So, let’s take a look at some past losers in the intelligence arms race:
Homo erectus. I’d ask them how their property rights are doing these days. But they’ve been hard to reach lately.
Chimpanzees. Hey, we can still find chimpanzees! As humans, we actually mostly value chimpanzees and we spend some resources to improve their lives. But to put it politely, chimpanzees are incredibly marginalized and pushed into niche habitats. Or occasionally they’re living in zoos.
When you lose an evolutionary arms race to a smarter competitor that wants the same resources, the default result is that you get some niche habitat in Africa, and maybe a couple of sympathetic AIs sell “Save the Humans” T-shirts and donate 1% of their profits to helping the human beings.
You don’t typically get a set of nice property rights inside an economic system you can no longer understand or contribute to.
Chimps actually have pretty elaborate social structure. They know their family relationships, they do each other favors, and they know who not to trust. They even basically go to war against other bands. Humans, however, were never integrated into this social system.
Homo erectus made stone tools and likely a small amount of decorative art (the Trinil shell engravings, for example). This maybe have implied some light division of labor, though likely not long distance trade. Again, none of this helped H erectus in the long run.
Way back a couple of decades ago, there was a bit in Charles Stross’s Accelerando about “Economics 2.0”, a system of commerce invented by the AIs. The conceit was that, by definition, no human could participate in or understand Economics 2.0, any more than chimps can understand the stock market.
So my actual argument is that when you lose the intelligence race badly enough, your existing structures of cooperation and economic production just get ignored. The new entities on the scene don’t necessarily value your production, and you eventually wind up controlling very little of the land, etc.
This could be avoided by something like Culture Minds that (in Iain Banks’ stories) essentially kept humans as pampered pets. But that was fundamentally a gesture of good will.
when you lose the intelligence race badly enough, your existing structures of cooperation and economic production just get ignored.
yes this is a risk, but I think it can be avoided by humans getting a faithful AI agent wrapper with fiduciary responsibility.
The concept and institutions for fiduciary responsibility were not around when humans surpassed apes, otherwise apes could have hired humans to act as their agents and simply invested in the human gold and later stock market.
I don’t think you need Banksian benevolent AIs for this, an agent can be trustlessly faithful via modern trust minimized AI. Ethereum is already working on a nascent standard for this, ERC-8004.
So, let’s take a look at some past losers in the intelligence arms race:
Homo erectus. I’d ask them how their property rights are doing these days. But they’ve been hard to reach lately.
Chimpanzees. Hey, we can still find chimpanzees! As humans, we actually mostly value chimpanzees and we spend some resources to improve their lives. But to put it politely, chimpanzees are incredibly marginalized and pushed into niche habitats. Or occasionally they’re living in zoos.
When you lose an evolutionary arms race to a smarter competitor that wants the same resources, the default result is that you get some niche habitat in Africa, and maybe a couple of sympathetic AIs sell “Save the Humans” T-shirts and donate 1% of their profits to helping the human beings.
You don’t typically get a set of nice property rights inside an economic system you can no longer understand or contribute to.
But Chimps and Homo Erectus lack(ed) their own property rights regimes.
OK, let me unpack my argument a bit.
Chimps actually have pretty elaborate social structure. They know their family relationships, they do each other favors, and they know who not to trust. They even basically go to war against other bands. Humans, however, were never integrated into this social system.
Homo erectus made stone tools and likely a small amount of decorative art (the Trinil shell engravings, for example). This maybe have implied some light division of labor, though likely not long distance trade. Again, none of this helped H erectus in the long run.
Way back a couple of decades ago, there was a bit in Charles Stross’s Accelerando about “Economics 2.0”, a system of commerce invented by the AIs. The conceit was that, by definition, no human could participate in or understand Economics 2.0, any more than chimps can understand the stock market.
So my actual argument is that when you lose the intelligence race badly enough, your existing structures of cooperation and economic production just get ignored. The new entities on the scene don’t necessarily value your production, and you eventually wind up controlling very little of the land, etc.
This could be avoided by something like Culture Minds that (in Iain Banks’ stories) essentially kept humans as pampered pets. But that was fundamentally a gesture of good will.
yes this is a risk, but I think it can be avoided by humans getting a faithful AI agent wrapper with fiduciary responsibility.
The concept and institutions for fiduciary responsibility were not around when humans surpassed apes, otherwise apes could have hired humans to act as their agents and simply invested in the human gold and later stock market.
I don’t think you need Banksian benevolent AIs for this, an agent can be trustlessly faithful via modern trust minimized AI. Ethereum is already working on a nascent standard for this, ERC-8004.