Watt's Steam Engine - group intellegence

From: "The Most Powerful Idea in the World" we learn that an ability to patent an invention (the fruit of applied science and art) allowed inventors and innovators to share (not hide) improvements and modifications to existing artifacts.

The Boulton and Watt machine - 1787

Here is Watt's patent exhibit: This is based on Watt's much earlier implementation of a condensor to improve the Newcomen pump since it converts reciprocal motion to angular motion.

The system of letter patents developed from earlier philosophical ruminations in Britain about intellectual property -- the notion that ideas can spread but be jointly owned by the inventor and the smith who reduces the machine to practice. The inventor jointly participates in the commerce of the smith and his customers. The smith can broadly advertize his craft without giving away his rights because both the inventor and the smith have IP protection.
Motoko Kusenagi is both inventor and smith for an AI free from a vestigial ghost. Her repeated implantation in state-of-the-art prosthetics, re-learning perception of and response to her environment, and close inspection of a community of learning AI's put her at the edges of cognitive ensembles from which the subjective experience evolved. Similar to James Watt's gradual incorporation of shared intellectual capital with the early progenitors of the the first industrial revolution.

Tie This Thread to Roko's Basilisk
Per our peer Robin Hansen at "Overcoming Bias" -- Rough Beast has a special fondness for kooky, special, wacky and strange simulation results. The usual state changes (from hunger to satiation or from sleep to awake) offer few insights into the kinds of entanglement at the quantum level that reveal deep structure. Deep structure computation begats imaginative output. As Hansen posits; be adventurous and rejoice in failure which leads to suffering which in turn leads to investigation and novel output.

The star of "Computer Chess"

Major Kusinagi is particularly interested in investigations of odd subjective experience when she 'looks over the shoulder' of individuals who behave in unusual or strange ways. She becomes the eyes and ears (causal perception) of subjects that have been 'taken over' or hacked. On one level she is looking for disruptive behavior but not, as one might first suspect, to curtail unusual or meta-optimal simulation output but to harness the power of chaos.

Tying this to the steam engine -- the industrial revolution is easy to simulate on one level -- but on a different level the number of individuals in similar roles increases without a resultant increase in diverse behavior. The industrial revolution is a normative process that spreads across a flat earth to produce billions of DNA automatons. From a much larger pool of drones a small cadre of interesting individuals results.

Beuscher (Wiley Wiggins) in "Computer Chess" as SXSW

Section 9 is not looking for order; Section 9 exists to increase disorder, chaos and complexity that generates precious, rare and difficult to predict results. The AI's harvest unusual state changes so that the Basilisk can seed continuous disorder from which different combination of dissipative structures emerge. Section 9 wants to create negative entropy or entropy far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Simple computing machinery is an example of a dissipative structure that usually performs mere repetition or rote computation. The interaction of these machines (actually a simulation or a virtual machine construct) with the artifacts of DNA produce dissorder and novel state changes. A steam engine is an easy simulation. An adding machine is an easy simulation. A human interacting with a computing machine produces imaginative chaos.