[lojban-beginners] Re: coi

[emf <mindlace@imeme.net>]

Jordi Mas wrote:
> > My primary interest in lojban is as a "high" language (like liturgical 
> > latin) for a self-organized distributed community.

> > My pragmatic initial goal is to translate the ideoms of the python 
> > programming language into lojban and make a substitute parser for 
> > python such that you can type lojban into it.

> > These things are related, but I won't bore you with the torturous 
> > inference.

> OK, I'll bite.

Ug. Ok, the following is still hypercondensed but carries some flavour:

My goal is to make software that subsumes the administrative functions 
of "management" or "governance" while retaining all the actual decision 
making authority on the human side.

There are a bunch of things that can be done to make this work, but 
eventually the system needs to aquire the ability to just be "another 
person in the room" when decisions are made and so on and so forth.

Lojban removes many of the nuances of traditional language that make it 
hard to parse lexically as well as semantically. I don't think, given 
the way humans can trivially state things in natural language that are 
very ambiguous, that increases in processor power will solve this problem.

I have also come to the conclusion that humans anthropomorphise 
everything, and so if you're making machines to deal with people, you 
just have to "sketch them in" and people will fill in the rest. Will 
Wright talks about this when he discusses Simish.

This is most trivial in ritualized contexts where the set of possible 
behaviours is somewhat restricted.

In short, I believe that if decision making processes of a distributed 
community are slightly ritualized and spoken in lojban, machines can 
meaningfully participate in the process of governance/order.

I do not know the precise mechanism by which I will effect this, and 
premature optimization is always a mistake. Therefore, I will translate 
an object oriented turing complete language, like python, into lojban, 
and then begin implementing the decision making tools in lojban/python, 
so that when I finally have a decent amount of the problem set 
addressed, the "speakability" will be "already there".

I think I can get a decent amount of mileage without lojban, but I think 
lojban will be the tool that "bridges the gap" between machines and man 
and makes the interaction truly "seamless".

~mindlace