The voter apathy problem in my opinion is the symptom/subset of the attention scarcity problem.

The attention scarcity problem will only get worse as the technological solutions become of a greater complexity.

Complex information becomes much more difficult to process and even if the data were simple it could be so much of it flowing around that no one can organize and process it all into anything useful to make wise decisions.

How do we scale up decision making capabilities along with the level of technological and information complexity in a way which factors in the problem of attention scarcity?

I think autonomous agents could be one mechanism we could use to do this. Algorithms are perhaps our only means of processing vast amounts of information of increasing complexity. How can we scale up our information processing capabilities within the Bitshares platform?

Delegating the decision making responsibilities to experts might delay a catastrophe but it is not a long term solution as it is top heavy and promotes reliance/dependency on others. These others who followers depend on could become the de-facto government of experts. Providing an incentive for people to vote will make people direct their attention from other problems but is a costly solution.  If we put a focus on solving the problem of attention scarcity using automation/algorithms then we might be able to solve the problem of voter apathy in the most cost effective way.

Reference
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy
http://www.theequitykicker.com/2009/07/24/information-abundance-creates-attention-scarcity/
http://subprint.com/blog/data-is-the-most-valuable-commodity-on-earth

I think now that the holiday seasons are kicking in we might begin to see a dramatic drop in price of BTS over the same time period.

I also think Bitcoin prices might go down as people spend it more than usual. Are my economics wrong?

Mastercoin looking to be first with autonomous agents:

Bitlov is a digital currency automation platform that utilizes a predominately trustless network of decentralized, distributed autonomous agents called Rubrics.

Bitlov empowers individuals and organizations to determine where money goes and when by simplifying the process of setting rules within contract templates, to write simple-to-complex transaction routines based upon various factors, such as: budget, pre-defined triggers, formulas, times, recipients, and more.

http://blog.mastercoin.org/2014/10/19/introducing-bitlov-a-new-project-integrated-with-mastercoin/

Abstract: Since the 1990s, intelligent agents and multi-agent systems with their known characteristics given by the AI community have been used to intelligently support individual or groups of human users in their business or personal decision-making in a large number and variety of applications in the Internet and Web. The developed frameworks of and systems with agent-based decision support differ in the extent to which they cover the typical phases of human decision-making, the types of decisions to be made, and their effectiveness and efficiency of support. In this respect, recommender systems, automated negotiation systems, matchmaker agents, and virtual user agents or avatars are classical examples to name but a few. On the other hand, semantic web technologies have been used during the past decade for providing better decision support through means of formal ontology-based representation, discovery, integration, and sharing of relevant heterogeneous data, knowledge, and services. Both agents and semantic web have deep and common roots in AI. However, despite the tremendous advances in research and development made in each of both technology domains, the full synergetic potential of agent-based and semantics-empowered decision support in innovative applications in the future Internet remains to be unlocked.
In this talk, I will present and discuss the basic principles, potential and challenges of a single and combined use of agents and semantic technologies for intelligent decision support together with selected showcases from different application domains.

http://vimeo.com/90860817

A brief overview of agents:

An intelligent software agent is like a "bot" which you can tell your goals and have it act on your behalf to accomplish these goals. This "bot" is intelligent because it can sense changes in the environment and adjust it's decisions according to the latest events. So for example the agent could be designated to search for an artist coin which meets some minimum criteria and purchase it at the IPO unless specific events happen to alert the agent that maybe it would not be a profitable deal. To direct your agent you would simply tell your agent your goals and it will pursue them using AI. Multi-Agent Systems are intentional systems where multiple intelligent agents "bots" can transact and communicate among each other to further their individual objectives.

We can and should build Multi-Agent Systems as a layer on top of the Bitshares protocol after Turing complete scripting allows for it. This would also allow for Intelligent Decision Support functionality as described in the Youtube video.

There will be more posts after this to go into details on why Multi-Agent Systems and Intelligent Decision Support functionality are so important. For now check out the videos in the references and discuss the potential if you see any.

Reference
“Agents and Semantics for Human Decision-Making” Dr. Matthias Klusch (ICAART 2014)
http://vimeo.com/90860817

Goal Oriented Search Engine
http://web.media.mit.edu/~lieber/Publications/Goose.pdf

What Would They Think?
A Computational Model of Attitudes
http://web.media.mit.edu/~hugo/publications/papers/IUI2004-wwtt.pdf

Software agent
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_agent

Considering the fact that marketing hasn't kicked in yet and the price is dropping is now a good time to buy as much as possible?

Would any of you take out a loan to buy BTS?

Counterparty Recreates Ethereum’s Smart Contract Platform on Bitcoin

The limitation of Counterparty up to now has been that all of its smart contracts have had to be hard‐coded into the protocol’s reference client by a set of core developers (as is the case with Bitcoin itself). This means that the addition of new features has been much slower than it needed to be. The solution to this problem is to allow users to write their own smart contracts, which they (and other contracts) can execute whenever they want.
This is the basic model of Ethereum, which is a project to create a novel blockchain in addition to a programming language and virtual machine for the creation of smart contracts. But the development of a new blockchain is unnecessarily slow and risky. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we, the cryptocurrency community, should be making evolutionary, tractable improvements to Bitcoin itself, whenever possible.
Counterparty Contracts
With Counterparty Contracts, users may write Turing Complete smart contracts into the Bitcoin blockchain and execute their code on all Counterparty nodes. We’ve ported Ethereum’s language and virtual machine over to the Counterparty platform, using the pyethereum codebase. The result is hosted on GitHub and open for public testing. Today, you can take Turing Complete Ethereum code, or write your own, and run it on Bitcoin with Counterparty. Anything that one could ever do with Ethereum, one can now do with Bitcoin and Counterparty.

One of our primary focuses was around maintaining compatibility between the Counterparty and Ethereum contract language. This also maximizes the security of the system. Our success is reflected in the fact that our implementation passes 100% of pyethereum’s contract execution integration tests:
  ~/counterpartyd > py.test test/pyethereum_contracts_test.py -v -x
  =============================== test session starts ================================
  platform linux -- Python 3.4.2 -- py-1.4.25 -- pytest-2.6.3 -- /usr/bin/python
  collected 14 items

  test/pyethereum_contracts_test.py::test_evm PASSED
  test/pyethereum_contracts_test.py::test_sixten PASSED
  test/pyethereum_contracts_test.py::test_returnten PASSED
  test/pyethereum_contracts_test.py::test_namecoin PASSED
  test/pyethereum_contracts_test.py::test_currency PASSED
  test/pyethereum_contracts_test.py::test_data_feeds PASSED
  test/pyethereum_contracts_test.py::test_hedge PASSED
  test/pyethereum_contracts_test.py::test_post PASSED
  test/pyethereum_contracts_test.py::test_suicider PASSED
  test/pyethereum_contracts_test.py::test_reverter PASSED
  test/pyethereum_contracts_test.py::test_stateless PASSED
  test/pyethereum_contracts_test.py::test_array PASSED
  test/pyethereum_contracts_test.py::test_array2 PASSED
  test/pyethereum_contracts_test.py::test_array3 PASSED

  ==============================14 passed in 63.47 seconds ===============================
  ~/counterpartyd >

http://counterparty.io/news/counterparty-recreates-ethereums-smart-contract-platform-on-bitcoin/

Bitshares devs are going to be left behind. Not only has Counterparty snatched up Overstock support but now they've got Turing complete scripting. This would explain why the XCP price has been shooting up.

Can Bitshares devs accelerate plans for Turing complete scripting?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRCta9y3gOY

Representative democracy may now be becoming obsolete as you can have direct algorithmic democracy.

Instead of giving your decision making power to another human it will sooner or later be more efficient to give that decision making power to algorithms. In fact Amazon already is using the technology to do this and these algorithms will continue to learn more about us until eventually these algorithms know us better than we know ourselves.

So what should we do? Algorithms are more cost efficient as delegates than people. As the algorithms become more optimized, personalized, then the accuracy and effectiveness in their ability to make decisions on our behalf will increase.

What should we do Bitshares team? If we stick with human beings making decisions directly then you have the problem where most people will not even vote. If you delegate the vote then it makes a lot of sense for the specific purpose that we need some operators for the DAC to be able to function but we don't need the vote to be decided by humans. It is likely that sooner or later the hiring and firing will be decided by algorithmic processes.

In my opinion this needs to be discussed on a philosophical level. It should be discussed deeply now because eventually we are going to reach a crossroad where a choice will have to be made between how we move forward. If we are going for maximum efficiency of operation and automation then algorithms have to play a larger role but if we are going to focus on trusting humans then reputation will play a larger role. The problem is humans tend to fail and also humans can be convinced to vote against their self interest.

These questions and topics go beyond Bitshares. Algorithmic democracy can potentially change the political process. Instead of electing human beings to Congress, Senate, Parliament, we'd instead be electing algorithms to serve as our digital representatives. Discuss?

Algorithmic voting theory
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=10804.0
Automatic algorithmically delegated voting, delegates and smart contracts
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=10745.msg141289#msg141289
Algorithmic Voting Theory, Venice, and a Talk on Old/New Papers
http://mat.tepper.cmu.edu/blog/?p=920
CP-nets, algorithmic voting theory and Turing complete voting languages
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=10840.0