Thread · 3 tweets · 9 Dec 2022

That's a fair point but I disagree on two points. I think that we *could* build a tech system with the rich opacity and complexity of an ecosystem. It would probably require new techniques because it's not something we've really tried that I'm aware (not even in ALife).

The thing is that it wouldn't do anything for us, we wouldn't be able to control it to produce anything useful for us. I suspect that there's a no-free-lunch in control vs intelligent complexity. For the same reason if we built AGI it would be hard to get it to do work for us.

The second point is: I believe that a techno-*social* environment could easily have ecosystem complexity! But for that to work, we need to liberate people, to find ways to prevent control from emerging.