Cheap duplication is the key factor, not low resource use or high productivity, because duplication is, of course, the mechanism by which a population reaches the Malthusian limit.
Low resource use is by itself not a problem. If suddenly half the humanity gained the magic ability to subsist on much less resources, that wouldn’t cause wages to drop, ceteris paribus. In principle, it wouldn’t even have to have any visible consequences, at least in places where everyone’s labor can earn wages well above subsistence so there’s no need to ever test the limit.
High productivity is a mixed bag. If suddenly half the humanity magically became much more productive, it would benefit the rest by making some things cheaper (basically all stuff that can be mass-produced), but it would also hurt them by bidding up the price of zero-sum things (most notably status and land). The net effect would depend on the concrete scenario.
Cheap duplication is an express ticket to a Malthusian equilibrium. Now, the point is that in the Malthusian equilibrium, you are definitely worse off if there is other labor that is far more productive and/or capable of subsisting on less resources, because this will push your wage below your subsistence. This is why the ordinary human Malthusian situation means dire but (usually) survivable poverty, but in the robot/upload Malthusian situation humans are kaput.
Suppose that I were living in Manhattan and there were no Japan in the world. Then one day, I find a box, and inside that box is Japan (in fact the box is a portal to Japan which is on some other world). [...]
The effect of the box depends on how much you have to pay the minds in the box for their services. The problem in your example is that it fails to distinguish clearly between two scenarios:
The box is a portal to another rich country with its own rich endowment of land and capital and accordingly high wages, so you have to trade expensively for the labor of these folks. This won’t (in general) drop the wages on the U.S. side.
The box contains millions of uploads willing to work for their subsistence wage of a few cents a year. In this case, the U.S. wages of people competing with them will drop significantly, and if the number of uploads is large enough, the wages will plummet asymptotically down to the upload subsistence level.
The problem with your subsequent “port to Japan” analogy is similar. If Japan is in the business of selling dirt-cheap labor that directly competes with yours, then this is certainly very bad news for you if you sell labor for a living. If it’s a high-wage country in its own right, everything is great.
Regarding the ghosts, I should have been more precise about my assumptions, which were that ghosts can do any intellectual or physical labor that humans do nowadays, but they can’t conjure land and resources out of nothing. So you’re screwed if you don’t own enough land that you can make the ghosts eke out sufficient food and lodging out of it, because your labor is worth zero, and even capital is worth only as much as the land rent opportunity cost that goes into making it.
This is very different from the upload scenario only if you assume that as the price of mental labor falls to near-zero, the price of physical labor remains high because machines adequate to replace human labor are expensive. This however seems very unlikely to me—what are these tasks that couldn’t be cheaply automated once uploads are available to control the machinery?
But I wanted to discuss events prior to hitting any Malthusian limit.
The whole point is that with uploads the Malthusian limit (and that’s the nasty upload-subsistence one) is reached in the blink of an eye.
The whole point is that with uploads the Malthusian limit (and that’s the nasty upload-subsistence one) is reached in the blink of an eye.
Since this is the whole point, then rather than prolong the rest of the exchange I will eventually consider the Malthusian limit, whether there is any defense against it and if so what it is, and what it would really come to. However, later. Maybe much later.
Low resource use is by itself not a problem. If suddenly half the humanity gained the magic ability to subsist on much less resources, that wouldn’t cause wages to drop, ceteris paribus. In principle, it wouldn’t even have to have any visible consequences, at least in places where everyone’s labor can earn wages well above subsistence so there’s no need to ever test the limit.
High productivity is a mixed bag. If suddenly half the humanity magically became much more productive, it would benefit the rest by making some things cheaper (basically all stuff that can be mass-produced), but it would also hurt them by bidding up the price of zero-sum things (most notably status and land). The net effect would depend on the concrete scenario.
Cheap duplication is an express ticket to a Malthusian equilibrium. Now, the point is that in the Malthusian equilibrium, you are definitely worse off if there is other labor that is far more productive and/or capable of subsisting on less resources, because this will push your wage below your subsistence. This is why the ordinary human Malthusian situation means dire but (usually) survivable poverty, but in the robot/upload Malthusian situation humans are kaput.
The effect of the box depends on how much you have to pay the minds in the box for their services. The problem in your example is that it fails to distinguish clearly between two scenarios:
The box is a portal to another rich country with its own rich endowment of land and capital and accordingly high wages, so you have to trade expensively for the labor of these folks. This won’t (in general) drop the wages on the U.S. side.
The box contains millions of uploads willing to work for their subsistence wage of a few cents a year. In this case, the U.S. wages of people competing with them will drop significantly, and if the number of uploads is large enough, the wages will plummet asymptotically down to the upload subsistence level.
The problem with your subsequent “port to Japan” analogy is similar. If Japan is in the business of selling dirt-cheap labor that directly competes with yours, then this is certainly very bad news for you if you sell labor for a living. If it’s a high-wage country in its own right, everything is great.
Regarding the ghosts, I should have been more precise about my assumptions, which were that ghosts can do any intellectual or physical labor that humans do nowadays, but they can’t conjure land and resources out of nothing. So you’re screwed if you don’t own enough land that you can make the ghosts eke out sufficient food and lodging out of it, because your labor is worth zero, and even capital is worth only as much as the land rent opportunity cost that goes into making it.
This is very different from the upload scenario only if you assume that as the price of mental labor falls to near-zero, the price of physical labor remains high because machines adequate to replace human labor are expensive. This however seems very unlikely to me—what are these tasks that couldn’t be cheaply automated once uploads are available to control the machinery?
The whole point is that with uploads the Malthusian limit (and that’s the nasty upload-subsistence one) is reached in the blink of an eye.
Since this is the whole point, then rather than prolong the rest of the exchange I will eventually consider the Malthusian limit, whether there is any defense against it and if so what it is, and what it would really come to. However, later. Maybe much later.