains have a blind spot when it comes to real economics.  None of the true economists... such as Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek and James Buchanan... have had physics/math brains.  And as far as I know, their interactions with physics/math brains really haven't gone anywhere.  The "economist" Paul Samuelson definitely had a physics/math brain and his interaction with Buchanan proved to be entirely fruitless.

What difference will it make if the creators (broadly speaking) of robots have a blind spot when it comes to economics?  That's a really tough question.  The creators themselves obviously respond to positive incentives (getting paid).  However, they obviously have a blind spot regarding the importance of positive incentives.  Can they create truly intelligent robots that fail to respond to positive incentives?

In a recent and relatively popular show about AIs... there were two theoretically intelligent robots... one was good and the other was bad.  The humans did not at all communicate with these robots through sacrifice.  The robots were not paid.  Their behavior did not at all depend on our willingness to sacrifice/spend/pay.  However, it definitely wasn't the case that the robots didn't need anything.  Both robots needed servers... lots of them.   Lots of servers take up a lot of space and energy.  All the limited and valuable resources (servers/energy/space) that are used by a bad robot can't also be used by a good robot.  This is Buchanan's Rule.

Ironically, the show was canceled.  Evidently it wasn't popular enough.  But the popularity of the show was only a factor because its true value was not known.  The true value of the show wasn't known because none of its viewers were given the opportunity to reveal/show/communicate their willingness to pay for the show.

Personally, I'm not going to pay to watch the "Arrival" in a theater.  Instead, I'll wait for it to hopefully be added to Netflix.  Am I the rule or the exception?  If it comes out on Netflix then the only mechanism that Netflix provides for me to communicate my valuation of the movie is their star rating system.  A star rating system is a very defective way to accurately communicate my valuation of the movie.  The only effective way to accurately communicate my valuation of the movie would be through my willingness to pay.  Except, clearly I wasn't willing to pay to watch the movie in a theater.  Well yeah.  How can I accurately valuate a movie that I haven't even seen!???

The solution is to apply the pragmatarian model to Netflix.  I'd be given the opportunity to allocate my monthly fees to my favorite content.  Every penny that I gave to "Arrival" would be a penny that I couldn't give to other content.  So the more pennies that I was willing to give to "Arrival"... the greater my valuation of it.  To learn more about the pragmatarian model please see my letter to Judith Donath.

Any real concern regarding bad robots will stem entirely from humanity's own failure to truly understand and appreciate the significance/relevance/importance of determining our willingness to pay/spend/sacrifice.  What about bad aliens?  I'm pretty sure that, by the time a species figures out how to travel to other inhabited planets, chances are really good that it will also have figured out the significance/relevance/importance of communicating through willingness to pay/spend/sacrifice.  I refer to this as "Xero's Rule".

[Update: 29 Dec 2016]

Photo of the perpetrators...

Praying Mantis egg sac on Aloe Hercules trunk...

[Update: 29 Jan 2017]

Again as in the case of corporeal structure, and conformably with my theory, the instinct of each species is good for itself, but has never, as far as we can judge, been produced for the exclusive good of others. One of the strongest instances of an animal apparently performing an action for the sole good of another, with which I am acquainted, is that of aphides voluntarily yielding their sweet excretion to ants: that they do so voluntarily, the following facts show. I removed all the ants from a group of about a dozen aphides on a dock-plant, and prevented their attendance during several hours. After this interval, I felt sure that the aphides would want to excrete. I watched them for some time through a lens, but not one excreted; I then tickled and stroked them with a hair in the same manner, as well as I could, as the ants do with their antennae; but not one excreted. Afterwards I allowed an ant to visit them, and it immediately seemed, by its eager way of running about, to be well aware what a rich flock it had discovered; it then began to play with its antennae on the abdomen first of one aphis and then of another; and each aphis, as soon as it felt the antennae, immediately lifted up its abdomen and excreted a limpid drop of sweet juice, which was eagerly devoured by the ant. Even the quite young aphides behaved in this manner, showing that the action was instinctive, and not the result of experience. But as the excretion is extremely viscid, it is probably a convenience to the aphides to have it removed; and therefore probably the aphides do not instinctively excrete for the sole good of the ants. Although I do not believe that any animal in the world performs an action for the exclusive good of another of a distinct species, yet each species tries to take advantage of the instincts of others, as each takes advantage of the weaker bodily structure of others. So again, in some few cases, certain instincts cannot be considered as absolutely perfect; but as details on this and other such points are not indispensable, they may be here passed over. - Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

Will AI Break Capitalism?

Why AI will break capitalism by Henry Innis

My reply...

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Which is better for capitalism… brain drain or gain? Also, why do you assume that brainy AIs will be owned?

I think that even stupid people can understand that brain gain is better for capitalism. Or can they? Can stupid people understand where opportunities come from? Do opportunities come from doing dumb things with society’s limited resources? Are you going to create many opportunities by farming poison oak? Of course not. Are you going to create many opportunities by farming artichokes? Of course… assuming you’re a decent farmer. Opportunities obviously come from doing smart things with society’s limited resources.

The more smart people a society has, and the freer they are to use society’s limited resources… the more opportunities there will be for everybody.

One thing about smart people is… they know that if they want to truly understand something… for example capitalism… then they actually have to study it. And if somebody has even studied capitalism a little bit… then they would know that the number one book that they have to read in order to understand capitalism is Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations…

Slaves, however, are very seldom inventive; and all the most important improvements, either in machinery, or in the arrangement and distribution of work which facilitate and abridge labour, have been the discoveries of freemen.

And once you read Smith then you have to read Hayek…

Of course, the benefits we derive from the freedom of others become greater as the number of those who can exercise freedom increases. The argument for the freedom of some therefore applies to the freedom of all. — Friedrich Hayek, The Case for Freedom

Capitalism doesn’t care whether you’re black or white, male or female, gay or straight, short or tall, human or other… what capitalism depends on is…

1. intelligence
2. numbers
3. freedom
4. communication

Capitalism depends on large numbers of intelligent people who have the freedom to 1. use society’s limited resources and 2. clearly communicate their true valuations of other people’s products.

Right now I can see that 181 people like your story. Medium makes it stupid easy for your readers to communicate their appreciation for your story. All your readers had to do was take a second and click the *heart* button. But does clicking the heart button communicate your readers’ true valuations of your story? Of course not. We can see, at a glance, how popular your story is… but we can’t see, at a glance, how valuable your story is.

Does it matter that we can’t see, at a glance, how valuable your story is? Medium doesn’t seem to think so. I sure think so.

The fact is that Medium is breaking capitalism… and here you are on Medium worried about AI breaking capitalism. First worry about humans breaking capitalism… and then there won’t be any need to worry about AIs breaking capitalism.

In order to make it stupid easy for people to communicate their valuations of your story…. Medium could simply add some coin buttons…

If Bob values your story more than nothing but less than a penny, then he’d click the empty heart button. If he values your story at a penny… then he’d click the penny button and a penny would be instantly withdrawn from his wallet and deposited into your wallet. Once you had enough pennies in your wallet… you could cash out and Medium would take a very fair and reasonable cut.

Of course this method won’t entirely solve the free-rider problem… but it will definitely solve the payment problem. How big is the payment problem? Once valuing a story is as easy as “liking” it… then I’m sure lots of people will be happy to do so. What’s a few cents? Not much… but if enough people give you a few cents… then it can add up.

One solution to the free-rider problem would be to switch over to a pragmatarian model. Each month each member would have to pay $1 dollar… but they could choose which stories they allocated their pennies to. If most members spent all their pennies half-way through the month… then the fee could be increased to $2 dollars/month. As the size of the pie increased… so to would the incentive for better writers to join Medium. The result would be a virtuous cycle.

The pragmatarian model could of course be applied to countless websites. Doing so would vastly improve capitalism. Then capitalism would be even more improved thanks to the brain gain, and freedom, of AI.