Abstract
The market launch of Tesla electric cars with an intelligent autopilot capable of dealing with the chaos of street traffic, shows how dramatic the need to develop a theory of building control systems for autonomous intelligent robots is, where there is no central control or it only exists locally. However, a suitable theory exists in the area of economics, for free (quasi free) markets, called “Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand” (ASIH). The general assumption of this theory is “that there is no control system, which will do better for the welfare of the free market, than spontaneous, unconscious, distributed, self-control/optimization that (ASIH) is able to perform”. In general, this theory is the front line of a harsh dispute between advocates of interventionism and advocates of liberalism. This paper presents how the ASIH theory could be distilled to obtain a general control theory for systems of autonomous, mobile, quasi-intelligent robots, for unmanned building sites, deep mines, etc. such that collective self-control is inborn into the nature of robots and no centralized control is necessary. The first theoretical results indicate that self-control and optimization systems based on such a theory should be much more intelligent in terms of problem solving than centralized systems could be and incomparably more resistant, e.g. when parts of a robot group are destroyed. The reason for this is, that such systems better exploit the potential of individual intelligences of agents.
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Notes
- 1.
Presumably the ancient Phoenician Republic of Cartagena, and then the Renaissance Venetian Republic were too small to make this phenomenon visible.
- 2.
First Industrial Revolution: 1760 to 1820 and 1840 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution.
- 3.
Some researchers question whether Adam Smith was aware of what he said, because the phrase “Invisible Hand” was used by him only three times [2] and there are no studies that would indicate that he actually worked on this issue. However, from the point of view of T. Szuba’s work on the chaotic processes of Collective Intelligence [5], this is completely irrelevant. It is important that as a prominent and respected thinker, philosopher and economist, he created this concept, it was not forgotten and other economists around 1925 began to work intensively on it [3]. Christopher Columbus also was not aware that he discovered America.
- 4.
Chaos it is not the same as indeterminism. Behind Chaos can be hidden e.g. equations. See https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chaos/#BriHisCha.
- 5.
Homo habilis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_habilis.
- 6.
Similarly like in human civilization, in ants’ social structures there is primitive agriculture (mushroom breeding) and animal breeding (ants like aphids because of the honeydew they emit, which is their delicacy. They even protect them, for example, against ladybugs that eat aphids). Probably for human style farming, much higher intelligence is required.
- 7.
Jericho had 2,000–3,000 inhabitants.
- 8.
Economic Calculation Problem referred to, is that of how to distribute resources rationally in an economy. The free market solution is the price mechanism, wherein people individually have the ability to decide how a good or service should be distributed based on their willingness to give money for it. The price conveys embedded information about the abundance of resources as well as their desirability which in turn allows, on the basis of individual consensual decisions, corrections that prevent shortages and surpluses.
- 9.
Computational complexity of this problem is not constant, is growing since free market components (agents, companies) are using more and more powerful computers for market prediction.
- 10.
The spontaneous construction of a bridge by the inhabitants of a remote high mountain village, without a plan and without an engineer/construction manager, using the available materials could be an example.
- 11.
For this they became ACM A.M. Turing Award laureates - equivalent of Nobel Award in IT.
- 12.
AI version of Means-Ends-Analysis: https://computersciencewiki.org/index.php/Means-Ends_Analysis Means-Ends-Analysis in general: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Means%E2%80%93ends_analysis.
- 13.
Deep Learning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning.
- 14.
M1 Apple processor: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/Apple-M1-Chip-Everything-We-Know.
- 15.
DNA digital data storage: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/dna-storage/.
- 16.
Tesla Autopilot: https://www.tesla.com/en_EU/autopilotAI.
- 17.
Tesla car Autopilot vision system: https://heartbeat.fritz.ai/computer-vision-at-tesla-cd5e88074376.
- 18.
General Problem Solver: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Problem_Solver.
- 19.
H. Simon in his last lecture in 2000 [18] was saying “... Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand is often highly visible....” (Authors comment) Perhaps such genius economist (Nobel Award, Turing Award for contribution in AI development) was able to see Invisible Hand often and precisely.
- 20.
This can be implemented with equivalent of dopamine hormone, also known as the “feel-good” hormone, satisfaction with the task performed.
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Szuba, T., Drożdż, M. (2021). Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand as a New, Powerful and Robust Control Paradigm for Collective AI Robotics. In: Nguyen, N.T., Iliadis, L., Maglogiannis, I., Trawiński, B. (eds) Computational Collective Intelligence. ICCCI 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12876. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88081-1_24
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