By John Taylor; 2008 Apr 12, 4 Jalal, 165 BE
In an earlier essay we touched on a prediction of August Forel eighty years ago that we will one day replace this feverish city pace with an agricultural lifestyle, and that servility to technology will be replaced by devotion to the social good. We noted that since then, lacking a world government, all-powerful corporations have learned to cross borders and lord it over farmers, replacing traditional methods with grossly unsustainable practices. The impotence of farmers to resist these pressures caused the present food crisis. We asked how it might be possible to tip the balance the other way toward a system where farmers decide for themselves what they need to get us fed, and corporations are obliged to follow their lead. This difficulty weighed upon me a long time until I experienced a eureka moment that I promised to discuss later. I will try today.
My inspiration was this: what would happen if the professions printed their own money? How about each trade or specialty issuing its own currency? Then, instead of a constant struggle of wills between unions and employers, both sides would find themselves on the same side from the start. Applied right, the rules of finance would oblige each party to conform to standards, benefits and rules that satisfy the other.
How? By means of simulated experiments in virtual worlds.
Online computer simulation has become so sophisticated over the last decade that simulated, fictional money can take on equivalent value in "real" dollars. Property, buildings and other virtual commodities in internet simulations like "Half Life" and "Entropia Universe" have been auctioned on eBay for tens of thousands of dollars. These virtual worlds are so popular that flesh-and-blood corporations are willing to pay great sums to advertise on high profile locations there.
An article in Scientific American, "What Can Virtual-World Economists Tell Us about Real-World Economies? As virtual economies expand, the study of their inner workings is shaping up to become a serious discipline'" (
"The players are very specialized. All some do is mine, move stuff around and trade, just like any other industrialist. Pilots need bigger and better weapons and people to trade them. They all need information to communicate [about] the economy, just like any community needs to know how interest and inflation affect its wealth. It's important to have a visible economist to analyze events and participate in discussion[s]."
Gumundsson sees this activity as a chance to try out theories that would be impracticable or unethical in a real-world economy. "... virtual realities can be used as experiments for change in our parallel, real-world environment."
This raises several questions,
We have an internet, why not go further and make up an "intersimulation" where virtual worlds work within virtual worlds? Why not start an educational virtual world, integrated into the world curriculum, that would give students and apprentices a chance to do beneficial work without errors doing harm in the real world? If each profession and trade had its own virtual world and its own currency, could these experts not invest in an initiative and test it to see how it might work under real conditions?
Students, instead of the present corrupt exam system plagued by widespread cheating on tests and plagiarizing of essays, would be rated on actual performance in a given virtual world. Because it is interactive, there would no faking since nobody would know the answer, and real work would be directed at the latest needs of that student's trade. Marks would be generated automatically by the simulation, not teachers. Teachers would devise the experiments in the simulation and it would be in their interest to see that their own students are both challenged and learn quickly.
The virtual learning economy then would be a dynamic laboratory for the progress of each trade or profession. If a hypothesis works according to the conditions set up by the specialized knowledge of a profession, the algorithm could be "released into the wild." That is, it would become part of the "intersimulation." If a given specialty does well in simulation -- that is, if its algorithms gain large amounts of virtual dollars, the profession itself would be able to trade its virtual capital for real-world influence.
The result would be giant step towards a solution to what I think is the most difficult problem facing our world today: the urgent need to reconcile democratic will with expert opinion. I will discuss that later. Meantime, let me call your attention to Thomas Hobbes' ninth law of nature, the assumption of equality between humans. In the long term, an intersimulated world, the InterSim, would reinforce equality by giving full vent to the one aspect of life in which we are not equal, our particular knowledge as individuals, and what we do socially with our knowledge.
"For there are so very few so foolish, that had not rather govern themselves, than be governed by others: nor when the wise in their own conceit, contend by force, with them who distrust their own wisdom, do they always, or often, or almost at any time, get the victory. If nature therefore have made them equally, that equality is to be acknowledged: or if nature have made men unequal; yet because men that think themselves equal, will not enter into conditions of peace, but upon equal terms, such equality must be admitted. And therefore for the ninth law of Nature, I put this, that every man acknowledge another for his equal by nature. The breach of this precept is pride." (Hobbes, Meldon, 228)
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