Attention-Based Stigmergic Distributed Collaborative Organizations

in crypto-news •  8 years ago  (edited)

Attention-Based Stigmergic Distributed Collaborative Organizations

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Introduction

"Attention is a scarce resource, information is not!"

In biological networks such as ant colonies, bee hives, or termites, you see self organization which builds and maintains critical architecture. Human beings can also take advantage of this self organizing mechanism to build and maintain institutions. The process is called stigmergy and to take advantage of this concept fully we have to revisit the fundamental theory of "the firm" as form of organization.

An attention based view of the firm

As human beings we are guided by our attention. It is also a fact that our attention is a scarce resource which many competing entities seek to capture. In an attention based view (ABV) of a firm it is attention which is the most precious resource and the allocation of attention is critical to the successful management of the firm. In a traditional top down hierarchical firm managerial attention is considered to be the most precious (Tseng & Chen, 2009), and is an very scarce resource. The allocation of attention within a firm can facilitate knowledge search. Knowledge search is part of the process of producing innovation and is effective or ineffective based on how management allocates their attention.

In the top down hierarchical model of the firm you must rely on managers properly allocating their attention because their attention is scarce. The problem of attention allocation (Tseng & Chen, 2009) and attention scarcity both plague traditional top down firms. In heterarchical flat organizations this may not be true anymore and when stigmergy comes into play it opens a door to a whole new method of knowledge search.

Attention-based stigmergic Distributed Collaborative Organizations

A Distributed Collaborative Organization (DCO) is a new model of human organization which did not exist until recently. Now that technology allows for Distributed Ledgers such as what we see with the Bitcoin blockchain it opens the door to new forms of human organizations such as the Distributed Collaborative Organization. Distributed Collaborative Organizations have unique capabilities and work by utilizing a token which represents "membership" in the DCO. Because of how DCOs are set up the tokens likely do not represent securities as they would if the traditional firm were used.

Attention-based stigmergic DCOs can take advantage of swarm intelligence to direct the attention of the members of the DCO. Stigmergy can be implemented through attractor patterns/attractor tokens, and incentive design patterns, both which would direct the attention and shape the activities of the swarm through simple algorithmic rules written as smart contracts. In this instance as Larry Lessig is famously quoted as saying: "Code is Law" but in a non-hierarchical swarm the user's attention is the most precious resource.

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Because attention is the most precious resource in a swarm there should be a mechanism allowing advertisers, or others, to pay for the attention of individual members within the swarm. In this case the DCO would have to be designed in such a way that attention is treated as extremely scarce, something to be preserved by use of bots/autonomous agents (personal preference swarms?) and automation. These personal swarms or personal drone networks if you'd like to call them that would seek out knowledge and information on behalf of individuals without the possibility of distraction.

These swarms could seek out the best deals for individuals. It could collect an extremely detailed amount of information about each and every product and use algorithms to compare products. This would allow swarms to evaluate anything from video games, to supermarket food, to stocks, to populate a list and buy, or to apply swarm intelligence to the construction of investment portfolios. All of this leads to a completely new paradigm of human organization through self organizing stigmergic institutions.

References
Grosan, C., Abraham, A., & Chis, M. (2006). Swarm intelligence in data mining (pp. 1-20). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Martens, D., Baesens, B., & Fawcett, T. (2011). Editorial survey: swarm intelligence for data mining. Machine Learning, 82(1), 1-42.

Ocasio, W. (1997). TOWARDS AN ATTENTION-BASED VIEW OF THE FIRM WILLIAM OCASlO. Psychology, 1, 403-404.

Tseng, C. C., & CHEN, P. C. (2009, August). SEARCH ACTIVITIES FOR INNOVATION--AN ATTENTION-BASED VIEW. In Academy of Management Proceedings (Vol. 2009, No. 1, pp. 1-6). Academy of Management.

This post is certified as from the original author by way of public keys posted at these locations: http://darkai.org/?p=527 and https://steemit.com/steemit/@dana-edwards/private-communication-with-me-via-pgp-for-those-who-know-and-understand

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To every whale that upvoted this today, THANK YOU!!!
You have completely restored my faith in our system. This topic really does take the prize in my opinion, this and Xeroc's but this is the best "not steem" topic I've seen since being here.

Certainly agree. I've come to realise that it's bound to happen over time for quality content to be added to whale vote lists, simply because over time their investment in an illiquid STEEM asset increases, which provides an incentive to protect that investment.

@dana-edwards your post and topic are insightful. But pseudo AI networks based on human attention are not new. We've had them for a long while now.

Your idea while innovative is not unique, both Amazon Mechanical Turk and Clickworker do exactly as you describe.

There isn't any benefit that I can see to combining this with blockchain tech the way you described. Nevertheless it is really good food for thought and I would like to collaborate with you on a real distributed AI targeting CDSS applications, but one supported by human experts such as licensed clinicians especially during it's earliest training phases.

Our plan is to make this an XPrize submission.
Let me know if you're interested and I'll contact you offlist with your permission.

p.s. While I realize your primary thrust is humans, you may be interested in reading this...
http://www.wildml.com/2016/01/attention-and-memory-in-deep-learning-and-nlp/

What I'm talking about is intelligent agents. More like Amazon Echo than Amazon Turk. More like Alexa than Clickworker. Here is an example of what I mean: https://github.com/cantino/huginn/

It is my understanding our brains are the bottleneck. Relying on human experts makes sense when there are experts but when you're doing certain new things there is no such thing as an expert. At the same time, how do you know which people you can trust? So instead I'm thinking intelligence amplification is the better solution and the reason to do it on a blockchain is so the whole world can have access without a point of failure.

In your post on your blog you mention beneficial bots. I'm very much for beneficial bots with the understanding that anything which saves time or attention adds value. Both time and attention are scarce resources for humans. If we can set curation on autopilot that is fine as long as it's voting based on criteria we would vote on if we had the attention.

Hey Huginn looks like a really neat platform. Thanks for showing that to me, I can already see possibilities.

I have to disagree on the brain being a bottle neck. It's by far and away the most powerful parallel processing system in the world. However I do understand your point. There are only so many hours in a day and it makes sense to automate repetitive tasks. It's the body that's the bottle neck though, not the brain. Just think about how we develop workflows in our daily lives that begin to self optimize and I think you'll see I'm right there.

We'd have to ask @dan to be certain, but I'm reasonably certain that Graphene, the blockchain tech that powers both bitshares and steem would never be able to deal with the kinds of irregular data you would need in order to store any sort of bespoke knowledge.

Blockchains are not a particularly well suited storage mechanism for this sort of information though because they are really nothing more than a distributed timestamped ledger service with cryptographic guarantees. If you don't need a rigid form of consensus then you don't need a blockchain. What you describe is the opposite of rigid consensus, it's fluid consensus based on perception. "I 25% agree with person A and 40% disagree with person B" In the blockchain world that's a consensus fork. In the real world, it's just how people are.

There is however the possibility of combining cryptographic signing and authentication with a regular document store or even a graph db such as neo4j. So long as there doesn't need to be rigid consensus, just regularity of the dataset then this approach makes sense. For distributed raw data storage you could just use Freenet or something like it...
https://freenetproject.org/

On the whole I do agree with you. Intelligence amplification as a force multiplier is the way forward. And the real secrets will be found in small specialized agent systems that can act cooperatively, i.e. swarms.

If I can be free to think, I can think more. Even typing is a chore that would better be handled by dictation AI. Curation based on a rudimentary form of collective swarm intelligence but with human guidance is also the topic of the blog post I linked above and really, really hope you'll read and comment on. :D

I'm not sure if Graphene in specific could do it as it is now but I do think it could be upgraded to manage it. I know for sure Tauchain could do it which is why I've given so much of my attention to Tauchain. Freenet is a bit outdated (2001) technology and doesn't even handle basics of the semantic web so I would not rely on it. The technology you need is the technology behind the semantic web which Tauchain promises to have. Solid also looks good and is made by Tim Berners-Lee, designed specifically for social media.

Generally though, it's going to happen sooner or later whether we see it on Tauchain or Graphene. To me a blockchain is just a data structure. But it does not have to be rigid, you can make it flexible and Tauchain shows that, but even to some degree you see it in DPOS. The blockchain allows you to have a flow of time, a sequence, an agreed upon shared state for any specific point in time, and for certain things this is necessary, but you can use other data structures too like tangles(DAGs) or even what SAFE Network is doing, depending on what you need to do.

Steemit needs the data structure it has but you can do sidechains with it to extend it.

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The benefit of blockchain is that you can bake in economic incentives to reward wanted behaviour. Or am I wrong?

Wow, actually... That's brilliant I hadn't considered the economic incentive before.
@markopaasila this gives me a brilliant idea for something completely unique to steem.

Personal Agents of global mind from Russia. Realized project:

Thank a lot for the education! It was well needed and you sure got my upvote. Namaste :)

Interesting post, keep posting!

I intend to post more on the topic of attention scarcity because it's the main constraint for Steemit. Steemit is in my opinion based on attention because attention is a required resource for Subjective Proof of Work. The whales do not have unlimited attention and the only way around it long term is bots/intelligent agents or voting power has to be more decentralized.

I was reading smooth on bitcointalk, and he was saying that they have around 40 votes before they exhaust their voting power. Now that -as I understand it- means that even if they were able to have more attention or delegate the curation process to helpers, they'd still be lacking the ability to vote >40 articles or comments... so decentralization of voting is a necessity as you say.

Voting power exhaustion is a matter of percentages. A whale still has more power after 40 votes than a minnow.

Also, whales do not need to vote with max power on each vote. They can give partial votes. The user interface just hasn't adapted to it yet.

Also, whales do not need to vote with max power on each vote. They can give partial votes. The user interface just hasn't adapted to it yet.

My brain knows that those kind of perfection are coming but at the same time Steem is already so perfect that it has a hard time seeing those coming.

Nice... hopefully that will increase whale voting without overthinking how much they give out...

No arguing with that logic :) @dan

@dana-edwards (posting here because it's ontopic and related to what you're saying)
I would absolutely LOVE your feedback on this...
https://steemit.com/steemit/@williambanks/bot-warz-a-hybrid-approach

Good point about attention being a resource for subjective proof of work and a constraint for Steemit.

Can swarms even form without a whale or two pointing out where they 'should' form?

Similar to SP, SMD tokens cannot be purchased directly on an external exchange. SMD are primarily earned through contributing but can be purchased by converting STEEM tokens to SMD tokens.

Actually Steem Dollars can now purchased on external exchanges !
https://poloniex.com/exchange#btc_sbd
https://bittrex.com/Market/Index?MarketName=BTC-SBD

PS Abbreviation of SBD = Steem Backed Dollars
or just SD = Steem Dollars (not SMD please edit)

:D I am an amateur beekeeper and this kind of reminds me of how a bee colony operates in locating food source and new hive locations.

Your article inspired me to give it a shot at my own post on how Blockchain, DAO and Steem reflect pheromone actions within a bee colony so thanks for that!

Have a look, it compliments your article quite well!

https://steemit.com/blockchain/@loewan/blockchain-dao-and-steem-from-the-perspectives-of-honeybees

Interesting you mention that. All swarm AI's take their cues primarily from nature, because nature was the first to solve these problems and has gotten really good at it.
A honey bee finding a flower with nectar in it is the same exact behavior as a swarm locating the next best topic to upvote.

It's good fun being a beekeeper. I feel a lot more attuned to the flora and the weather conditions in my surrounding areas. There are always mad surprises whenever I open the hive for inspections and it's always wonderful to read about something new and crazy and have it confirmed by observation.

Want to see the 10 most common words used in this article and a word cloud of the top 100 updated daily? Head over to http://steemread.com

Hey that's pretty awesome! Do you happen to have the source for that tool? I've been looking for a message extraction tool for steem and this looks like a good basis for it.

Who's the idiot that downvoted this topic? 1 down vote cost Dana $1,100?

Are you seriously asking those of us who care about quality content to go somewhere else?

It's completely on topic and targets the majority of community members, even if the people interested in it aren't necessarily whales.

Seriously guys, flagging is for spam and abuse, not because you think a posting is overrated or have a grudge. Using it for anything else is abusing the system.

@Dan come on man, please require that flagging require both a name and a comment, so we can know who these guys are at least and why. You said yourself that bagholders would always act in the best interests of the coin, but how is abusing the flagging system in the best interests of coin? Make them be as public as the upvoters at least, please! That way they at least have their reputation and curation on the line.

Otherwise the flagging system is going to be abused by people who are jealous and have nothing to risk at all. Yeah it might trigger mod wars, but at the very least, the community should have the right to give back the money to the person who earned even if someone is jealous and doesn't feel like they deserve it.

Anyone else agree with me about this?

I agree with you. There have been many article I have seen that someone has flagged and for the life of me I couldn't see why. I always wanted to know who these people are flagging articles. Maybe it is my sense of "your right to know your accuser". It's the same reason I feel that there should not be any "anonymous" tips to the police. Too easy to abuse the system.
If you are going to flag you should have the courage of your conviction. User names should accompany the flag. Maybe we should also be able to up and down vote the flagger. Flagging should be reserved to a limited set of circumstances.

Hi dana-edwards!
After reading your article I realized one thing.
Steemit - Based Stigmergic Distributed Collaborative Organization.
Whales affect the development of events in the steemit community.

  ·  8 years ago (edited)

the truth is that I know little about this but I find it really fascinating

good post @dana-edwards 8]

This is very interesting! I'm still trying to wrap my head around this. I've recently tried to express using Steemit to positively reinforce businesses around the world. I've read many of your posts and you seem to have a good technical grasp of this emerging social technology. Hmm care to have a look and see how I could express my ideas better? https://steemit.com/business/@kevinwong/steemit-and-the-dance-music-scene

Research sidechains because they may be the key to understanding the true potential of what Steemit can do.

  ·  8 years ago Reveal Comment
  ·  8 years ago Reveal Comment

I flagged because I feel this post is suffering from swarm voting and is over rewarded. That is not to say it isn't a worthwhile bit of writing but is really just a short note. I would not flag but for the already-excessive reward (if the reward drops I will remove the flag).

It's not your job to determine if an article is over rewarded. If you don't want to reward the post, don't upvote it. Who are you to determine for the rest of us how valuable a post should be? That's just pure jealousy.
If an article is off topic (tagged inappropriately) or spam, fine, flag away, but to use the flagging system to subjectively determine how much it should be rewarded or if the article is long enough is abusing the system.

It's not your job to determine if an article is over rewarded

The blockchain disagrees, it hired me to perform precisely this job.

Dana go on!

Go go Dana

Please note that Attention Economics was brought up by jpdimensions, previous to this post. He may deserve some credit.

https://steemit.com/steemit-faq/@jpdimensions/8-intangibles-to-riding-the-wave-of-the-attention-economy-understanding-the-new-currency-the-price-of-attention

such swarms are useless both in anomaly detection and distinguishing chaos from order, this is why they are easy meat for dolphins and whales; pattern recognition constraints lead to IoT sensors only

Nice read!

very interesting one

I know your busy but you tend to reply. My thought is theory about how ants and bees work. I love artificial intelligence and theorizing how to do amazing things. I believe that an Queen ant, actually gives worker ants little computer programs or pretty cool instructions, intelligent in a natural way, like dna strands. The program changes slightly based on new information the queen receives and she sends the program and updates via outgoing ants which pass it along.

I could write 3 articles based on ideas you remind me of having.

Big whale, click on my button! =)

this is superb! I had no idea a document could look this good.

This reminds me of the "Hive Mind" of Anonymous . If you are not familiar with Anonymous (like you have been living in a cave for the last 10 years), here is an article explaining it:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/07/anonymous_feature/

If you prefer video to text, here is a YouTube explaining it:

  ·  8 years ago Reveal Comment

good posting.. thx for information

wow. extraordinary. you inspire me to think. I need to think a while before replying to this. You've been added to my green-list.

Thanks for sharing I wait for your next post

Similar to SP, SMD tokens cannot be purchased directly on an external exchange. SMD are primarily earned through contributing but can be purchased by converting STEEM tokens to SMD tokens.

Actually Steem Dollars can now purchased on external exchanges !
https://poloniex.com/exchange#btc_sbd
https://bittrex.com/Market/Index?MarketName=BTC-SBD

PS Abbreviation of SBD = Steem Backed Dollars
or just SD = Steem Dollars (not SMD please edit)

Everybody fight for decentralization, but there is only one (or two) attraction center? So, system is centralized after all?

@dana-edwards would you try up-voting some of your valued readers comments:)

omg wtf is this ? :D

I can and I do but I'm not a whale so maybe people don't notice my votes. Now what do you think of the article?

I personal think this article needs to be broken down in layman's terms and if this is the best it can be broken down for not so smart people like myself oh-well suit myself my loss for not understanding.

I once saw a documentary about a group of individuals living in the jungle who had no leader whatsover and functioned fine, by "everybody knowing what they had to do"

Thanks for this interesting post...
Although I love Steemit and its logic as a great improvement, in the long run I am more interested in an abundance based economy which seem to need a complete reboot of our mindset... What about an empathy / common good based reward system? Attention can and will always be driven by lots of aspects that have zero value to the common good of society. Because attention is a big illusion victim tricked by the senses and our mind. For decades advertisers have been using all the trics to draw attetion to meaningless stuff... If you carefully look the same is already visible here in Steemit. I am convinced this what we witness here is just the beginning of decentralized reward based networking... exciting times...

  ·  8 years ago (edited)

Thanks for sharing, Dana. To a certain extend I´d say yes. But my thoughts and conceptual drafts have a lot more details. I agree in a lot of points and also think that it needs something what you call a robust reputation management. I´d like to explore this in more depth at some point... I work with many great people in the NewEarth Project and we are developing something like that...

To give you a better idea of where I am coming form, I was starting at the very core of our existing value creation system, central banks and questioned how this scarce central controled system could be replaced with something that effectively changes the current mindset of "survival of the fittest" into a system mimicing natures abundance. I believe we will end up in a gifting economy one day. But how to transition to this utopia when humanity is still conditioned like it is today? When we look at the cryptoworld we see very similar patterns of the same conditioned greed oriented mindset like in our dominated centralized and top down controlled system. The swarm does not yet deserve the word intelligence in an altruistic sense. I very much believe we need to crack the mind and the idea of separation and the illusion of isolation to become more in tune with the collective morphic field, senseing others, the planet and the entire universe...

Back to my root question: What has real value, and with real I mean REAL. Not invented or agreed upon because its been learned and used (e.g. precious metals like Gold, etc). In my view the only real value for human beings is alive and visible in appreciated interaction, which has countless forms. When we akt, speak or think in our interactions with others, it not necessarily ends up to be valuable for the other(s). So what creates value is a proof of value by the other(s). A reputation system obviously requires a voting system. But more advanced than what we see in social media or gamification models (I don't really like this word). And it needs to be open enough to learn. Such a gamification and voting system, with multiple "badges" each related to a specific index and algorithm (attention, appreciation, innovation, social, cultural, envitonmental, etc...) would be a good start... As value can be clustered in so many groups and priorities, and as it is a changing element of human life it is immanently important to keep it as open as possible to enable changes to the choise of what type of values should make it into the reputation system.

Another aspect we are adding into the system is renewble (free) energy as mining source, but there are some secrets that will take us a while before we are able to announce this exciting element in more depth...

  ·  8 years ago Reveal Comment