Well, you completely ignored the point I made, which is that there is no reason to think emulations would conspire with each other to deny people their investments. Many emulations would also have long periods of investing and money and earning enormous amounts through interest payments. Many non-uploaded humans would probably invest money in funds that would be run (like almost anything else) by uploaded people. Both rich uploads and upload fund managers would have an incentive to oppose confiscations.
If you had a time machine and went back and invested in any of those time periods, what are the chances you’d get that money back?
Benjamin Franklin actually did invest money in 1790, and the amount with 200 years of interest really was paid out in the way specified in the trust. People have owned land titles and shares in businesses for over a thousand years through multiple dynasties and regimes.
1) have something we want or 2) try to make a claim against anything we have. It never ends well for the foragers.
The difference being that foragers don’t have titles/deeds or even a clear understanding of property-ownership.
ETA: I should really proofread my comments before I post.
The difference being that foragers don’t have titles/deeds or even a clear understanding of property-ownership.
So what? History is still not kind. I pointed out 2 more examples to Hanson, which I think he blogged about, where someone doing something very similar to Franklin saw the money completely wasted. 1⁄3 odds is not especially encouraging given that the analysis has only just begun...
For example, a deeper analysis might include the Islamic world’s perpetual charity corporation, the waqf which form dates back almost to the beginning, collectively comprised a huge chunk of various economies—but while they did much better than one might expect, most still ceased to exist at some point. As far as I know, every wafq started in, say, 1000 AD is now dead. There may be a few Egyptian survivors from later centuries, attached to the University, but nevertheless, the overall picture is one of a very low survival rate. (I’ve pointed out waqfs to Hanson multiple times, but I don’t know what he makes of them.)
Just a rough dirty outline since I’m headed out of town for two days. I may make a discussion post about some of the points later.
The natural human method of property division is killing people and taking their stuff. Capitalism is a blip on the radar.
Ems will be entering an entirely different context than 20th century humans. We’ll be lucky if capitalism translates to the digital world at all.
Ems vs human will be a natural division point. Every human (if lucky) becomes a retiree at some point, no Ems become human. Humans do not have a good track record of respecting the property rights of those different to them.
Humans literally cannot object to Ems doing this. We literally cannot think fast enough to stop it from happening and it only needs happen once in 5000 years each year for us.
5000 years? That’s older than the entire concept of capital. Unless capitalism is the one true economic system for all eternity, you’ll be out of luck. Historically, the vast majority of economic systems wouldn’t honor your holding onto that property without a means to personally enforce it.
5000x wasn’t the cap. Hanson made a comment about potential 1,000,000x speeds. One year goes longer back than our ancestors could even say the word ‘capitalism’. I say ancestors because homo sapiens weren’t around back then. I’m imagining making a capital investment to Krogg, and trying to get that repaid today.
This ignores the possibility of Em-space becoming a free for all of replicators trying to ascend into Godhood. I consider it the most likely possibility (but that’s the subject of another thread). But even if that doesn’t happen and they keep capitalism, and Ems have no government shakeups, and they bother keeping track of debts to humans, you won’t be able to withdraw because...
Sheer magnitude of value. A human working earning, lets say $20,000 in one year pre-uploading, is worth one man-year of work. A human investing that money and earning a year’s interest during the 1-month doubling time frame suddenly has $81,000,000. People would happily steal from retirees if that much money was changing hands.
Meanwhile the average wage has dropped to $4 a year. There is no moral system I can imagine that figures it’s okay for one person’s year of work to be worth someone else’s 20-million years of work just because they got lucky when they made it.
Scratch that. I know that there’s a similar-ish disparity between a CEO and a bottom quintile Nigerian. Lucky for the CEO, current Nigerians don’t run at 5000x speed because they would happily take his money away and be morally okay with that. Lets say some Ems are on the side of giving humans back their money. You’re going to have literally a thousand times the current population of the earth as poor Nigerians who will be set for a literal million years if they can get just a fraction of the money away from the old human dinosaurs who literally cannot object to them. That’s a lot of literals.
Similarly, the opportunity cost of ‘pay off that human’ vs ‘give 10,000,000 ems a better standard of living’ is an easy choice. Who could morally side with the human? Well, maybe a human but they won’t be making that decision.
All the goods are digital. You can’t eat zeros and ones. Your money will increase by 4,000x+ a year, but the number of apples won’t increase by 4,000x+ a year, so the gains will just be inflated away for physical goods.
Actually, the economy will probably become mostly decoupled between digital and physical goods. Ems may increase thinking capacity a trillion fold, but it’s not they’ll will significantly increase the number of apples we grow.
Scratch that. Having Ems will increase apples, because all the computer programmers, and bureaucrats, and entertainers, and etc, etc, etc, will now be out of jobs except for growing apples and delivering microchips to the Em towers. So, I guess that’s nice?
My original post was expressing derision at the idea that you could live off the interest from Ems. I understand that it’s not a popular message to say, “Ems are gonna hard takeoff, and leave us in the dust, but we won’t necessarily go extinct (unless we do).” However, it’s a lot more honest than promising fantastic wealth just for surviving until uploading even if you yourself don’t upload. As I mentioned above these are rough objections, but I may make a post.
One key objection to this argument is that even though a human with enough money to survive is fantastically rich relative to individual digital folk (and immensely worth expropriating from the perspective of individuals, or those in physical proximity), she can still be vanishingly poor relative to the em society as a whole. If 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000 available units of free energy within a certain jurisdiction goes to humans while the rest goes to much cheaper digital life, national-scale digital politicians won’t be able to promise any noticeable improvement in average living standards in exchange for expropriating the humans.
You seem to be under the impression that I am promising a guarantee that every form of retiree investment will live up to all retiree hopes, no matter how much change happens in the political or economic systems. But even in times of peace where law is upheld, many supposedly “safe” investments will disappoint. The recent downturn is an obvious example. In such times of turmoil, even government guaranteed investments may fail. And in times of war, there are even fewer safe investments.
But this is all a pretty generic fact about the future—the more change it sees, the more at risk are individual investments. If change speeds up, then the realization of this risk speeds up. There really isn’t a realistic alternative—all of this applies no matter what kids of big changes are coming.
Well, you completely ignored the point I made, which is that there is no reason to think emulations would conspire with each other to deny people their investments. Many emulations would also have long periods of investing and money and earning enormous amounts through interest payments. Many non-uploaded humans would probably invest money in funds that would be run (like almost anything else) by uploaded people. Both rich uploads and upload fund managers would have an incentive to oppose confiscations.
Benjamin Franklin actually did invest money in 1790, and the amount with 200 years of interest really was paid out in the way specified in the trust. People have owned land titles and shares in businesses for over a thousand years through multiple dynasties and regimes.
The difference being that foragers don’t have titles/deeds or even a clear understanding of property-ownership.
ETA: I should really proofread my comments before I post.
So what? History is still not kind. I pointed out 2 more examples to Hanson, which I think he blogged about, where someone doing something very similar to Franklin saw the money completely wasted. 1⁄3 odds is not especially encouraging given that the analysis has only just begun...
For example, a deeper analysis might include the Islamic world’s perpetual charity corporation, the waqf which form dates back almost to the beginning, collectively comprised a huge chunk of various economies—but while they did much better than one might expect, most still ceased to exist at some point. As far as I know, every wafq started in, say, 1000 AD is now dead. There may be a few Egyptian survivors from later centuries, attached to the University, but nevertheless, the overall picture is one of a very low survival rate. (I’ve pointed out waqfs to Hanson multiple times, but I don’t know what he makes of them.)
Just a rough dirty outline since I’m headed out of town for two days. I may make a discussion post about some of the points later.
The natural human method of property division is killing people and taking their stuff. Capitalism is a blip on the radar.
Ems will be entering an entirely different context than 20th century humans. We’ll be lucky if capitalism translates to the digital world at all.
Ems vs human will be a natural division point. Every human (if lucky) becomes a retiree at some point, no Ems become human. Humans do not have a good track record of respecting the property rights of those different to them.
Humans literally cannot object to Ems doing this. We literally cannot think fast enough to stop it from happening and it only needs happen once in 5000 years each year for us.
5000 years? That’s older than the entire concept of capital. Unless capitalism is the one true economic system for all eternity, you’ll be out of luck. Historically, the vast majority of economic systems wouldn’t honor your holding onto that property without a means to personally enforce it.
5000x wasn’t the cap. Hanson made a comment about potential 1,000,000x speeds. One year goes longer back than our ancestors could even say the word ‘capitalism’. I say ancestors because homo sapiens weren’t around back then. I’m imagining making a capital investment to Krogg, and trying to get that repaid today.
This ignores the possibility of Em-space becoming a free for all of replicators trying to ascend into Godhood. I consider it the most likely possibility (but that’s the subject of another thread). But even if that doesn’t happen and they keep capitalism, and Ems have no government shakeups, and they bother keeping track of debts to humans, you won’t be able to withdraw because...
Sheer magnitude of value. A human working earning, lets say $20,000 in one year pre-uploading, is worth one man-year of work. A human investing that money and earning a year’s interest during the 1-month doubling time frame suddenly has $81,000,000. People would happily steal from retirees if that much money was changing hands.
Meanwhile the average wage has dropped to $4 a year. There is no moral system I can imagine that figures it’s okay for one person’s year of work to be worth someone else’s 20-million years of work just because they got lucky when they made it.
Scratch that. I know that there’s a similar-ish disparity between a CEO and a bottom quintile Nigerian. Lucky for the CEO, current Nigerians don’t run at 5000x speed because they would happily take his money away and be morally okay with that. Lets say some Ems are on the side of giving humans back their money. You’re going to have literally a thousand times the current population of the earth as poor Nigerians who will be set for a literal million years if they can get just a fraction of the money away from the old human dinosaurs who literally cannot object to them. That’s a lot of literals.
Similarly, the opportunity cost of ‘pay off that human’ vs ‘give 10,000,000 ems a better standard of living’ is an easy choice. Who could morally side with the human? Well, maybe a human but they won’t be making that decision.
All the goods are digital. You can’t eat zeros and ones. Your money will increase by 4,000x+ a year, but the number of apples won’t increase by 4,000x+ a year, so the gains will just be inflated away for physical goods.
Actually, the economy will probably become mostly decoupled between digital and physical goods. Ems may increase thinking capacity a trillion fold, but it’s not they’ll will significantly increase the number of apples we grow.
Scratch that. Having Ems will increase apples, because all the computer programmers, and bureaucrats, and entertainers, and etc, etc, etc, will now be out of jobs except for growing apples and delivering microchips to the Em towers. So, I guess that’s nice?
My original post was expressing derision at the idea that you could live off the interest from Ems. I understand that it’s not a popular message to say, “Ems are gonna hard takeoff, and leave us in the dust, but we won’t necessarily go extinct (unless we do).” However, it’s a lot more honest than promising fantastic wealth just for surviving until uploading even if you yourself don’t upload. As I mentioned above these are rough objections, but I may make a post.
One key objection to this argument is that even though a human with enough money to survive is fantastically rich relative to individual digital folk (and immensely worth expropriating from the perspective of individuals, or those in physical proximity), she can still be vanishingly poor relative to the em society as a whole. If 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000 available units of free energy within a certain jurisdiction goes to humans while the rest goes to much cheaper digital life, national-scale digital politicians won’t be able to promise any noticeable improvement in average living standards in exchange for expropriating the humans.
You seem to be under the impression that I am promising a guarantee that every form of retiree investment will live up to all retiree hopes, no matter how much change happens in the political or economic systems. But even in times of peace where law is upheld, many supposedly “safe” investments will disappoint. The recent downturn is an obvious example. In such times of turmoil, even government guaranteed investments may fail. And in times of war, there are even fewer safe investments.
But this is all a pretty generic fact about the future—the more change it sees, the more at risk are individual investments. If change speeds up, then the realization of this risk speeds up. There really isn’t a realistic alternative—all of this applies no matter what kids of big changes are coming.