The Viable System Model & Multi-Scale Agency

AI was used to generate the scary science attack section in a different voice than the original part was written through as well as creating diagrams according to my instructions in LaTeX.

Introduction

One of the deeper questions within the field of AI Safety is on how we can create a theory of multi-scale hierarchical agency.

I want to give you an alternative today which comes from the tradition of cybernetics, the people that information theorists like Claude Shannon talked to back when coming up with information theory.

There was a gentleman there by the name of Stafford Beer who would come to be an operations researcher and progenitor of a part of modern management science. In his somewhat obscure writing he created something called the Viable Systems Model which is a very interesting buzzword in certain circles. It is a way to describe general businesses and governments (e.g collective intelligences) and what they do developed through years of practice and it has a bunch of cool information theory hidden behind it. It is a bit dense and difficult to understand and yours truly has spent some time doing this. Yours truly has also tried to translate this into modern information theoretic terms through an Active Inference angle.

Now, this translation is not necessarily fully precise, it is approximate and pointing at the underlying truth. I’m not necessarily sure that this is the right way to formalise it either but hopefully it points at something interesting that we can build upon!

As I’ve been writing this, I’ve been continually realising that the depth of this goes deeper than I thought. I’ve been listening to these VHS tapes from the 90s and there’s a lot of stuff there to unpack.

My plan is therefore to introduce these general concepts to you, go through the brain of the firm in the future and get back to you with whatever I find. (I’m still an ignoramus in the cybernetics land for good and for bad.)

Scary Diagram attack!

Ahh! A scary diagram showed…