u/ComputerByld

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I'd like to propose that we use this board to crowdsource and select content with the goal of identifying the ideal corpus of work needed to produce a Georgist AI agent. (I vote we name him George.)

It seems to me that such an agent would be immensely valuable. Consider the following:

This board is probably the single most discoverable hub of Georgists on the internet. It's Reddit so it's heavily favored by search engines including Google, and it's social media so people come not only to read answers but to ask questions. An authorized community-created AI could offer near-instant well synthesized answers trained on the best body of respectable Georgist works (and perhaps adjacent, Gaffney comes to mind).

Consider also that AI models are largely trained off of Reddit (not entirely, but it is a major contributor). Practically the only corner of the open internet producing original Georgist content daily is this board. The more questions we answer with the most well reasoned, properly synthesized responses, the better frontier models will become at synthesizing the ideas and answering similar questions during frontier model use.

Consider finally that there is no "Georgist School" the way there's e.g. a Chicago School. Oftentimes when someone drops a question here they get entirely conflicting answers. Debate is good. But a source that is in some sense "the AI synthesis of our best Georgist thinkers" addresses a real problem we currently have, which is a lack of any authoritative figure or institution. Such an AI wouldn't solve this problem entirely, but it could well be a force for a bit more unity and clarity.

I began rolling this idea around in my head when I saw this thread by u/acceptablesummer5171 the other day: https://www.reddit.com/r/georgism/s/zVyt85Yhzo

The linked final report is full of community leaders offering their support (or opposition) to a Georgist proposal in New York City. The supportive quotes are full of well reasoned and elevated writing that would serve this purpose well. There must be many more gems out there (Homer Hoyt comes to mind). To say nothing of the obvious (George's own writings and so on).

I've done a bit of preliminary research and this project is achievable right now. We would build a vector database that's basically a reference map that points a frontier AI to the most relevant pieces of the corpus which it then ingests for consideration as prompt context before generating a given response.

The vector database would be something like Pinecone or Weaviate. The corpus texts would need to be cleaned up: artifacts removed so it's literal text only, in chunks of ~500 word passages. All of that can be done by very efficient apps now, so that part is actually almost entirely automated. But in terms of the actual $ cost to run the agent, if we assume it comments roughly 50 times a day (could be tweaked to comment only when tagged, or only when it detects a direct question, or whatever) it would cost roughly $20/month on Claude Sonnet or GPT-4o. That stretches to a lofty $38/month on a true frontier model like a Claude Opus. I'm pretty sure we can raise that much from this community if need be.

Anyhow, I wanted to float this to see what the community thinks, and if there is support then the next step would be identifying ideal works, consolidating them into a final list, and then processing them into a vector database.

The bottleneck, such that there is one, is deciding what belongs in such a corpus.

Is this worth pursuing? Would you be in favor of such a thing existing? Do you have any thoughts on how much it would interact? And if a mod wants to comment that would be welcome also, I'd be interested to know if they'd be amenable or not.

Alright community, what say ye.

(I will be building this for personal use regardless of the response here, fwiw.)