[video] Robin Hanson: Uploads Economics 101

It might be worse for example if you are a total utilitarian and complete copies count more than copy-on-write forks.

And in case anyone is wondering, it might be better because terminating a copy-on-write fork seems less like killing someone than deleting a complete copy.

The difference being that foragers don't have titles/deeds or even a clear understanding of property-ownership.

So what? History is still not kind. I pointed out 2 more examples to Hanson, which I think he blogged about, where someone doing something very similar to Franklin saw the money completely wasted. 1/3 odds is not especially encouraging given that the analysis has only just begun...

For example, a deeper analysis might include the Islamic world's perpetual charity corporation, the waqf which form dates back almost to the beginning, collectively comprised a huge chunk of various economies - but while they did much better than one might expect, most still ceased to exist at some point. As far as I know, every wafq started in, say, 1000 AD is now dead. There may be a few Egyptian survivors from later centuries, attached to the University, but nevertheless, the overall picture is one of a very low survival rate. (I've pointed out waqfs to Hanson multiple times, but I don't know what he makes of them.)

Just a rough dirty outline since I'm headed out of town for two days. I may make a discussion post about some of the points later.

• The natural human method of property division is killing people and taking their stuff. Capitalism is a blip on the radar.

• Ems will be entering an entirely different context than 20th century humans. We'll be lucky if capitalism translates to the digital world at all.

• Ems vs human will be a natural division point. Every human (if lucky) becomes a retiree at some point, no Ems become human. Humans do not have a good track record of respecting the property rights of those different to them.

• Humans literally cannot object to Ems doing this. We literally cannot think fast enough to stop it from happening and it only needs happen once in 5000 years each year for us.

• 5000 years? That's older than the entire concept of capital. Unless capitalism is the one true economic system for all eternity, you'll be out of luck. Historically, the vast majority of economic systems wouldn't honor your holding onto that property without a means to personally enforce it.

• 5000x wasn't the cap. Hanson made a comment about potential 1,000,000x speeds. One year goes longer back than our ancestors could even say the word 'capitalism'. I say ancestors because homo sapiens weren't around back then. I'm imagining making a capital investment to Krogg, and trying to get that repaid today.

• This ignores the possibility of Em-space becoming a free for all of replicators trying to ascend into Godhood. I consider it the most likely possibility (but that's the subject of another thread). But even if that doesn't happen and they keep capitalism, and Ems have no government shakeups, and they bother keeping track of debts to humans, you won't be able to withdraw because...

• Sheer magnitude of value. A human working earning, lets say $20,000 in one year pre-uploading, is worth one man-year of work. A human investing that money and earning a year's interest during the 1-month doubling time frame suddenly has $81,000,000. People would happily steal from retirees if that much money was changing hands.

• Meanwhile the average wage has dropped to $4 a year. There is no moral system I can imagine that figures it's okay for one person's year of work to be worth someone else's 20-million years of work just because they got lucky when they made it.

• Scratch that. I know that there's a similar-ish disparity between a CEO and a bottom quintile Nigerian. Lucky for the CEO, current Nigerians don't run at 5000x speed because they would happily take his money away and be morally okay with that. Lets say some Ems are on the side of giving humans back their money. You're going to have literally a thousand times the current population of the earth as poor Nigerians who will be set for a literal million years if they can get just a fraction of the money away from the old human dinosaurs who literally cannot object to them. That's a lot of literals.

• Similarly, the opportunity cost of 'pay off that human' vs 'give 10,000,000 ems a better standard of living' is an easy choice. Who could morally side with the human? Well, maybe a human but they won't be making that decision.

• All the goods are digital. You can't eat zeros and ones. Your money will increase by 4,000x+ a year, but the number of apples won't increase by 4,000x+ a year, so the gains will just be inflated away for physical goods.

• Actually, the economy will probably become mostly decoupled between digital and physical goods. Ems may increase thinking capacity a trillion fold, but it's not they'll will significantly increase the number of apples we grow.

• Scratch that. Having Ems will increase apples, because all the computer programmers, and bureaucrats, and entertainers, and etc, etc, etc, will now be out of jobs except for growing apples and delivering microchips to the Em towers. So, I guess that's nice?

My original post was expressing derision at the idea that you could live off the interest from Ems. I understand that it's not a popular message to say, "Ems are gonna hard takeoff, and leave us in the dust, but we won't necessarily go extinct (unless we do)." However, it's a lot more honest than promising fantastic wealth just for surviving until uploading even if you yourself don't upload. As I mentioned above these are rough objections, but I may make a post.

There again, there is tail risk. You may not be made whole if the pension custodian is bankrupted by fraud, seized by the government, or otherwise subject to accident.

There's an easy empirical way to assess this. Ask how common are violent political revolutions and what happens to financial products sold before the revolution. Did the All-Russia Insurance Company continue to pay out on policies after the 1917 Revolution? The headquarters building was seized by the Cheka and I believe the owners and executives were exiled or liquidated. What happened if you had your pension investments in Iran in 1979?

Yes, there are rich, developed, stable countries where revolution is rare. How long will they stay that way? A century? Two centuries? In the presence of Singularity-scale disruption? These stories about multiplying wealth by factors of thousands or more seem to be making a very heavy bet on permanent stability of the sort never previously seen on Earth.

You're right, my intuitions had been swayed toward the "expensive verisimilitude" direction by the part in the beginning of Permutation City where the EMs keep committing suicide.

The future will have little winding passages constructed to prevent line-of-sight from one room to another?

Deus Ex was righter than they knew.

The rooms will still need to be designed and available somewhere; even AAA games can't get away with indefinitely big canned environments no matter how many paging or zoning tricks they use to reduce the immediate rendering costs.

That 16 workers running at 16x overseen by 4 line bosses and 1 CEO will suffer more coordination failure that can be avoided by running 256 workers at 1x with one CEO running at 21x, seems plausible and even likely if you assume these are human-like minds.

Robin's scenario is 256 workers and 64 line bosses running at 1x plus one CEO running at 21x who directly oversees the line bosses not the workers (you can check for yourself here). This offers no coordination advantages over having 16 workers, 4 line bosses and one CEO all running at 16x, as far as I can tell.

I'm not sure about that. What I've seen of the management literature suggests that the complexity of coordination and oversight problems is strongly nonlinear on the number of workers overseen, and clocking faster would produce only linear improvements. It might still make sense to run the CEO at a faster clockspeed, since that role has to deal with additional coordination problems that aren't entirely under the company's control, but this line of thought suggests to me that smaller numbers of more individually productive workers would be more efficient overall than maximizing the workforce size.

Robin may have been assuming abundant memory and scarce CPU time?

He's not saving on CPU time (i.e., total number of instructions executed), but substituting more, slower processors for fewer, faster processors and also using more memory. We don't see a lot of this today. For example render farms and data centers all use essentially the fastest CPUs available. Some operations might back off a few notches from the bleeding edge in order to save money, but it's not even close to 2x much less 21x. My earlier "doesn't seem plausible" may be too strong, but I don't understand why Robin seems to be predicting this as the most likely scenario. If he has some specific reasons why the economics will likely work out this way, I'd very much like to see it.