The Society of Mind Requires an Economy of Mind
CPM Report No.: 00-70
By: Ian Wright
Date: 2nd May 2000
A Paper at: The "Starting from
Society" symposium at ASIB'2000
convention, Birmingham University, 16th-19th April 2000.
Also published as: Ian Wright (2000), "The Society of
Mind Requires an Economy of Mind", in the Proceedings of the AISB'00 Symposium
on Starting from Society - the Application of Social Analogies to Computational
Systems, Birmingham, UK: AISB, 113-124. (ISBN 1 902956 13 8)
Abstract
A society of mind will require an economy of mind, that is multi-agent systems that meet a
requirement for the adaptive allocation and reallocation of scarce resources will need to employ
a quantitative, universal, and domain-independent representation of value that mirrors the flow
of agent products, much as money is used in simple commodity economies. The
money-commodity in human economic systems is shown to be an emergent exchange
convention that serves both to constrain and allow the formation of commitments by functioning
as an ability to buy processing power. Multi-agent systems with both currency flow and
minimally economic agents can adaptively allocate and reallocate control relations and scarce
resources, in particular labour or processing power. The implications of this design hypothesis
for cognitive science and economics are outlined.
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