The Selfish Gene, Part II

Today’s threats to National Security are existential. Hackers and terrorists – both operating without a military to attack, boarders to invade, or citizens to target – threaten the day to day security of the American people. The problem is the democratization of technology such as computers or weapons. Now anyone can be as powerful as the governments attempting to control them. So what is the point of a government?

It is time to usher in a new era of social engineering to control the population. The time to control the spread of powerful technologies has passed – now we must mitigate the effects of this spread. We can do this by learning more about selfishness in an attempt to make compliance with society in the interest of these rogue elements.

Let us begin by demonstrating the inherent selfish value of altruistic behavior.

The American political scientists Robert Axelrod has created a “tournament” of computer programs, all equipped with a different strategy for dealing with a Prisoners’ Dilemma.

In each round of the Prisoner’s Dilemma tournament, there is a “banker” who controls the flow of money to the players. Each player has two options, “cooperate” or “defect.” Each player chooses an option simultaneously, so that one player’s move cannot influence the other’s. The trick is that each player’s winning are dependent on the other player’s move. There are four outcomes:

OUTCOME I: Both play cooperate. Each player wins 3 points.
OUTCOME II: Both play defect. Each player wins only one point.
OUTCOME III: Player 1 plays cooperate, player 2 plays defect. Player 1 wins 0 points. Player 2 wins 5 points.
OUTCOME IV: Player 1 plays defect, player 2 plays cooperate. Player 1 wins 5 points. Player 2 wins 0 points.

The competition is open to computer scientists and game theorists. One might expect the most vicious programs – for example, one that never cooperates – to win the tournament. But on the contrary, the winner of the first tournament was the most altruistic… “tit-for-tat,” a program that simply copied the move made in the round before.

In the next tournament, an even more altruistic program, “tit-fot-two-tats,” only defected if it was defected against twice in a row by the same program. It did even better than “tit-for-tat.”

Altruism works in this simulation, because like in human society, it is a non-zero-sum situation. Everyone can win.

My final post will discuss how to apply the strategy of selfishly motivated altruism to society.