When it comes to artificial intelligence, there is always going to be a flaw until it can truly think and code for itself, us. The problem is that whoever codes the system is going to code into it their own ideals of how they think it should interact with its environment. I wrote a piece the other day about what it may look like if general intelligence AI's competed against each other in the real world. I see conflict similar to that of humans depending on their core values they 'live' by.
We can kind of see this idea demonstrated at Steemit with bots, more easily with whale bots. I don't know how many whales or big fish types there are here but there are plenty of different bots at play and they interact with the environment based on the philosophy of their programmer. There is a difference in content voted upon depending on the value system of the operator.
Some bot operators are looking to maximize their own reward return and set their bot to target what will do that which seems to generally be what will appear in trending, and other operators look for a more even win/win situation and spread their votes further, regardless of their return. There is of course always a return however but where that return comes from may be important for the site.
I do not know any whales personally, but have chatted casually with a couple in general from time to time with one in particular standing out. I have the tendency to watch people in real life, and in chat/posts I try to get an understanding of the character behind the words. When this particular whale is in the room and someone asks a newbie type question, they patiently answer and spend time helping at the most basic level. For me, this is something that indicates a person's commitment to the long-term view.
A few days ago I was going through one chat friend's blog page as I had not seen her art before ( @m31 - check her out) and came across one of her resteems. A post from a month ago by said whale outlining their voting behavior, concerns about the platform and why and how they wrote their bot to act the way it does.
The title of the post was a quote from Gandhi, 'be the change you want to see in the world' and the whale is @pharesim who also happens to be a witness, as many of the whales are.
In the coding of his bot he has chosen to train it to follow mostly manual curators. This is something I have mentioned before as supremely important for site development as manual curators are much less likely to ever upvote spam or nonsense posts, they will read the content and choose what engages them or thinks will engage the community. He also then continued tweaking his bot to maximize spread and minimize his own return to some degree it seems.
This is a long-term view as this type of bot behavior will forego weekly gains for gains that come about through the entire community developing. There is no guarantee this will happen, it is more an act of faith. Not religious faith, faith in the community itself, the more important kind.
After reading this and watching the interactions in chat, there seems to be low conflict between his personal philosophy and the philosophy of the bot he coded. Now, the bots themselves now are not AI at all and are limited in their ability to discern content but, this is essentially how AI is going to develop into the future.
Who codes it matters and how they view the long-term matters also. If the programming is shortsighted, the AI is going to live on instant gratification, something that plagues the world already. If the AI has a long view, it will work on patience and faith that it has the ability to influence what it cannot yet predict, like the longevity of Steemit.
I find AI quite fascinating and write relatively regularly about it as I think that it is going to increasingly be a driving factor in how our world shifts. It may even get to a point where 'be the change' is replaced by 'code your AI to support the change'.
I do not know much about AI however, nor how bots and trails work for that matter. I am more interested in how humans work and how the actions of individuals within a community influence the community as a whole. This is essentially how Gandhi lived his life, he died with relatively very little to his name but the value he brought to his and the world's community is so great, so complex it is unmeasurable. And, it is still ongoing through his words and stories carried by the global community.
People do not need to be whales or bots to really make a difference at Steemit though, they just need to use whatever power they have to nudge the content they really enjoy and appreciate along. Since Hardfork 19, the entire community has more say than ever before, but the long-term view that benefits all is likely going to be an initial slight reduction in the weekly curation return but a larger spread of the pool to the community.
Now comes the hard part. I rarely mention people in my posts and especially since notifications aren't working consistently, I let them know that I have mentioned them in DM. I do this as it gives them a chance to respond if they choose and if they want to correct misrepresentations or defend a position, they have the opportunity. I am pretty sure @m31 will be okay with this but @pharesim? Still, my ethics are what they are so I will err on the side they will both forgive me the trespass.
The original post from Pharesim is behind this link.
And the latest art post by @m31 is here.
Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]
