Just A New Fractal Detail In The Big Picture (2015)

I am aware that his one use of "free market" was in a passage describing protectionist trade practices favouring the woolens manufacture industry in England: keeping raw wool import costs low and preventing import of finished goods, thereby maximising the revenue-cost differential, which is to say, profits.

Now I'm having some trouble sorting out the categories in my head. On the one hand, the "emergence" you described in your comment is garden variety feedback loops. Something very simple in principle - and being a part of a feedback system literally means 'being beholden and impacting it'.

On the other hand, it really feels like search for intelligence is in a big part just tweaking one's abstractions. You can see the market as "just" a complex set of feedback loops between individuals and groups, or hop one abstraction level above and realize that we're all components of a feedback system that's optimizing for something we as individuals have close to zero control over. A system that's bossing us all around. We try to understand it, so that we can say that e.g. prices of product X dropped because people in company Y invented some innovative process. But if one digs deeper one can sometimes notice that if it wasn't company Y then it would be a company Z; if it wasn't an innovative process then it would be an innovative business model (or a scam), or a substitute product X1. All because the "market pressures" made it happen. If you step another abstraction layer up, you can just treat the market as a being and it's not a big of a stretch.

So at what point one should stop playing with abstractions? Or, maybe, what do we mean by "intelligence"? If we're looking for a different-but-mostly-similar being to talk to, then searching for it by doing abstraction dance is not a good way. But if by "intelligence" one means a sufficiently smart optimizer, one that can make decisions to reach its own goals, and that in principle could coerce us to do its bidding - if one means that, then one may realize this has already happened.

By restraining, either by high duties or by absolute prohibitions, the importation of such goods from foreign countries as can be produced at home, the monopoly of the home market is more or less secured to the domestic industry employed in producing them. Thus the prohibition of importing either live cattle or salt provisions from foreign countries secures to the graziers of Great Britain the monopoly of the home market for butcher's meat. The high duties upon the importation of corn, which in times of moderate plenty amount to a prohibition, give a like advantage to the growers of that commodity. The prohibition of the importation of foreign woollens is equally favourable to the woollen manufacturers. The silk manufacture, though altogether employed upon foreign materials, has lately obtained the same advantage. The linen manufacture has not yet obtained it, but is making great strides towards it. Many other sorts of manufacturers have, in the same manner, obtained in Great Britain, either altogether or very nearly, a monopoly against their countrymen. The variety of goods of which the importation into Great Britain is prohibited, either absolutely, or under certain circumstances, greatly exceeds what can easily be suspected by those who are not well acquainted with the laws of the customs.

That this monopoly of the home market frequently gives great encouragement to that particular species of industry which enjoys it, and frequently turns towards that employment a greater share of both the labour and stock of the society than would otherwise have gone to it, cannot be doubted. But whether it tends either to increase the general industry of the society, or to give it the most advantageous direction, is not, perhaps, altogether so evident.

The restraint of government intervention (here as so often elsewhere noted in Wealth) is by government, yes, but quite clearly on behalf of specific powerful commercial interests. It's that* power Smith is hoping to curb -- directly then a restraint on excessive power accumulation by means of commerce, trade, and manufacture.

https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_...

Even in the US where unsecured personal debt is practically a badge of honor, more than 50% of households still have a net worth.

Yes you could stretch the term of AI to say that a large system made up of people and simple machines is some form of AI, but that's stretching it to the point of becoming meaningless.

When people talk about real Artificial Intelligence they usually mean general AI, or at least a specific AI that is capable of human-like decision making. Not Computer Chess and not an auto-stop in a filling pump.

Stretching AI to the point of ludicrousness like this seems to serve only the purpose of trying to shut down discussion around human-like AI. Which is not a noble goal.

Discussing human-like AI is important, especially before we figure it out. It would have been nice if people in the early 1900s had spent time thinking about the consequences of putting so much carbon into the atmosphere before they did it. Let's not be another generation of people who could have had a lot more forethought than they did.