the price of lifestyle that would be considered tolerable by today’s human standards may well grow even more rapidly as the Malthusian scenario unfolds.
I think that this is the exact opposite of what Robin predicts, he predicts that if the economy grows at a faster rate because of ems, the best strategy for a human is to hold investments, which would make you fabulously rich in a very short time.
That is true—my comment was worded badly and open to misreading on this point. What I meant is that I agree with Hanson that ems likely imply a Malthusian scenario, but I’m skeptical of the feasibility of the investment strategy, unless it involves ditching the biological body altogether and identifying yourself with a future em, in which case you (or “you”?) might feasibly end up as a wealthy em. (From Hanson’s writing I’ve seen, it isn’t clear to me if he automatically assumes the latter, or if he actually believes that biological survival might be an option for prudent investors.)
The reason is that in a Malthusian world of cheap AIs, it seems to me that the prices of resources necessary to keep biological humans alive would far outrun any returns on investments, no matter how extraordinary they might be. Moreover, I’m also skeptical if humans could realistically expect their property rights to be respected in a Malthusian world populated by countless numbers of far more intelligent entities.
Suppose that my biological survival today costs 2000 MJ of energy per year and 5000kg of matter. Since I can spend (say) $50,000 today to buy 10,000 MJ of energy and 5000kg of matter. I invest my $50,000 and get cryo. Then, the em revolution happens, and the price of these commodities becomes very high, at the same time as the economy (total amount of wealth) grows, at say 100% per week, corrected for inflation.
That means that every week, my 10000 MJ of energy and 5000kg of matter investment becomes twice as valuable, so after one week, I own 20,000MJ of energy and 10,000kg of matter. Though, at the same time, the dollar price of these commodities has also increased a lot.
The end result: I get very very large amounts of energy/matter very quickly, limited only by the speed of light limit of how quickly earth-based civilization can grow.
The above all assumes preservation of property rights.
That means that every week, my 10000 MJ of energy and 5000kg of matter investment becomes twice as valuable, so after one week, I own 20,000MJ of energy and 10,000kg of matter. Though, at the same time, the dollar price of these commodities has also increased a lot.
This is a fallacious step. The fact that risk-free return on investment over a certain period is X% above inflation does not mean that you can pick any arbitrary thing and expect that if you can afford a quantity Y of it today, you’ll be able to afford (1+X/100)Y of it after that period. It merely means that if you’re wealthy enough today to afford a particular well-defined basket of goods—whose contents are selected by convention as a necessary part of defining inflation, and may correspond to your personal needs and wants completely, partly, or not at all—then investing your present wealth will get you the power to purchase a similar basket (1+X/100) times larger after that period. [*] When it comes to any particular good, the ratio can be in any direction—even assuming a perfect laissez-faire market, let alone all sorts of market-distorting things that may happen.
Therefore, if you have peculiar needs and wants that don’t correspond very well to the standard basket used to define the price index, then the inflation and growth numbers calculated using this basket are meaningless for all your practical purposes. Trouble is, in an economy populated primarily by ems, biological humans will be such outliers. It’s enough that one factor critical for human survival gets bid up exorbitantly and it’s adios amigos. I can easily think of more than one candidate.
The above all assumes preservation of property rights.
From the perspective of an em barely scraping a virtual or robotic existence, a surviving human wealthy enough to keep their biological body alive would seem as if, from our perspective, a whole rich continent’s worth of land, capital, and resources was owned by a being whose mind is so limited and slow that it takes a year to do one second’s worth of human thinking, while we toil 24⁄7, barely able to make ends meet. I don’t know with how much confidence we should expect that property rights would be stable in such a situation.
[*] - To be precise, the contents of the basket will also change during that period if it’s of any significant length. This however gets us into the nebulous realm of Fisher’s chain indexes and similar numerological tricks on which the dubious edifice of macroeconomic statistics rests to a large degree.
If the growth above inflation isn’t defined in terms of today’s standard basket of goods, then is it really growth? I mean if I defined a changing basket of goods that was the standard one up until 1991, and thereafter was based exclusively upon the cost per email of sending an email, we would see massive negative inflation and spuriously high growth rates as emails became cheaper to send due to falling computer and network costs.
I.e. Robin’s prediction of fast growth rates is presumably in terms of today’s basket of goods, right?
The point of ems is that they will do work that is useful by today’s standard, rather than just creating a multiplicity of some (by our standard) useless commodity like digits of pi that they then consume.
If the growth above inflation isn’t defined in terms of today’s standard basket of goods, then is it really growth? I mean if I defined a changing basket of goods that was the standard one up until 1991, and thereafter was based exclusively upon the cost per email of sending an email, we would see massive negative inflation and spuriously high growth rates as emails became cheaper to send due to falling computer and network costs.
You’re asking some very good questions indeed! Now think about it a bit more.
Even nowadays, you simply cannot maintain the exact same basket of goods as the standard for any period much longer than a year or so. Old things are no longer produced, and more modern equivalents will (and sometimes won’t) replace them. New things appear that become part of the consumption basket of a typical person, often starting as luxury but gradually becoming necessary to live as a normal, well-adjusted member of society. Certain things are no longer available simply because the world has changed to the point where their existence is no longer physically or logically possible. So what sense does it make to compare the “price index” between 2010 and 1950, let alone 1900, and express this ratio as some exact and unique number?
The answer is that it doesn’t make any sense. What happens is that government economists define new standard baskets each year, using formalized and complex, but ultimately completely arbitrary criteria for selecting their composition and determining the “real value” of new goods and services relative to the old. Those estimates are then chained to make comparisons between more distant epochs. While this does make some limited sense for short-term comparisons, in the long run, these numbers are devoid of any sensible meaning.
Not to even mention how much the whole thing is a subject of large political and bureaucratic pressures. For example, in 1996, the relevant bodies of the U.S. government concluded that the official inflation figures were making the social security payments grow too fast for their taste, so they promptly summoned a committee of experts, who then produced an elaborate argument that the methodology hitherto used had unsoundly overstated the growth in CPI relative to some phantom “true” value. And so the methodology was revised, and inflation obediently went down. (I wouldn’t be surprised if the new CPI math indeed gives much more prominence to the cost of sending emails!)
Now, if such is the state of things even when it comes to the fairly slow technological and economic changes undertaken by humans in recent decades, what sense does it make to project these numbers into an em-based economy that develops and changes at a speed hardly imaginable for us today, and whose production is largely aimed at creatures altogether different from us? Hardly any, I would say, which is why I don’t find the attempts to talk about long-term “real growth” as a well-defined number meaningful.
I.e. Robin’s prediction of fast growth rates is presumably in terms of today’s basket of goods, right?
I don’t know what he thinks about how affordable biological human life would be in an em economy, but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t define his growth numbers tied to the current CPI basket. From the attitudes he typically displays in his writing, I would be surprised if he would treat things valued by ems and other AIs as essentially different from things valued by humans and unworthy of inclusion into the growth figures, even if humans find them irrelevant or even outright undesirable.
I think that this is the exact opposite of what Robin predicts, he predicts that if the economy grows at a faster rate because of ems, the best strategy for a human is to hold investments, which would make you fabulously rich in a very short time.
That is true—my comment was worded badly and open to misreading on this point. What I meant is that I agree with Hanson that ems likely imply a Malthusian scenario, but I’m skeptical of the feasibility of the investment strategy, unless it involves ditching the biological body altogether and identifying yourself with a future em, in which case you (or “you”?) might feasibly end up as a wealthy em. (From Hanson’s writing I’ve seen, it isn’t clear to me if he automatically assumes the latter, or if he actually believes that biological survival might be an option for prudent investors.)
The reason is that in a Malthusian world of cheap AIs, it seems to me that the prices of resources necessary to keep biological humans alive would far outrun any returns on investments, no matter how extraordinary they might be. Moreover, I’m also skeptical if humans could realistically expect their property rights to be respected in a Malthusian world populated by countless numbers of far more intelligent entities.
Suppose that my biological survival today costs 2000 MJ of energy per year and 5000kg of matter. Since I can spend (say) $50,000 today to buy 10,000 MJ of energy and 5000kg of matter. I invest my $50,000 and get cryo. Then, the em revolution happens, and the price of these commodities becomes very high, at the same time as the economy (total amount of wealth) grows, at say 100% per week, corrected for inflation.
That means that every week, my 10000 MJ of energy and 5000kg of matter investment becomes twice as valuable, so after one week, I own 20,000MJ of energy and 10,000kg of matter. Though, at the same time, the dollar price of these commodities has also increased a lot.
The end result: I get very very large amounts of energy/matter very quickly, limited only by the speed of light limit of how quickly earth-based civilization can grow.
The above all assumes preservation of property rights.
Roko:
This is a fallacious step. The fact that risk-free return on investment over a certain period is X% above inflation does not mean that you can pick any arbitrary thing and expect that if you can afford a quantity Y of it today, you’ll be able to afford (1+X/100)Y of it after that period. It merely means that if you’re wealthy enough today to afford a particular well-defined basket of goods—whose contents are selected by convention as a necessary part of defining inflation, and may correspond to your personal needs and wants completely, partly, or not at all—then investing your present wealth will get you the power to purchase a similar basket (1+X/100) times larger after that period. [*] When it comes to any particular good, the ratio can be in any direction—even assuming a perfect laissez-faire market, let alone all sorts of market-distorting things that may happen.
Therefore, if you have peculiar needs and wants that don’t correspond very well to the standard basket used to define the price index, then the inflation and growth numbers calculated using this basket are meaningless for all your practical purposes. Trouble is, in an economy populated primarily by ems, biological humans will be such outliers. It’s enough that one factor critical for human survival gets bid up exorbitantly and it’s adios amigos. I can easily think of more than one candidate.
From the perspective of an em barely scraping a virtual or robotic existence, a surviving human wealthy enough to keep their biological body alive would seem as if, from our perspective, a whole rich continent’s worth of land, capital, and resources was owned by a being whose mind is so limited and slow that it takes a year to do one second’s worth of human thinking, while we toil 24⁄7, barely able to make ends meet. I don’t know with how much confidence we should expect that property rights would be stable in such a situation.
[*] - To be precise, the contents of the basket will also change during that period if it’s of any significant length. This however gets us into the nebulous realm of Fisher’s chain indexes and similar numerological tricks on which the dubious edifice of macroeconomic statistics rests to a large degree.
If the growth above inflation isn’t defined in terms of today’s standard basket of goods, then is it really growth? I mean if I defined a changing basket of goods that was the standard one up until 1991, and thereafter was based exclusively upon the cost per email of sending an email, we would see massive negative inflation and spuriously high growth rates as emails became cheaper to send due to falling computer and network costs.
I.e. Robin’s prediction of fast growth rates is presumably in terms of today’s basket of goods, right?
The point of ems is that they will do work that is useful by today’s standard, rather than just creating a multiplicity of some (by our standard) useless commodity like digits of pi that they then consume.
Roko:
You’re asking some very good questions indeed! Now think about it a bit more.
Even nowadays, you simply cannot maintain the exact same basket of goods as the standard for any period much longer than a year or so. Old things are no longer produced, and more modern equivalents will (and sometimes won’t) replace them. New things appear that become part of the consumption basket of a typical person, often starting as luxury but gradually becoming necessary to live as a normal, well-adjusted member of society. Certain things are no longer available simply because the world has changed to the point where their existence is no longer physically or logically possible. So what sense does it make to compare the “price index” between 2010 and 1950, let alone 1900, and express this ratio as some exact and unique number?
The answer is that it doesn’t make any sense. What happens is that government economists define new standard baskets each year, using formalized and complex, but ultimately completely arbitrary criteria for selecting their composition and determining the “real value” of new goods and services relative to the old. Those estimates are then chained to make comparisons between more distant epochs. While this does make some limited sense for short-term comparisons, in the long run, these numbers are devoid of any sensible meaning.
Not to even mention how much the whole thing is a subject of large political and bureaucratic pressures. For example, in 1996, the relevant bodies of the U.S. government concluded that the official inflation figures were making the social security payments grow too fast for their taste, so they promptly summoned a committee of experts, who then produced an elaborate argument that the methodology hitherto used had unsoundly overstated the growth in CPI relative to some phantom “true” value. And so the methodology was revised, and inflation obediently went down. (I wouldn’t be surprised if the new CPI math indeed gives much more prominence to the cost of sending emails!)
Now, if such is the state of things even when it comes to the fairly slow technological and economic changes undertaken by humans in recent decades, what sense does it make to project these numbers into an em-based economy that develops and changes at a speed hardly imaginable for us today, and whose production is largely aimed at creatures altogether different from us? Hardly any, I would say, which is why I don’t find the attempts to talk about long-term “real growth” as a well-defined number meaningful.
I don’t know what he thinks about how affordable biological human life would be in an em economy, but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t define his growth numbers tied to the current CPI basket. From the attitudes he typically displays in his writing, I would be surprised if he would treat things valued by ems and other AIs as essentially different from things valued by humans and unworthy of inclusion into the growth figures, even if humans find them irrelevant or even outright undesirable.
Thankyou, it’s a pleasure to chat with you, we should meet up in real life sometime!