Well, the government could take all your property away at a whim; millions of people have experienced that. Plus there are things like eminent domain.
Also, the government can tax your property (and punish you if you don’t pay e.g. by taking away that thing), which is kinda weird philosophically… on one hand, something already belongs to you, on the other hand, you need to keep paying to keep it so—but this is how renting is supposed to work, not owning.
A more obvious example is the intellectual property. There are no Schelling points; twenty years of copyright versus hundred years, there is no number that seems obviously correct.
And if after Singularity, the superintelligent AIs decide that they won’t respect human property claims (but may respect each other’s property), then… that’s just the new reality. Just like a human ignores how the ants in his garden have distributed the territory among themselves.
So the fact that you have a property at all is downstream from “there is a consensus among those with power that this definition of ‘property’ is generally a good thing to have”.
There is the way these things are generally done in the Western civilization, but if you asked some people living in tribes, they probably would have wildly different intuitions about what a person can own.
I can only own something if I am strong enough to defend it, or if there is a consensus among the others that they should let me keep it.
Well, the government could take all your property away at a whim; millions of people have experienced that. Plus there are things like eminent domain.
Also, the government can tax your property (and punish you if you don’t pay e.g. by taking away that thing), which is kinda weird philosophically… on one hand, something already belongs to you, on the other hand, you need to keep paying to keep it so—but this is how renting is supposed to work, not owning.
A more obvious example is the intellectual property. There are no Schelling points; twenty years of copyright versus hundred years, there is no number that seems obviously correct.
And if after Singularity, the superintelligent AIs decide that they won’t respect human property claims (but may respect each other’s property), then… that’s just the new reality. Just like a human ignores how the ants in his garden have distributed the territory among themselves.
So the fact that you have a property at all is downstream from “there is a consensus among those with power that this definition of ‘property’ is generally a good thing to have”.
There is the way these things are generally done in the Western civilization, but if you asked some people living in tribes, they probably would have wildly different intuitions about what a person can own.
I can only own something if I am strong enough to defend it, or if there is a consensus among the others that they should let me keep it.