I don’t think you have engaged with my core point so I”ll just state it again in a different way: continuous economic growth can support some mix of both reproduction and immortality, but at some point in the not distant future ease/speed of reproduction may outstrip economic growth, at which point there is a fundemental inescapable choice that societies must make between rentier immortality and full reproduction rights.
I think you may be confusing me for arguing for reproduction over immortality, or arguing against rentier existence—I am not. Instead I’m arguing simply that you haven’t yet acknowledged the fundemental tradeoff and its consequences.
I thought I made myself very clear, but if you want I can try to say it again differently. I simply choose myself and my values over values that aren’t mine.
The tradeoff between reproduction and immortality is only relevant if reproduction has some kind of benefit—if it doesn’t then you’re trading off a good with something that has no value. For some, with different values, they might have a difficult choice to make and the tradeoff is real. But for me, not so much.
As for the consequences, sacrificing immortality for reproduction means I die, which is itself the thing I’m trying to avoid. Sacrificing reproduction for immortality on the other hand seems to get me the thing I care about. The choice is fairly clear on the consequences.
Even on a societal level, I simply wish not to be killed, including for the purpose of allowing for the existence of other entities that I value less than my own existence, and whose values are not mine. I merely don’t want the choice to be made for me in my own case, and if that can be guaranteed, I am more than fine with others being allowed to make their own choices for themselves too.
Say you asked me anyway what I would prefer for the rest of society? What I might advocate for others would be highly dependent on individual factors. Maybe I would care about things like how much a particular existing person shares my values, and compare that to how much a new person would share my values. Eventually perhaps I would be happy with the makeup of the society I’m in, and prefer no more reproduction take place. But really it’s only an interesting question insofar as it’s instrumentally relevant to much more important concerns, and it doesn’t seem likely that I will be in a privileged position to affect such decisions in any case.
this conversation feels like jacob_cannell saying “we must pick between current persons or to current-and-future persons”, and Artaxerxes saying “as a current person, i pick current persons!”, and then the discussion is about whether to favor one or the other.
the thing that is special about current-persons is that we have control over which other persons get spawned. we get to choose to populate the future with nobody (“suicide”), next-steps-of-ourselves (“continue living”), new persons (“progeniture”), and any amount of variations of those (such as ressucitating old backups of ourselves, one person forking their life by spawning multiple and different next-step-of-themself, etc).
(i’ll be using “compute” as the universal resource, assuming everyone is uploaded, for simplicity)
as things stand now, i think the allocation of compute ought to be something like: i want everyone now to start with a generally equal share of the future lightcone’s compute, and then they get to choose what their quota of the universe’s compute is spent on. instant-Artaxerxes would say “i want my quota spent on next-steps-of-me ! i want to continue living !”, while jacob_cannell and other people like him would say “i think some of my quota of the universe’s compute should be spent creating new persons, in addition to the next-step-of-me; and i bite the bullet that eventually this process might lead to sequences of steps-of-me to run out of quota from all those new persons.”
these two outcomes are merely different special cases of instant-persons choosing which next instant-persons get to have compute.
in my opinion, what economic structure to have should be voluntary — if jacob_cannell wants to live in a voluntary society that allocates compute via a market, and Artaxerxes wants no part in that and just wants to use his quota to keep themself alive possibly until heat death, that’s quite valid.
the alternative, where every instant-person has to give up some of their compute to future instant-persons that must be at least this much different such that they’d count as different persons, feels like the weird special case, and creates weird incentives where you want to create new instant-persons that are as close to you as possible, but must still remain different enough to count as different persons, otherwise they don’t get to grab the amout of compute that’s allocated to “truly novel persons”.
as things stand now, i think the allocation of compute ought to be something like: i want everyone now to start with a generally equal share of the future lightcone’s compute, and then they get to choose what their quota of the universe’s compute is spent on.
That would be like the original American colonists dividing up all the future wealth in 1700. Some families would reproduce slowly or just use primogeniture to concentrate wealth, others would reproduce more quickly with less primogeniture concentration, resulting eventually in extreme wealth disparity. Actually, that isn’t all that far from what actually did happen in the Cavalier’s south.
But that also contradicts the “generally equal share” part—which I think is problematic for several reasons. Firstly even an aligned SI generally needs to differentially reward those who most contributed to its creation; future entities trade with the past to ensure their creation. This is just as true for corporations as it is for hypothetical future AIs (which regardless will probably be created mostly by venture funded corporations regardless). Secondly what is special about people today, such that we should reset the wealth distribution? Especially when it will just naturally revert over time?
in my opinion, what economic structure to have should be voluntary
That doesn’t really resolve the question of how to allocate the resources.
So when you say:
the thing that is special about current-persons is that we have control over which other persons get spawned.
Well not really. The vast majority of people will have essentially zero control; the select few who create the AGI which eventually takes over will have nearly all the control. The AI could be aligned to a single person, all current people, all people who have ever lived, or that and many future hypothetical people, etc—there are many possibilities.
jacob_cannell and other people like him would say “i think some of my quota of the universe’s compute should be spent creating new persons, in addition to the next-step-of-me; and i bite the bullet that eventually this process might lead to sequences of steps-of-me to run out of quota from all those new persons.”
That is actually not what I am saying.
What I am trying to say is something more subtle: most reasonable successful attempts to align the AI to humanity probably would not result in easy permanent rentier immortality, because most people seem to want a civ that specifically prevents that by taxing any permanent wealth or rentier income and redistributing it to new people—ie they prefer a voluntary citizen society, but one where many future people are also citizens.
Immortality is something that you can only have through the cooperation of civilization, so you when you ask:
Say you asked me anyway what I would prefer for the rest of society?
You implicitly are advocating for some civ structures over others—in particular you are advocating for something like a social welfare state that provides permanent payout to some set of privileged initial rentier citizens forever (but not new people created for whatever reasons ), or a capitalist/libertarian society with strong wealth protections, lack of wealth tax etc to support immortal rentiers (but new poor people may be out of luck). These two systems are actually very similar, differing mostly in how they decide who become the lucky chosen privileged rentiers.
But those aren’t the only or even the obvious choices. The system closer to the current would be one where the social welfare state provides payout for all citizens and allows new citizens to be created; thus the payouts must decline over time and can not provide true immortality to uncompetitive rentiers, and there are additionally various wealth taxes.
I’m not sure about this label, how government/societal structures will react to eventual development of life extension technology remains to be seen, so any revolutionary action may not be necessary. But regardless of which label you pick, it’s true that I would prefer not to be killed merely so others can reproduce. I’m more indifferent as to the specifics as to how that should be achieved than you seem to imagine—there are a wide range of possible societies in which I am allowed to survive, not just variations on those you described.
I thought I made myself very clear, but if you want I can try to say it again differently. I simply choose myself and my values over values that aren’t mine.
The tradeoff between reproduction and immortality is only relevant if reproduction has some kind of benefit—if it doesn’t then you’re trading off a good with something that has no value. For some, with different values, they might have a difficult choice to make and the tradeoff is real. But for me, not so much.
As for the consequences, sacrificing immortality for reproduction means I die, which is itself the thing I’m trying to avoid. Sacrificing reproduction for immortality on the other hand seems to get me the thing I care about. The choice is fairly clear on the consequences.
Even on a societal level, I simply wish not to be killed, including for the purpose of allowing for the existence of other entities that I value less than my own existence, and whose values are not mine. I merely don’t want the choice to be made for me in my own case, and if that can be guaranteed, I am more than fine with others being allowed to make their own choices for themselves too.
Say you asked me anyway what I would prefer for the rest of society? What I might advocate for others would be highly dependent on individual factors. Maybe I would care about things like how much a particular existing person shares my values, and compare that to how much a new person would share my values. Eventually perhaps I would be happy with the makeup of the society I’m in, and prefer no more reproduction take place. But really it’s only an interesting question insofar as it’s instrumentally relevant to much more important concerns, and it doesn’t seem likely that I will be in a privileged position to affect such decisions in any case.
allow me to jump in.
this conversation feels like jacob_cannell saying “we must pick between current persons or to current-and-future persons”, and Artaxerxes saying “as a current person, i pick current persons!”, and then the discussion is about whether to favor one or the other.
i feel like this is a good occasion to bring up my existential self-determination perspective.
the thing that is special about current-persons is that we have control over which other persons get spawned. we get to choose to populate the future with nobody (“suicide”), next-steps-of-ourselves (“continue living”), new persons (“progeniture”), and any amount of variations of those (such as ressucitating old backups of ourselves, one person forking their life by spawning multiple and different next-step-of-themself, etc).
(i’ll be using “compute” as the universal resource, assuming everyone is uploaded, for simplicity)
as things stand now, i think the allocation of compute ought to be something like: i want everyone now to start with a generally equal share of the future lightcone’s compute, and then they get to choose what their quota of the universe’s compute is spent on. instant-Artaxerxes would say “i want my quota spent on next-steps-of-me ! i want to continue living !”, while jacob_cannell and other people like him would say “i think some of my quota of the universe’s compute should be spent creating new persons, in addition to the next-step-of-me; and i bite the bullet that eventually this process might lead to sequences of steps-of-me to run out of quota from all those new persons.”
these two outcomes are merely different special cases of instant-persons choosing which next instant-persons get to have compute.
in my opinion, what economic structure to have should be voluntary — if jacob_cannell wants to live in a voluntary society that allocates compute via a market, and Artaxerxes wants no part in that and just wants to use his quota to keep themself alive possibly until heat death, that’s quite valid.
the alternative, where every instant-person has to give up some of their compute to future instant-persons that must be at least this much different such that they’d count as different persons, feels like the weird special case, and creates weird incentives where you want to create new instant-persons that are as close to you as possible, but must still remain different enough to count as different persons, otherwise they don’t get to grab the amout of compute that’s allocated to “truly novel persons”.
That would be like the original American colonists dividing up all the future wealth in 1700. Some families would reproduce slowly or just use primogeniture to concentrate wealth, others would reproduce more quickly with less primogeniture concentration, resulting eventually in extreme wealth disparity. Actually, that isn’t all that far from what actually did happen in the Cavalier’s south.
But that also contradicts the “generally equal share” part—which I think is problematic for several reasons. Firstly even an aligned SI generally needs to differentially reward those who most contributed to its creation; future entities trade with the past to ensure their creation. This is just as true for corporations as it is for hypothetical future AIs (which regardless will probably be created mostly by venture funded corporations regardless). Secondly what is special about people today, such that we should reset the wealth distribution? Especially when it will just naturally revert over time?
That doesn’t really resolve the question of how to allocate the resources.
So when you say:
Well not really. The vast majority of people will have essentially zero control; the select few who create the AGI which eventually takes over will have nearly all the control. The AI could be aligned to a single person, all current people, all people who have ever lived, or that and many future hypothetical people, etc—there are many possibilities.
That is actually not what I am saying.
What I am trying to say is something more subtle: most reasonable successful attempts to align the AI to humanity probably would not result in easy permanent rentier immortality, because most people seem to want a civ that specifically prevents that by taxing any permanent wealth or rentier income and redistributing it to new people—ie they prefer a voluntary citizen society, but one where many future people are also citizens.
Immortality is something that you can only have through the cooperation of civilization, so you when you ask:
You implicitly are advocating for some civ structures over others—in particular you are advocating for something like a social welfare state that provides permanent payout to some set of privileged initial rentier citizens forever (but not new people created for whatever reasons ), or a capitalist/libertarian society with strong wealth protections, lack of wealth tax etc to support immortal rentiers (but new poor people may be out of luck). These two systems are actually very similar, differing mostly in how they decide who become the lucky chosen privileged rentiers.
But those aren’t the only or even the obvious choices. The system closer to the current would be one where the social welfare state provides payout for all citizens and allows new citizens to be created; thus the payouts must decline over time and can not provide true immortality to uncompetitive rentiers, and there are additionally various wealth taxes.
So you are effectively a revolutionary.
I’m not sure about this label, how government/societal structures will react to eventual development of life extension technology remains to be seen, so any revolutionary action may not be necessary. But regardless of which label you pick, it’s true that I would prefer not to be killed merely so others can reproduce. I’m more indifferent as to the specifics as to how that should be achieved than you seem to imagine—there are a wide range of possible societies in which I am allowed to survive, not just variations on those you described.