Essay: The State as a Computational System
Abstract Recently, there's been an explosion in public discourse around AI systems. One strand of this argues it for taking lessons learned from computer architecture and predictive modeling/machine learning and applying them elsewhere. Most notably, these lessons have entered the studies of the human mind - psychology and neuroscience. It is becoming common to use the components of predictive modeling as a toy description for what is happening in the brain. In this narrative, human perception and experience are described as a continuously modeled hallucination on top of our senses, calculated with a brain-based neural network. While in these contexts it is unknown whether it will be more useful to use the “computational framework” in a metaphorical or literal sense, the former allows for intriguing opportunities in its application to a wide ranging set of problems. In this essay, I suggest we consider the state - that is, the organizational structure that people use to govern them...