Is getting 100% of the lightcone a hundred times better than 1%?
I think yes, if we take into account that the more of the lightcone we (our FAI) get, the more trading opportunities we would have with UFAI in other possible worlds. Diminishing marginal value shouldn’t apply across possible worlds, because otherwise it would imply gross violations of expected utility maximization.
Also, I suspect that there are possible worlds with much greater resources than our universe (perhaps with physics that allow hypercomputation, or just many orders of magnitude more total exploitable resources), and some of them would have potential trading partners who are willing to give us a small share of their world for a large share of ours. We may eventually achieve most of our value from trading with them. But of course such trade wouldn’t be possible if we didn’t have something to trade with!
Interesting. This suggests thinking about FAI not as using its control to produce terminal value in its own world, but as using its control to buy as much terminal value as it can, in various world-programs. Since it doesn’t matter where the value is produced, most of the value doesn’t have to be produced in the possible worlds with FAIs in them. Indeed, it sounds unlikely that specifically the FAI worlds will be optimal for FAI-value optimization. FAIs (and the worlds they control) act as instrumental leverage, a way of controlling the global mathematical universe into having more value for our preference.
Thus, more FAIs means stronger control over the mathematical universe, while more UFAIs mean that the mathematical universe is richer, and so the FAIs can get more value out of it with the same control. The metaphors of trade and comparative advantage start applying again, not on the naive level of cohabitation on the same world, but on the level of the global ontology. Mathematics grants you total control over your domain, so that your “atoms” can’t be reused for something else by another stronger agent, and so you do benefit from most superintelligent “aliens”.
Yes, assuming that trading across possible worlds can be done in the first place. One thing that concerns me is the combinatorial explosion of potential trading partners. How do they manage to “find” each other?
It’s the same combinatorial explosion as with the future possible worlds. Even though you can’t locate individual valuable future outcomes (through certain instrumental sequences of exact events), you can still make decisions about your actions leading to certain consequences “in bulk”, and I expect the trade between possible worlds can be described similarly (after all, it does work on exactly the same decision-making algorithm). Thus, you usually won’t know who are you trading with, exactly, but on the net estimate that your actions are in the right direction.
I currently agree it’s a bad analogy and I no longer endorse the position that global acausal trade is probably feasible, although its theoretical possibility seems to be a stable conclusion.
I think yes, if we take into account that the more of the lightcone we (our FAI) get, the more trading opportunities we would have with UFAI in other possible worlds. Diminishing marginal value shouldn’t apply across possible worlds, because otherwise it would imply gross violations of expected utility maximization.
Also, I suspect that there are possible worlds with much greater resources than our universe (perhaps with physics that allow hypercomputation, or just many orders of magnitude more total exploitable resources), and some of them would have potential trading partners who are willing to give us a small share of their world for a large share of ours. We may eventually achieve most of our value from trading with them. But of course such trade wouldn’t be possible if we didn’t have something to trade with!
Interesting. This suggests thinking about FAI not as using its control to produce terminal value in its own world, but as using its control to buy as much terminal value as it can, in various world-programs. Since it doesn’t matter where the value is produced, most of the value doesn’t have to be produced in the possible worlds with FAIs in them. Indeed, it sounds unlikely that specifically the FAI worlds will be optimal for FAI-value optimization. FAIs (and the worlds they control) act as instrumental leverage, a way of controlling the global mathematical universe into having more value for our preference.
Thus, more FAIs means stronger control over the mathematical universe, while more UFAIs mean that the mathematical universe is richer, and so the FAIs can get more value out of it with the same control. The metaphors of trade and comparative advantage start applying again, not on the naive level of cohabitation on the same world, but on the level of the global ontology. Mathematics grants you total control over your domain, so that your “atoms” can’t be reused for something else by another stronger agent, and so you do benefit from most superintelligent “aliens”.
Yes, assuming that trading across possible worlds can be done in the first place. One thing that concerns me is the combinatorial explosion of potential trading partners. How do they manage to “find” each other?
It’s the same combinatorial explosion as with the future possible worlds. Even though you can’t locate individual valuable future outcomes (through certain instrumental sequences of exact events), you can still make decisions about your actions leading to certain consequences “in bulk”, and I expect the trade between possible worlds can be described similarly (after all, it does work on exactly the same decision-making algorithm). Thus, you usually won’t know who are you trading with, exactly, but on the net estimate that your actions are in the right direction.
Isn’t the set of future worlds with high measure a lot smaller?
I currently agree it’s a bad analogy and I no longer endorse the position that global acausal trade is probably feasible, although its theoretical possibility seems to be a stable conclusion.
Robin Hanson would be so pleased that it turns out economics is the fundamental law of the entire ensemble universe.