Are you so sure that there is not a single interesting, a priori deducible fact about the superintelligent economy beyond “a singleton is in charge and everything is utopia”?
End points are easier to infer than trajectories, so sure, I think there’s some reasonable guesses you can try to make about how the world might look after aligned superintelligence, should we get it somehow.
For example, I think it’s a decent bet that basically all minds would exist solely as uploads almost all of the time, because living directly in physical reality is astronomically wasteful and incredibly inconvenient. Turning on a physical lamp every time you want things to be brighter means wiggling about vast numbers of particles and wasting an ungodly amount of negentropy just for the sake of the teeny tiny number of bits about these vast numbers of particles that actually make it to your eyeballs, and the even smaller number of bits that actually end up influencing your mind state and making any difference to your perception of the world. All of the particles[1] in the lamp in my bedroom, the air its light shines through, and the walls it bounces off, could be so much more useful arranged in an ordered dance of logic gates where every single movement and spin flip is actually doing something of value. If we’re not being so incredibly wasteful about it, maybe we can run whole civilisations for aeons on the energy and negentropy that currently make up my bedroom. What we’re doing right now is like building an abacus out of supercomputers. I can’t imagine any mature civilisation would stick with this.
It’s not that I refuse to speculate about how a world post aligned superintelligence might look. I just didn’t think that your guess was very plausible. I don’t think pre-existing property rights or state structures would matter very much in such a world, even if we don’t get what is effectively a singleton, which I doubt. If a group of superintelligent AGIs is effectively much more powerful and productive than the entire pre-existing economy, your legal share of that pre-existing economy is not a very relevant factor in your ability to steer the future and get what you want. The same goes for pre-existing military or legal power.
Something like a crux here is I believe the trajectories non-trivially matter for which end-points we get, and I don’t think it’s like entropy where we can easily determine the end-point without considering the intermediate trajectory, because I do genuinely think some path-dependentness is present in history, which is why even if I were way more charitable towards communism I don’t think this was ever defensible:
[...] Marx was philosophically opposed, as a matter of principle, to any planning about the structure of communist governments or economies. He would come out and say it was irresponsible to talk about how communist governments and economies will work. He believed it was a scientific law, analogous to the laws of physics, that once capitalism was removed, a perfect communist government would form of its own accord. There might be some very light planning, a couple of discussions, but these would just be epiphenomena of the governing historical laws working themselves out.
End points are easier to infer than trajectories, so sure, I think there’s some reasonable guesses you can try to make about how the world might look after aligned superintelligence, should we get it somehow.
For example, I think it’s a decent bet that basically all minds would exist solely as uploads almost all of the time, because living directly in physical reality is astronomically wasteful and incredibly inconvenient. Turning on a physical lamp every time you want things to be brighter means wiggling about vast numbers of particles and wasting an ungodly amount of negentropy just for the sake of the teeny tiny number of bits about these vast numbers of particles that actually make it to your eyeballs, and the even smaller number of bits that actually end up influencing your mind state and making any difference to your perception of the world. All of the particles[1] in the lamp in my bedroom, the air its light shines through, and the walls it bounces off, could be so much more useful arranged in an ordered dance of logic gates where every single movement and spin flip is actually doing something of value. If we’re not being so incredibly wasteful about it, maybe we can run whole civilisations for aeons on the energy and negentropy that currently make up my bedroom. What we’re doing right now is like building an abacus out of supercomputers. I can’t imagine any mature civilisation would stick with this.
It’s not that I refuse to speculate about how a world post aligned superintelligence might look. I just didn’t think that your guess was very plausible. I don’t think pre-existing property rights or state structures would matter very much in such a world, even if we don’t get what is effectively a singleton, which I doubt. If a group of superintelligent AGIs is effectively much more powerful and productive than the entire pre-existing economy, your legal share of that pre-existing economy is not a very relevant factor in your ability to steer the future and get what you want. The same goes for pre-existing military or legal power.
Well, the conserved quantum numbers of my room, really.
Assuming that which end point you get to doesn’t depend on the intermediate trajectories at least.
Something like a crux here is I believe the trajectories non-trivially matter for which end-points we get, and I don’t think it’s like entropy where we can easily determine the end-point without considering the intermediate trajectory, because I do genuinely think some path-dependentness is present in history, which is why even if I were way more charitable towards communism I don’t think this was ever defensible: