Yeah, but future uploads shouldn’t view us exactly the same way we would view the mountain people: for starters, we are able to provide food for ourselves (and indeed have done so since the dawn of time), but the mountain people can’t.
That won’t be true in the face of uploading, though; most (all?) people will find themselves outcompeted. For example, Uploaded!Fezziwig can sell his services as a programmer much more cheaply than Meat!Fezziwig can.
Clearly what I meant with this analogy is that humans won’t be able to pay our own way. Once uploads become common, and can run quickly, they would be able to do vastly more work (because they could run much more quickly than human brains). They would also need far less money (most uploads just needing to buy some cycles on future super-duper computers). In this future, upload wages could fall far below human subsistence levels while still providing a good quality of life fore the uploads. Organic humans are pretty closely analogous to mountain people in this scenario. I doubt uploads would voluntarily choose to support the monumentally expensive and slow-thinking organic humans.
An alternate future is Eliezer’s “AI god” scenario, where a single AI becomes so dominant, it can take over pretty much everything. In this case, all economic decisions are centrally planned, and the AI has to expend vastly more resources on organic humans than on uploads (per capita), this costs a lot in any kind of utility function that values human uploads and organic humans equally. Maybe the AI would keep devoting resources to organic humans, but my guess is that most FAIs won’t choose to do this unless it is specifically programmed into its preferences.
Yeah, but future uploads shouldn’t view us exactly the same way we would view the mountain people: for starters, we are able to provide food for ourselves (and indeed have done so since the dawn of time), but the mountain people can’t.
That won’t be true in the face of uploading, though; most (all?) people will find themselves outcompeted. For example, Uploaded!Fezziwig can sell his services as a programmer much more cheaply than Meat!Fezziwig can.
Clearly what I meant with this analogy is that humans won’t be able to pay our own way. Once uploads become common, and can run quickly, they would be able to do vastly more work (because they could run much more quickly than human brains). They would also need far less money (most uploads just needing to buy some cycles on future super-duper computers). In this future, upload wages could fall far below human subsistence levels while still providing a good quality of life fore the uploads. Organic humans are pretty closely analogous to mountain people in this scenario. I doubt uploads would voluntarily choose to support the monumentally expensive and slow-thinking organic humans.
An alternate future is Eliezer’s “AI god” scenario, where a single AI becomes so dominant, it can take over pretty much everything. In this case, all economic decisions are centrally planned, and the AI has to expend vastly more resources on organic humans than on uploads (per capita), this costs a lot in any kind of utility function that values human uploads and organic humans equally. Maybe the AI would keep devoting resources to organic humans, but my guess is that most FAIs won’t choose to do this unless it is specifically programmed into its preferences.