The share of income going to humans could simply tend towards zero if humans have no real wealth to offer in the economy. If humans own 0.001% of all wealth, for takeover to be rational, it needs to be the case that the benefit of taking that last 0.001% outweighs the costs. However, since both the costs and benefits are small, takeover is not necessarily rationally justified.
In the human world, we already see analogous situations in which groups could “take over” and yet choose not to because the (small) benefits of doing so do not outweigh the (similarly small) costs of doing so. Consider a small sub-unit of the economy, such as an individual person, a small town, or a small country. Given that these small sub-units are small, the rest of the world could—if they wanted to—coordinate to steal all the property from the sub-unit, i.e., they could “take over the world” from that person/town/country. This would be a takeover event because the rest of the world would go from owning <100% of the world prior to the theft, to owning 100% of the world, after the theft.
In the real world, various legal, social, and moral constraints generally prevent people from predating on small sub-units in the way I’ve described. But it’s not just morality: even if we assume agents are perfectly rational and self-interested, theft is not always worth it. Probably the biggest cost is simply coordinating to perform the theft. Even if the cost of coordination is small, to steal someone’s stuff, you might have to fight them. And if they don’t own lots of stuff, the cost of fighting them could easily outweigh the benefits you’d get from taking their stuff, even if you won the fight.
You are conflating “what humans own” with “what you can get by process with side effect of killing humans”. Humans are not going to own any significant chunk of Earth in the end, they are just going to live on its surface and die when this surface will evaporate during disassembling into Dyson swarm, and all of this 6*10^24 kg of silicon, hydrogen, oxygen and carbon are quite valuable. What does, exactly, prevent this scenario?
The environment in which digital minds thrive seem very different from the environment in which humans thrive. I don’t see a way to convert the mass of the earth into computronium without killing all the humans, without doing a lot more economic work than the humans are likely capable of producing.
All it takes is for humans to have enough wealth in absolute (not relative) terms afford their own habitable shelter and environment, which doesn’t seem implausible?
Anyway, my main objection here is that I expect we’re far away (in economic time) from anything like the Earth being disassembled. As a result, this seems like a long-run consideration, from the perspective of how different the world will be by the time it starts becoming relevant. My guess is that this risk could become significant if humans haven’t already migrated onto computers by this time, they lost all their capital ownership, they lack any social support networks that would be willing to bear these costs (including from potential ems living on computers at that time), and NIMBY political forces become irrelevant. But in most scenarios that I think are realistic, there are simply a lot of ways for the costs of killing humans to disassemble the Earth to be far greater than the benefits.
I’d love to see a scenario by you btw! Your own equivalent of What 2026 Looks Like, or failing that the shorter scenarios here. You’ve clearly thought about this in a decent amount of detail.
Okay, we have wildly different models of tech tree. In my understanding, to make mind uploads you need Awesome Nanotech and if you have misaligned AIs and not-so-awesome nanotech it’s sufficient to kill all humans and start to disassemble Earth. The only coherent scenario that I can imagine misaligned AIs actually participating in human economy in meaningful amounts is scenario where you can’t design nanotech without continent-sized supercomputers.
The share of income going to humans could simply tend towards zero if humans have no real wealth to offer in the economy. If humans own 0.001% of all wealth, for takeover to be rational, it needs to be the case that the benefit of taking that last 0.001% outweighs the costs. However, since both the costs and benefits are small, takeover is not necessarily rationally justified.
In the human world, we already see analogous situations in which groups could “take over” and yet choose not to because the (small) benefits of doing so do not outweigh the (similarly small) costs of doing so. Consider a small sub-unit of the economy, such as an individual person, a small town, or a small country. Given that these small sub-units are small, the rest of the world could—if they wanted to—coordinate to steal all the property from the sub-unit, i.e., they could “take over the world” from that person/town/country. This would be a takeover event because the rest of the world would go from owning <100% of the world prior to the theft, to owning 100% of the world, after the theft.
In the real world, various legal, social, and moral constraints generally prevent people from predating on small sub-units in the way I’ve described. But it’s not just morality: even if we assume agents are perfectly rational and self-interested, theft is not always worth it. Probably the biggest cost is simply coordinating to perform the theft. Even if the cost of coordination is small, to steal someone’s stuff, you might have to fight them. And if they don’t own lots of stuff, the cost of fighting them could easily outweigh the benefits you’d get from taking their stuff, even if you won the fight.
You are conflating “what humans own” with “what you can get by process with side effect of killing humans”. Humans are not going to own any significant chunk of Earth in the end, they are just going to live on its surface and die when this surface will evaporate during disassembling into Dyson swarm, and all of this 6*10^24 kg of silicon, hydrogen, oxygen and carbon are quite valuable. What does, exactly, prevent this scenario?
The environment in which digital minds thrive seem very different from the environment in which humans thrive. I don’t see a way to convert the mass of the earth into computronium without killing all the humans, without doing a lot more economic work than the humans are likely capable of producing.
All it takes is for humans to have enough wealth in absolute (not relative) terms afford their own habitable shelter and environment, which doesn’t seem implausible?
Anyway, my main objection here is that I expect we’re far away (in economic time) from anything like the Earth being disassembled. As a result, this seems like a long-run consideration, from the perspective of how different the world will be by the time it starts becoming relevant. My guess is that this risk could become significant if humans haven’t already migrated onto computers by this time, they lost all their capital ownership, they lack any social support networks that would be willing to bear these costs (including from potential ems living on computers at that time), and NIMBY political forces become irrelevant. But in most scenarios that I think are realistic, there are simply a lot of ways for the costs of killing humans to disassemble the Earth to be far greater than the benefits.
I’d love to see a scenario by you btw! Your own equivalent of What 2026 Looks Like, or failing that the shorter scenarios here. You’ve clearly thought about this in a decent amount of detail.
Okay, we have wildly different models of tech tree. In my understanding, to make mind uploads you need Awesome Nanotech and if you have misaligned AIs and not-so-awesome nanotech it’s sufficient to kill all humans and start to disassemble Earth. The only coherent scenario that I can imagine misaligned AIs actually participating in human economy in meaningful amounts is scenario where you can’t design nanotech without continent-sized supercomputers.