If You Want to Be Exponentially Better: Be Cooperative.

The current speed of technological progress and a degree of connectivity promote the cooperation paradigm as the best strategy.

What does it mean to be an entrepreneur? It means you are going to the place where nobody has been before. It means to create an idea that brings wealth for everyone. The ideas have to create cooperation via win-win situations for funders, investors, employees, partners and clients. It should bring long-term benefits for all.

Lets look at these statements from a mathematician point of view.

Prisoner’s Dilemma

Consider “closed bag exchange” example from Douglas Hofstadter:

Two people meet and exchange closed bags, with the understanding that one of them contains money, and the other contains a purchase. Either player can choose to honor the deal by putting into his or her bag what he or she agreed, or he or she can defect by handing over an empty bag.

They both don’t know and don’t trust each other. And if they are rational players a defect is always the best choice. To make a deal in a cooperative style they have to bear additional costs.

That dilemma brings to existence mediators who can solve the problem for 10% of the deal. Imagine a deal over the Internet. It’s obvious that you need Amazon, Ebay, Alibaba, your Bank and other mediators. But after some time such mediator may become monopolistic. And such monopoly, after all, suffers from the same dilemma — if it wants to cooperate with own customers or for instance raise a rate up to 15% that will increase profit by betraying all the customers. Such monopoly becomes a source of power. And we need another mediator to manage this situation.

Bitcoins on the stage

In November 2008, a paper was posted on the Internet under the name Satoshi Nakamoto titled bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. That was the beginning of Bitcoin. It happened in a month after Lehman Brothers, the fourth-largest investment bank in the United States that was operational for 158 years from its founding in 1850 filed for bankruptcy at the peak of the crisis of 2008.

Bitcoin did exactly opposite to what banks had been doing for hundreds of years. It has showed that we don’t need a hierarchical organization with own will to manage money for us.

Blockchain is technology behind Bitcoin

The beauty of Blockchain is that monopoly is not an option for this technology and the power is melted among all users. And everyone is equal.

Blockchain is the example of a distributed system where there is no place for hierarchy and a control isn’t concentrated in one hand. The idea is absolutely perfect because it brings equal benefits for all in the same fraction as for you. Meanwhile, a competition means creating a monopoly on some wealth resource, what is selfish and destructive in a longer term. The more projects like blockchain we support the bigger cumulative wealth is coming back to each of us.Using Blockchain-like approach there is no place for monopolies.

Some of you follow this idea on everyday basis, some don’t.

But there is one more step ahead — you may teach others to use this knowledge. “Ideas create tribes”. And the bigger is a tribe that shares the idea of a cooperation, the better world we will live in.

AI Safety

There is an opinion that is possible in near future to create AI with human-level capabilities and beyond. That is why top AI researchers are talking about the risk of concentration AI in one hand. AI is ultimately too powerful for this option. And we have already got a response for this situation. For instance, tech giants pledge $1bn for ‘altruistic AI’ venture, OpenAI.

OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our mission is to build safe AI, and ensure AI’s benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible.

So the problem is real.

Conclusion

What is the best strategy to grow your company — help your client to solve problems. What is a great strategy to live with — help people around you. Think cooperative. Help others. This idea is also the basis for all religions. Treat others as you want to be treated by them. You may agree with it or may not. What I want is to emphasize that it is not just a good advice but a proved mechanism by the theory of games. We live in a huge non-zero sum cooperative game, that’s why cooperation is a key for success.

If you want to be incrementally better: Be competitive. If you want to be exponentially better: Be cooperative. — Author Unknown

My explanation for the quote is that the progress is fast enough nowadays and if you make your project open source today, tomorrow someone can create an amazing technology using it, and the day after tomorrow you’ll wake up in the world where everything is better for you.

When Elon Musk gave away all the patents I suppose he had the same ideas.

Have my words made you more cooperative?