I’m not incredibly familiar with Robin Hanson’s arguments;
I’m going to try to summarize them (feedback on how well that works please). One relates to how uploads come to dominate humanity, and another is how ruthless resource exporters come to dominate their section of the universe.
Uploads beating Humans
An upload will be as mentally capable as a human, but faster
An upload will be easy to copy
Uploads require much less to survive
Basically, the argument goes that uploads will be able to replace large swathes of normal humans who work on cognitive tasks, such as lawyers, engineers, writers, academics, programmers, etc.
Imagine a mathematician who has literally 100 times as much time as you do. Where you spend a day on a problem, they have months.
Once you have any uploads willing to be duplicated, they will be willing to be duplicated for as many tasks as they can be paid to do.
As supply of labor goes up, wages go down.
Wages can only go down to subsistence level before you can’t push them any lower.
As long as there is incentive to copy, people will copy, and supply will increase until wages go down to upload subsistence level in a wide variety of fields. If uploads can control robots, then they number of fields they dominate is even higher.
Since the subsistence level of uploads is much cheaper than natural humans, then maintaining a body is going to be ridiculously expensive, and beyond the reach of most people. Unable to support themselves, many people die, leaving mostly the uploads.
Expanders beating Non-expanders
The Nash equilibrium for controlling matter in the universe is to use everything you can to the cause of getting more matter to control. When you’re up against an enemy like that, they will have more stuff than you with which to destroy you and repurpose your matter.
Groups which encounter planets and turn as much as they can into probes to do more colonization will wind up reaching and controlling more planets than groups that don’t.
I’d say that’s a good summary. To complete the grimness of the picture, the vast swarms of uploads toiling for the absolute minimum subsistence would be massively annihilated whenever they’d become even slightly obsolete or otherwise a suboptimal way to use the hardware on which they are running, and a recession in an upload economy would have a similar effect as a bad harvest leading to a cataclysmic famine among Malthusian farmers. As Hanson put it, “When life is cheap, death is cheap as well.”
On top of all that, to make things even more ghastly from the perspective of LW ideals, Hanson has made the shrewd observation that in order to make their subsistence more bearable, their behavior more productive and cooperative, and the acceptance of their eventual demise easier, uploads may well end up having their minds indoctrinated with religion and ideology, not trained in LW-style epistemic rationality (beyond what’s necessary for their main task, of course).
So the universe gets tiled with a sea of barely surviving people similar to humans, who are optimized towards whatever makes them most likely to remain productive in their dreary existence.
So like, the opposite of everyone becoming happy and rich.
Our ancestors were designed with pleasure and pain to motivate them in a near subsistence world. … Our descendants will be similarly adapted to find joy and meaning in their near subsistence lives.
I guess it was a stretch to say that its not like everyone becoming happy.
I don’t think that uploads would require nearly as much matter to lead a happy life. Basically right now if I want to have a nice, warm, comfortable place to sleep and a stomach full of nutritious food, I need to rearrange lots of stuff to physically construct those.
Contrast that with an upload, who can simply have a computer stimulating his emulated neurons in such a way as to make them believe that they were.
I think it’s likely that uploads will need a simulated environment anyway, and I doubt if a pleasant one is harder to simulate than an unpleasant one.
For that reason, I personally think that an upload is more likely to be living in a state of sensory darkness and deprivation (which I would find pretty terrifying) from having no stimulation than in an unpleasant simulation for not being able to afford a nicer one.
uploads may well end up having their minds indoctrinated with religion and ideology, not trained in LW-style epistemic rationality
IIRC, he says that religion and ideology are symptoms of modern-day wealth/excess, and future folk won’t be able to afford non-adaptive/non-correct beliefs. He calls our current position in history as “The Dreamtime”
we live in the brief but important “dreamtime” when delusions drove history. Our descendants will remember our era as the one where the human capacity to sincerely believe crazy non-adaptive things, and act on those beliefs, was dialed to the max.
IIRC, he says that religion and ideology are symptoms of modern-day wealth/excess, and future folk won’t be able to afford non-adaptive/non-correct beliefs. He calls our current position in history as “The Dreamtime”
Well, it is possible that he has said inconsistent things at different times, but in the posts I linked in my above comment, he argues (in my opinion plausibly) that the social mechanisms of control and coordination for ems may well end up being based on similar (epistemically) irrational beliefs as in historical human societies, i.e. religion, ideology, strict custom, etc. (“Onward Christian robots!,” as he put it.)
[Edit—forgot to add: ] And of course, adaptive and correct beliefs are not always one and the same, and it’s a huge fallacy to argue as if they were.
Basically, the argument goes that uploads will be able to replace large swathes of normal humans who work on cognitive tasks, such as lawyers, engineers, writers, academics, programmers, etc.
This resembles the “Luddite fallacy”, which was debunked by experience, which is to say, had the Luddites been right that the majority of the workforce would be replaced by a much more productive minority working the labor-saving machines (compare: humans would be replaced by much more productive uploads), we would already be living in something like a Hansonian upload dystopia, which we are not.
What instead happened was that the labor force stayed the same and production greatly expanded, and labor reaped a large part of the benefit of the expansion.
Extending what actually happened in the Luddite scenario to the upload scenario, then we might expect the amount of work to be done to expand to fully accomodate the number of people (human and upload) available to do it.
What of the fact that uploads need much less to survive? Won’t this mean that they will be willing to work for much less, and therefore drive their human competitors out of business? Well, we in the US already earn far more than we need to barely survive, which is very little. So in a sense we are already modeling the upload scenario with respect to the low requirement to survive. So it is not obvious that uploads will end up working for upload-subsistence-level.
As long as there is incentive to copy, people will copy, and supply will increase until wages go down to upload subsistence level in a wide variety of fields.
But demand will also increase. If you increase the total number of people, it’s true that you are increasing the total number of potential producers (sellers), but you are also increasing the total number of consumers (buyers) by the exact same amount. You are simply expanding the population. And we have already seen the effects of this. The population of the US expanded enormously over the past 200 years, and wages have not gone down.
Am I forgetting the low subsistence level of uploads? Won’t the heavy competition for jobs reduce salaries to subsistence level? Well, this is what might have been predicted for the same reason in the Luddite scenario, and it turned out not to be the case. Here is an alternative suggestion: if the number of workers increase, say, by a factor of 1000, so that the effective population balloons from 5 billion to 5 trillion, then the work will also increase by that same factor, so that the amount of work done by each person remains the same and the standard of living enjoyed by each person remains the same.
But let’s assume that the following is true:
Since the subsistence level of uploads is much cheaper than natural humans, then maintaining a body is going to be ridiculously expensive, and beyond the reach of most people. Unable to support themselves, many people die, leaving mostly the uploads.
Indulge me and let’s suppose a billion (non-upload) humans agree to trade only with each other and not with uploads (don’t worry, I know about the instability of such arrangements and I’ll relax this restriction soon enough, I just want to set up the scenario). In that case, they can continue surviving with an economy just like the pre-upload economy, in which people were after all surviving and doing quite well. Now let’s relax the restriction. The humans start trading freely with uploads. We are now in the “free trade” versus “protectionism” scenario, and economists have plenty to say about that, mostly in favor of free trade as being to the mutual benefit of both populations. Vladimir has repeatedly made the point that comparative advantage is not all it’s cracked up to be—but neither is it nothing. While it is probable that free trade will put some sectors of the human economy largely out of business (but couldn’t they just move to a different sector?) nor was this ever denied by economists arguing for free trade (putting certain sectors largely out of business in one country is after all what must be entailed by the country’s population focusing on areas where they have a comparative advantage), free trade does not lead to the entire economy going out of business and everybody starving to death.
By the way, if possible and if it is necessary to survive, I intend to become an upload. Here is my plan for increasing my own productive power beyond that of a single upload, thus increasing my standard of living. I duplicate myself many times, a thousandfold, but with constraints. The thousand copies will remain in existence for, say, an hour subjective time, during which time they will work, and then all will be deleted except for one randomly selected copy. This will not be much like death for the 999 copies; it will be much more like losing memories, memories which are likely to be lost anyway through normal forgetfulness. (See Derek Parfit Reasons and Persons Part 3 for full discussion of personal identity which I essentially agree with.) If I repeat this a few times, I will build up an intuitive expectation of survival and a willingness to keep doing it. Moreover it might be possible to merge some of my memories, minimizing loss of significant memories.
I am not saying that Hanson is wrong. I am just pointing out areas of the argument which seem to me to be incomplete. By the way, it was my understanding that Hanson’s dystopia is independent of whether we upload or not. Rather, it is the very nature of life to expand, expand, expand, until a malthusian limit is reached. Now, this argument is quite a bit stronger. But I am here dealing specifically with the upload scenario.
This resembles the “Luddite fallacy”, which was debunked by experience… Extending what actually happened in the Luddite scenario to the upload scenario, then we might expect the amount of work to be done to expand to fully accomodate the number of people (human and upload) available to do it.
This is not a correct comparison. None of the technological advances in human history so far have produced machines capable of replacing human labor across the board at much lower cost. Uploads would be a totally unprecedented development in this regard.
The closest historical analogy is what happened to draft horses after motor transport was invented. The amount of work in pulling things has indeed expanded, but it is no longer possible for a draft horse to earn subsistence, since machines can do it by orders of magnitude cheaper and better.
The population of the US expanded enormously over the past 200 years, and wages have not gone down.
That’s because the economic growth and technical progress have been too fast for the slow and fickle human reproduction to catch up. With uploads, in contrast, the population growth necessary to hit the Malthusian limit is possible practically instantaneously—and there will be incentives in place to make it happen.
As for the remainder of your post, rather than criticizing your reasoning point by point, let me ask you: why didn’t the draft horses benefit from trading with motor transport then, but ended up in slaughterhouses instead? Your entire argument can be reworded as telling an American draft horse circa 1920 that he has no reason to fear displacement by motor vehicles. What is the essential difference when it comes to human labor versus uploads supposed to be?
None of the technological advances in human history so far have produced machines capable of replacing human labor across the board at much lower cost.
You seem to think that the luddite fallacy depends on the possibility of substitution not being across the board. I’ve already answered a similar point by jimrandomh but I will answer again. Suppose that we have a series of revolutions in one sector after another in which labor-saving machines greatly increase the productivity of workers within that sector. So, what will happen? First, let’s see what will happen in just one sector. According to Wikipedia, the main critique of luddism is as follows:
The term “Luddite fallacy” has become a concept in neoclassical economics reflecting the belief that labour-saving technologies (i.e., technologies that increase output-per-worker) increase unemployment by reducing demand for labour. Neoclassical economists believe this argument is fallacious because they assert that instead of seeking to keep production constant by employing a smaller and more productive workforce, employers increase production while keeping workforce size constant.
So, what will happen according to this critique is that the workforce size remains constant within the sector that has been affected by the change. Hold your horses—I know what you’re going to say, but one thing at a time. Recall, we are trying to predict what will happen if there is a series of tech revolutions in one sector after another eventually covering all sectors. The result, based on the Wikipedia quote, is that all sector employment will remain the same.
Now, what you were going to say is, I think, that when labor saving devices hit a sector, labor shifts to other sectors. Am I right? We have the example of agriculture which seems to show this happening. So we want to know, what happens if labor-saving devices hit all sectors? Let’s say they hit them simultaneously. If the solution to the luddite nightmare was that labor would shift to another sector, then the solution here must be that labor would shift entirely out of the economy, there not being any other sectors to shift to—right? But that does not follow.
We can reproduce the same sector-shifting phenomenon with immigration. In the US, immigrants have taken over certain sectors of the economy in many regions. In my region, Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Latin Americans have taken over many fast food kitchens. The result has been that Americans have shifted into other sectors.
But what if immigrants came to the US and entered into every sector simultaneously? Would they totally displace Americans completely out of the economy? No, they would not. They would simply expand the economy.
So there’s a puzzle here. If immigrants enter one sector, American labor shifts away from the sector. But if immigrants enter all sectors, Americans stay in place. What explains this? What explains is is that the reason for the shift is relative wages. Americans shift to sectors where wages are higher. But if wages in all sectors remain the same (which they very well might in an economy which is simply expanding) then there won’t be any shifting. But here’s another objection: immigrants depress wages in the sectors they enter. Therefore if they entered all sectors simultaneously, they would depress all wages simultaneously, right? But that does not at all follow. Immigrants depress wages in the sector they enter but they do so only by offering more value for money to the customer—in short, they depress wages in their sector only by boosting effective wages in other sectors. If they enter all sectors simultaneously, they depression and boosting could very well cancel out.
With uploads, in contrast, the population growth necessary to hit the Malthusian limit
Yes, the Malthusian limit. I specifically said this was a strong argument. The arguments that I answered were not Malthusian. It’s not because of the Malthusian limit that uploads would supposedly replace humans, but because they are better and cheaper—which is not because of the Malthusian limit. I do have many thoughts on Hanson’s Malthusian argument, but they have nothing specifically to do with uploads. I want to postpone discussion about the Malthusian limit for another time. Here I am specifically talking about uploads versus humans at a time before the Malthusian limit is reached.
why didn’t the draft horses benefit from trading with motor transport then, but ended up in slaughterhouses instead? Your entire argument can be reworded as telling an American draft horse circa 1920 that he has no reason to fear displacement by motor vehicles. What is the essential difference when it comes to human labor versus uploads supposed to be?
Every species has a natural niche in which the species is fully able to support itself, and the niche can only support so many members of that species. Draft horses greatly outnumbered their natural niche, but they did not outnumber their artificial niche—the niche created for them by humans who were supporting them in exchange for work. When humans ceased to support them, then the draft horses, which greatly outnumbered their natural niche, died out. For all I know some of the wild horses are descendants draft horses.
The niche of a species is roughly determined by the total amount of food that the species is able to produce or obtain. Draft horses obtained food from humans, and could obtain only a small fraction of that food by themselves. Humans do not outnumber their natural niche, because humans make enough food to support themselves.
In order for uploads to lead to a mass dying off of humans, uploads would have to massively reduce the total quantity of food that humans produce. This would require that the uploads take over the land. However, Hanson’s upload scenario depends on uploads needing very few resources. Let’s take this to the limit and suppose that uploads require zero resources and work for free, demanding absolutely nothing in return. This merely takes to an extreme the very factors that were used to argue that humans will starve to death in the upload scenario. Given uploads that use no resources and work for free, it is not obvious that uploads would take over any agricultural land. So the same amount of food can still be produced.
It had been imagined that uploads would replace doctors, academics, etc. But none of this reduces the amount of food available to humans. And actually it increases the amount of medicine, education, etc. available to humans.
What you are observing are the effects of relatively small rates of immigration, small enough that all kinds of complex and non-obvious effects are possible in a dynamic and diversified economy, especially since the skills profile of the immigrants is very different from the native population. However, if you kept adding an unlimited number of immigrants to a country at arbitrarily fast rates, including an unlimited number of immigrants skilled at each imaginable profession, the wages of all kinds of labor would indeed plummet. At some point, they would fall all the way down to subsistence, and if you kept adding extra people beyond that, they would fall even further and there would be mass famine.
Remember, we’re not talking about a country that accepts an annual number of immigrants equal to 1%, or 5%, or even 10% or 20% of its population. We’re talking about a magical world where the number of people can be increased by orders of magnitude overnight, with readily available skills in any work you can imagine. That is what uploads mean, and there’s no way you can extrapolate the comparably infinitesimal trends from ordinary human societies to such extremes.
As for the issues of land, housing, and food production, that would also be fatal for humans. Uploads still require non-zero resources to subsist, and since the marginal cost of copying them is zero as long as there are resources available, they will be multiplied until they fill all the available resources. Now, a human requires a plot of land to produce his food and another plot of land for lodging (future technology may shrink the former drastically, but not to the level of an upload’s requirements, and moreover the latter must remain substantial).
Unless the human owns enough land, he must pay the land rent to subsist (directly for the lodging land and through his food bills for the farming land). But the rent of land must be at least as high as the opportunity cost of forsaking the option to fill it up with a vast farm of slaving uploads and reap the profits, which will be many orders of magnitude above what a human can earn. It would be as if presently there existed a creature large enough to fill a whole state and requiring its entire agricultural output to subsist, but incapable of doing more productive work than a single human. How could such a creature support itself?
However, if you kept adding an unlimited number of immigrants to a country at arbitrarily fast rates, including an unlimited number of immigrants skilled at each imaginable profession, the wages of all kinds of labor would indeed plummet....
That is what uploads mean, and there’s no way you can extrapolate the comparably infinitesimal trends from ordinary human societies to such extremes.
One the one hand you express near certainty about what would happen (wages “would indeed plummet”), and on the other hand you caution about extrapolating from the known to the unknown.
My position, as you will recall, is not that Hanson is wrong, but that his argument is incomplete. My position is skeptical, in the sense that I see important gaps in the argument (at least as reproduced here). You are defending Hanson’s prediction—the prediction about which I am expressing skepticism. Warnings about extrapolating from the known to the unknown work in favor of skepticism about predictions and against confidence in predictions, and therefore they work in my favor.
Uploads still require non-zero resources to subsist
Indeed they do, but my point is that if you look at the two ends of this spectrum—one end at which they take up the same amount of resources as humans, and the other end in which they take up nothing, at both ends there is no clear reason to believe that humans will die off. Now, this does not necessarily means that something funny won’t happen in between, but since it is very common that if A causes B then more of A will cause more of B, then the fact that taking A to an extreme does not obviously cause any more B should at least make a person who reasoned that A caused B start to suspect that maybe they missed something.
Imagining that the uploads take zero resources and charge zero for their services is unrealistic, granted—about as unrealistic as imagining that you are traveling along at the speed of light and trying to imagine what you observe. Unrealistic, yes, but not necessarily useless. It’s inherently hard to think about most things, and so as an assist—a dangerous assist granted—it is useful to consider cases which are simpler to think about, as extremes often are.
You are tremendously confident in a certain prediction. I am not confident. I am objecting, pointing out why certain supposed extrapolations do not really follow because the larger picture matters—the larger picture being what you call “all kinds of complex and non-obvious effects” and which you continue to neglect and which you argue does not matter if the increase is sufficiently fast—as if increasing the speed of the transition would by magic somehow enhance the effects that you happen to have considered while negating the effects that I have pointed out. Which is not the case. If an upload replaces a human at some task because the upload does it better for less, then the customer is immediately benefits. So the speed of that neglected effect (benefit to customer) is precisely as fast as the speed of the considered effect (harm to competitor). Speed up one by a million times, and the other also speeds up by a million times, because they are flip sides of precisely the same occurrence.
But the rent of land must be at least as high as the opportunity cost of filling it up with swarms of slaving uploads and reaping the profits, which will be many orders of magnitude above what a human can earn. It would be as if presently there existed a creature large enough to fill a whole state and requiring its entire agricultural output to subsist, but incapable of doing more productive work than a single human.
To say that one quantity would be much larger than another does not mean that the second quantity would be absolutely low. The first quantity could be absolutely very high.
We already have a kind of land use similar to what you are describing: skyscrapers. These allow an enormous number of people to occupy a minuscule square footage. So, where is the mass starvation? Do you think that the American economy would be enhanced by blowing up skyscrapers full of people? Or do you think that the American economy would be harmed? I think the latter.
But rent would definitely be lowered in NYC if all of its buildings were blown up. So, yeah, rent is high because of the high concentration of minds. But lowering the rent would not accompany a net benefit to humanity. I don’t think we would be benefited by lowering rents in NYC by means of blowing up the buildings with the people in them. So, why would we necessarily be benefited by blowing up a square yard of land with trillions of minds on it? And if we would not be benefited by their destruction, then we would not be harmed by their introduction.
How could such a creature support itself?
That scenario imagines a creature with a certain absolute size and a certain absolute productivity. Given that absolute size and that absolute productivity, the creature cannot support itself. But given only that a human is much less productive than a trillion minds in a box, then we cannot draw any conclusions about how well the human can support themselves.
One the one hand you express near certainty about what would happen (wages “would indeed plummet”), and on the other hand you caution about extrapolating from the known to the unknown.
I don’t caution about extrapolating from the known to the unknown in this case—on the contrary. The economic effects of the (relatively) low rates of migration and population growth in today’s world are unclear, complicated, and controversial, since these phenomena are intertwined with many others of similar magnitudes. In contrast, the economic effects of the upload scenario (or the infinite immigration in the thought experiment) are much clearer, since these feature a few simple effects that are strong enough to dominate everything else.
[I]f you look at the two ends of this spectrum—one end at which [robots/uploads] take up the same amount of resources as humans, and the other end in which they take up nothing, at both ends there is no clear reason to believe that humans will die off.
In the first case, a straightforward analysis leads to the classic Malthusian scenario, i.e. both human and robot wages are reduced to the barest subsistence, which happens to be the same for both. (This assuming robots can be multiplied cheaply and rapidly.)
The second case is more interesting. Suppose we find a way to summon magical ghosts which will do any work doable by humans for nothing in return. Now all labor becomes free, like air. The cost of capital becomes equal to the cost of land (which in economic parlance also includes other natural resources) necessary to produce it -- once you have that, you can just summon the ghosts to make whatever you want out of it. Your fate as a human depends on whether you own enough land to enable you to subsist with the help of ghosts. If not, you’re screwed, since you can’t sell your labor to afford the land rent to lodge and feed yourself, and even the ghosts can’t summon land out of thin air.
The realistic upload scenarios are somewhere between these two grim possibilities.
We already have a kind of land use similar to what you are describing: skyscrapers. These allow an enormous number of people to occupy a minuscule square footage. So, where is the mass starvation?
However, Manhattan is situated right next to a vast and much less densely populated continent from which it’s cheap to bring stuff, so that food prices in Manhattan reflect the farming land rent in these neighboring places, not Manhattan itself. If the land rents in the whole world were as high as in Manhattan, you bet there would be mass starvation. (And with uploads, it’s hyper-Manhattan everywhere.)
In contrast, the economic effects of the upload scenario (or the infinite immigration in the thought experiment) are much clearer, since these feature a few simple effects that are strong enough to dominate everything else.
The only effect that I discern that dominates everything else involves hitting the Malthusian limit—which I have already allowed is a strong argument (though not, I think, decisive—but I’m putting off that discussion for some other time). The other elements of the argument look to me like a question of ignoring the unseen, of assuming that the non-obvious is trivial.
In the first case, a straightforward analysis leads to the classic Malthusian scenario, i.e. both human and robot wages are reduced to the barest subsistence
Again my response to mention of the Malthusian scenario is that I want to put off discussion of that. However, the first case as I intended it (without cheap duplication) was essentially what we have now, which is not a Malthusian scenario. I assumed all costs are the same as for humans, including duplication. So, we would simply have two kinds of human, a flesh one and a silicon/metal one (say).
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 and high productivity don’t have any clear effect one way or another, because consider the following two scenarios:
1) You have a trillion minds in a cube (hence: low resource use and high productivity).
2) You have a cube-shaped portal to another world, and on that other world there are a trillion minds.
The scenarios are (from your point of view) effectively identical. But the second scenario is just the international trade scenario. Free trade is usually better, draft horses notwithstanding.
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). So now the population of Manhattan is half the (previous) population of the US, because of the people in the box. The net economic impact is positive, for the same reason that the impact of trade with Japan is positive. Rent goes up in Manhattan a bit, because of the advantage of being near the portal to Japan. But the higher rent necessarily is counterbalanced by the higher advantage of being near the portal since that is the reason for the higher rent, so that the net effect is not obviously either positive or negative (I could argue that it is actually positive). Notice that at this point there is not necessarily any displacement of Americans out of the economy, even though there are 150 million minds in a box. Displacement doesn’t even begin at this point, even though the population of the box is comparable to the population of the US (i.e. half).
If this is about right, then everything happens at or near the Malthusian limit. That’s what we need to look out for. Not merely the existence of masses of uploads, so long as the Malthusian limit remains far.
The cost of capital becomes equal to the cost of land (which in economic parlance also includes other natural resources) necessary to produce it
Let’s specify the scenario more explicitly. We assume the ghosts are completely friendly, innumerable, will do anything we want for free, but need powered bodies to do it (they have only the minutest ability to direct physical events). I think this comes closest to the upload scenario. (If we assume the ghosts have significant psychokinetic power then the scenario is I think very different from the upload scenario). The ghosts are essentially Indian subcontractors, only much cheaper (free) and much more numerous (infinite).
Immediately I think we can see that there are fairly severe bottlenecks on the ability of uploads, sorry, ghosts to direct significant physical activity. There may be infinitely many ghosts, but there are at any given time only so many powered bodies for them to direct. Alongside these powered bodies directed by external ghosts, there are powered bodies directed by internal ghosts—namely, human bodies, which have their own ghosts. There is no upper limit on the mental work that ghosts can do, but there is a severe limit on the physical work that ghosts can do no matter how many ghosts there are. So we would have an economy which was essentially all a mind-work economy, with only a minuscule fraction (zero percent, considering the infinity of minds) of the population (human or ghost) doing any physical work.
Anyway, for there to be any Malthusian result, it seems to me that it would have to involve competition for resources between human bodies and robot bodies, not between humans and ghosts directly. But I wanted to discuss events prior to hitting any Malthusian limit.
So, all a person has to do to get a ghost to help him is to build a robot with a ghost interface and supply the robot with energy. One more specification—we suppose that ghosts will help whoever owns the bodies (that easily takes care of the decision about who they help).
In principle, once a person owns a number of ghost-directed robot bodies, the bodies can do all the work required to keep themselves (and him) alive and might furthermore be able to increase their own number (by buying raw materials on the market and constructing another body, which can then be inhabited by a new ghost).
For a long time, until the Malthusian limit is reached, it’s not obvious that this would significantly affect the employability of humans. Some humans would create robots and get their robots to work for them, but not all humans would have robots, and those humans would have to trade with each other as usual. And even the humans with robots would have to trade with the wider economy to get raw materials (just as slave plantation owners did), and therefore probably trade with robotless humans. After a long time, a very long time, a Malthusian limit might be reached, but the unemployability of people before that happens seems to me to be greatly exaggerated.
However, Manhattan is situated right next to a vast and much less densely populated continent from which it’s cheap to bring stuff, so that food prices in Manhattan reflect the farming land rent in these neighboring places, not Manhattan itself. If the land rents in the whole world were as high as in Manhattan, you bet there would be mass starvation.
You are again assuming that the Malthusian limit is already reached. You have relied over and over on the Malthusian argument, which in my original comment—the one that you objected to—I had already acknowledged as strong (and as not specific to uploads), and I had already said that I was not critiquing it (yet).
Initially, long before the Malthusian limit is reached, it makes sense to situate the uploads in a highly populated area, like Manhattan (a cousin of mine explained that companies are buying warehouses near Wall Street and filling them with computers, because light speed is a limiting factor; it’s no good to have the trading computers situated far from Wall Street). And the effect of placing the uploads in Manhattan should be much like the effect of turning a city into an international port—which raises the local rents high only to the extent that it is made more worthwhile to be close to the port, so that the net effect of the raised rents is not obviously negative (in fact I would argue positive). Far from Manhattan rents would not be much affected, and meanwhile people would benefit to some degree, just as they would increased trade from a port.
It would be a long time before the whole world turned into one large city.
Adding one new upload box is a bit like adding one new port. Imagine that every day somebody opens a new port to a new Japan on a new planet. What’s the effect? Well, suppose that there is already five ports open to five Japans within a ten mile radius, and somebody opens a new port to a new Japan right next door. You ask me, this has the aroma of diminishing marginal returns about it. The port owner tries to profit from trade to a Japan via his port, but the nearness of the other ports (and the existence of hundreds or thousands of ports further away) means that he can’t charge monopolistic prices. The amount of profit that a person can make from his port to a new Japan rapidly approaches the cost of setting up the port, possibly long before the countryside is completely covered with ports to Japans, and beyond that point there is no net profit to building yet another port to yet another Japan. Since that happens long before ports to Japans completely cover the landscape, then there is still much land left over for people to live on.
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.
Basically, the argument goes that uploads will be able to replace large swathes of normal humans who work on cognitive tasks, such as lawyers, engineers, writers, academics, programmers, etc.
This resembles the “Luddite fallacy”, which was debunked by experience, which is to say, had the Luddites been right that the majority of the workforce would be replaced by a much more productive minority working the labor-saving machines (compare: humans would be replaced by much more productive uploads), we would already be living in something like a Hansonian upload dystopia, which we are not.
No, these are not the same. Labor-saving machines replace humans with a smaller number of humans, at some ratio. If the economy grows by that same ratio, then the demand for humans is back where it started. Labor-saving machines also apply only to some domains but not others, so the tasks which machines can’t do become limiting and expand. But with uploads, there is no such ratio; no operators are needed, and there are no domains of things uploads can’t do. so growing the economy further does not make humans valuable again.
It does not matter whether they are the same or not—what matters is whether the differences change the conclusion.
Labor-saving machines replace humans with a smaller number of humans, at some ratio. If the economy grows by that same ratio, then the demand for humans is back where it started.
Why does this change the conclusion? You need to explain how this makes the conclusion any different. You have an “if” there. I can propose an equivalent “if” in my scenario—and I did, which is that the total economy, both supply and demand, expands along with the population (where population = human + upload). Remember, the uploads are potential demanders, not just suppliers.
Labor-saving machines also apply only to some domains but not others, so the tasks which machines can’t do become limiting and expand. But with uploads, there is no such ratio; no operators are needed, and there are no domains of things uploads can’t do. so growing the economy further does not make humans valuable again.
Again, why does this change the conclusion? You say that there are no domains of things that uploads can’t do. But you could say the same thing of new babies. There are no things that new babies can’t do. So, suppose that our population is increased a hundredfold by new babies. Now we have 99 new-population for each old-population. And they can do everything the old-population can do. So, is the old-population no longer valuable? No—the economy simply expands a hundredfold. The 99 new-population compete for the exact same jobs that the old-population were doing, sure, but they are also 99 new customers. The new people buying stuff exactly matches the new people selling stuff. So the old-population remains in business.
I’m going to try to summarize them (feedback on how well that works please). One relates to how uploads come to dominate humanity, and another is how ruthless resource exporters come to dominate their section of the universe.
Uploads beating Humans
An upload will be as mentally capable as a human, but faster
An upload will be easy to copy
Uploads require much less to survive
Basically, the argument goes that uploads will be able to replace large swathes of normal humans who work on cognitive tasks, such as lawyers, engineers, writers, academics, programmers, etc.
Imagine a mathematician who has literally 100 times as much time as you do. Where you spend a day on a problem, they have months.
Once you have any uploads willing to be duplicated, they will be willing to be duplicated for as many tasks as they can be paid to do.
As supply of labor goes up, wages go down.
Wages can only go down to subsistence level before you can’t push them any lower.
As long as there is incentive to copy, people will copy, and supply will increase until wages go down to upload subsistence level in a wide variety of fields. If uploads can control robots, then they number of fields they dominate is even higher.
Since the subsistence level of uploads is much cheaper than natural humans, then maintaining a body is going to be ridiculously expensive, and beyond the reach of most people. Unable to support themselves, many people die, leaving mostly the uploads.
Expanders beating Non-expanders
The Nash equilibrium for controlling matter in the universe is to use everything you can to the cause of getting more matter to control. When you’re up against an enemy like that, they will have more stuff than you with which to destroy you and repurpose your matter.
Groups which encounter planets and turn as much as they can into probes to do more colonization will wind up reaching and controlling more planets than groups that don’t.
I’d say that’s a good summary. To complete the grimness of the picture, the vast swarms of uploads toiling for the absolute minimum subsistence would be massively annihilated whenever they’d become even slightly obsolete or otherwise a suboptimal way to use the hardware on which they are running, and a recession in an upload economy would have a similar effect as a bad harvest leading to a cataclysmic famine among Malthusian farmers. As Hanson put it, “When life is cheap, death is cheap as well.”
On top of all that, to make things even more ghastly from the perspective of LW ideals, Hanson has made the shrewd observation that in order to make their subsistence more bearable, their behavior more productive and cooperative, and the acceptance of their eventual demise easier, uploads may well end up having their minds indoctrinated with religion and ideology, not trained in LW-style epistemic rationality (beyond what’s necessary for their main task, of course).
So the universe gets tiled with a sea of barely surviving people similar to humans, who are optimized towards whatever makes them most likely to remain productive in their dreary existence.
So like, the opposite of everyone becoming happy and rich.
Well, in Hanson’s words: Poor Folks Do Smile
I guess it was a stretch to say that its not like everyone becoming happy.
I don’t think that uploads would require nearly as much matter to lead a happy life. Basically right now if I want to have a nice, warm, comfortable place to sleep and a stomach full of nutritious food, I need to rearrange lots of stuff to physically construct those.
Contrast that with an upload, who can simply have a computer stimulating his emulated neurons in such a way as to make them believe that they were.
I think it’s likely that uploads will need a simulated environment anyway, and I doubt if a pleasant one is harder to simulate than an unpleasant one.
For that reason, I personally think that an upload is more likely to be living in a state of sensory darkness and deprivation (which I would find pretty terrifying) from having no stimulation than in an unpleasant simulation for not being able to afford a nicer one.
IIRC, he says that religion and ideology are symptoms of modern-day wealth/excess, and future folk won’t be able to afford non-adaptive/non-correct beliefs. He calls our current position in history as “The Dreamtime”
Well, it is possible that he has said inconsistent things at different times, but in the posts I linked in my above comment, he argues (in my opinion plausibly) that the social mechanisms of control and coordination for ems may well end up being based on similar (epistemically) irrational beliefs as in historical human societies, i.e. religion, ideology, strict custom, etc. (“Onward Christian robots!,” as he put it.)
[Edit—forgot to add: ] And of course, adaptive and correct beliefs are not always one and the same, and it’s a huge fallacy to argue as if they were.
This resembles the “Luddite fallacy”, which was debunked by experience, which is to say, had the Luddites been right that the majority of the workforce would be replaced by a much more productive minority working the labor-saving machines (compare: humans would be replaced by much more productive uploads), we would already be living in something like a Hansonian upload dystopia, which we are not.
What instead happened was that the labor force stayed the same and production greatly expanded, and labor reaped a large part of the benefit of the expansion.
Extending what actually happened in the Luddite scenario to the upload scenario, then we might expect the amount of work to be done to expand to fully accomodate the number of people (human and upload) available to do it.
What of the fact that uploads need much less to survive? Won’t this mean that they will be willing to work for much less, and therefore drive their human competitors out of business? Well, we in the US already earn far more than we need to barely survive, which is very little. So in a sense we are already modeling the upload scenario with respect to the low requirement to survive. So it is not obvious that uploads will end up working for upload-subsistence-level.
But demand will also increase. If you increase the total number of people, it’s true that you are increasing the total number of potential producers (sellers), but you are also increasing the total number of consumers (buyers) by the exact same amount. You are simply expanding the population. And we have already seen the effects of this. The population of the US expanded enormously over the past 200 years, and wages have not gone down.
Am I forgetting the low subsistence level of uploads? Won’t the heavy competition for jobs reduce salaries to subsistence level? Well, this is what might have been predicted for the same reason in the Luddite scenario, and it turned out not to be the case. Here is an alternative suggestion: if the number of workers increase, say, by a factor of 1000, so that the effective population balloons from 5 billion to 5 trillion, then the work will also increase by that same factor, so that the amount of work done by each person remains the same and the standard of living enjoyed by each person remains the same.
But let’s assume that the following is true:
Indulge me and let’s suppose a billion (non-upload) humans agree to trade only with each other and not with uploads (don’t worry, I know about the instability of such arrangements and I’ll relax this restriction soon enough, I just want to set up the scenario). In that case, they can continue surviving with an economy just like the pre-upload economy, in which people were after all surviving and doing quite well. Now let’s relax the restriction. The humans start trading freely with uploads. We are now in the “free trade” versus “protectionism” scenario, and economists have plenty to say about that, mostly in favor of free trade as being to the mutual benefit of both populations. Vladimir has repeatedly made the point that comparative advantage is not all it’s cracked up to be—but neither is it nothing. While it is probable that free trade will put some sectors of the human economy largely out of business (but couldn’t they just move to a different sector?) nor was this ever denied by economists arguing for free trade (putting certain sectors largely out of business in one country is after all what must be entailed by the country’s population focusing on areas where they have a comparative advantage), free trade does not lead to the entire economy going out of business and everybody starving to death.
By the way, if possible and if it is necessary to survive, I intend to become an upload. Here is my plan for increasing my own productive power beyond that of a single upload, thus increasing my standard of living. I duplicate myself many times, a thousandfold, but with constraints. The thousand copies will remain in existence for, say, an hour subjective time, during which time they will work, and then all will be deleted except for one randomly selected copy. This will not be much like death for the 999 copies; it will be much more like losing memories, memories which are likely to be lost anyway through normal forgetfulness. (See Derek Parfit Reasons and Persons Part 3 for full discussion of personal identity which I essentially agree with.) If I repeat this a few times, I will build up an intuitive expectation of survival and a willingness to keep doing it. Moreover it might be possible to merge some of my memories, minimizing loss of significant memories.
I am not saying that Hanson is wrong. I am just pointing out areas of the argument which seem to me to be incomplete. By the way, it was my understanding that Hanson’s dystopia is independent of whether we upload or not. Rather, it is the very nature of life to expand, expand, expand, until a malthusian limit is reached. Now, this argument is quite a bit stronger. But I am here dealing specifically with the upload scenario.
Constant:
This is not a correct comparison. None of the technological advances in human history so far have produced machines capable of replacing human labor across the board at much lower cost. Uploads would be a totally unprecedented development in this regard.
The closest historical analogy is what happened to draft horses after motor transport was invented. The amount of work in pulling things has indeed expanded, but it is no longer possible for a draft horse to earn subsistence, since machines can do it by orders of magnitude cheaper and better.
The economist Nick Rowe wrote an excellent analysis along these lines (see also the very good comment thread):
http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2011/01/robots-slaves-horses-and-malthus.html
That’s because the economic growth and technical progress have been too fast for the slow and fickle human reproduction to catch up. With uploads, in contrast, the population growth necessary to hit the Malthusian limit is possible practically instantaneously—and there will be incentives in place to make it happen.
As for the remainder of your post, rather than criticizing your reasoning point by point, let me ask you: why didn’t the draft horses benefit from trading with motor transport then, but ended up in slaughterhouses instead? Your entire argument can be reworded as telling an American draft horse circa 1920 that he has no reason to fear displacement by motor vehicles. What is the essential difference when it comes to human labor versus uploads supposed to be?
You seem to think that the luddite fallacy depends on the possibility of substitution not being across the board. I’ve already answered a similar point by jimrandomh but I will answer again. Suppose that we have a series of revolutions in one sector after another in which labor-saving machines greatly increase the productivity of workers within that sector. So, what will happen? First, let’s see what will happen in just one sector. According to Wikipedia, the main critique of luddism is as follows:
So, what will happen according to this critique is that the workforce size remains constant within the sector that has been affected by the change. Hold your horses—I know what you’re going to say, but one thing at a time. Recall, we are trying to predict what will happen if there is a series of tech revolutions in one sector after another eventually covering all sectors. The result, based on the Wikipedia quote, is that all sector employment will remain the same.
Now, what you were going to say is, I think, that when labor saving devices hit a sector, labor shifts to other sectors. Am I right? We have the example of agriculture which seems to show this happening. So we want to know, what happens if labor-saving devices hit all sectors? Let’s say they hit them simultaneously. If the solution to the luddite nightmare was that labor would shift to another sector, then the solution here must be that labor would shift entirely out of the economy, there not being any other sectors to shift to—right? But that does not follow.
We can reproduce the same sector-shifting phenomenon with immigration. In the US, immigrants have taken over certain sectors of the economy in many regions. In my region, Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Latin Americans have taken over many fast food kitchens. The result has been that Americans have shifted into other sectors.
But what if immigrants came to the US and entered into every sector simultaneously? Would they totally displace Americans completely out of the economy? No, they would not. They would simply expand the economy.
So there’s a puzzle here. If immigrants enter one sector, American labor shifts away from the sector. But if immigrants enter all sectors, Americans stay in place. What explains this? What explains is is that the reason for the shift is relative wages. Americans shift to sectors where wages are higher. But if wages in all sectors remain the same (which they very well might in an economy which is simply expanding) then there won’t be any shifting. But here’s another objection: immigrants depress wages in the sectors they enter. Therefore if they entered all sectors simultaneously, they would depress all wages simultaneously, right? But that does not at all follow. Immigrants depress wages in the sector they enter but they do so only by offering more value for money to the customer—in short, they depress wages in their sector only by boosting effective wages in other sectors. If they enter all sectors simultaneously, they depression and boosting could very well cancel out.
Yes, the Malthusian limit. I specifically said this was a strong argument. The arguments that I answered were not Malthusian. It’s not because of the Malthusian limit that uploads would supposedly replace humans, but because they are better and cheaper—which is not because of the Malthusian limit. I do have many thoughts on Hanson’s Malthusian argument, but they have nothing specifically to do with uploads. I want to postpone discussion about the Malthusian limit for another time. Here I am specifically talking about uploads versus humans at a time before the Malthusian limit is reached.
Every species has a natural niche in which the species is fully able to support itself, and the niche can only support so many members of that species. Draft horses greatly outnumbered their natural niche, but they did not outnumber their artificial niche—the niche created for them by humans who were supporting them in exchange for work. When humans ceased to support them, then the draft horses, which greatly outnumbered their natural niche, died out. For all I know some of the wild horses are descendants draft horses.
The niche of a species is roughly determined by the total amount of food that the species is able to produce or obtain. Draft horses obtained food from humans, and could obtain only a small fraction of that food by themselves. Humans do not outnumber their natural niche, because humans make enough food to support themselves.
In order for uploads to lead to a mass dying off of humans, uploads would have to massively reduce the total quantity of food that humans produce. This would require that the uploads take over the land. However, Hanson’s upload scenario depends on uploads needing very few resources. Let’s take this to the limit and suppose that uploads require zero resources and work for free, demanding absolutely nothing in return. This merely takes to an extreme the very factors that were used to argue that humans will starve to death in the upload scenario. Given uploads that use no resources and work for free, it is not obvious that uploads would take over any agricultural land. So the same amount of food can still be produced.
It had been imagined that uploads would replace doctors, academics, etc. But none of this reduces the amount of food available to humans. And actually it increases the amount of medicine, education, etc. available to humans.
Constant,
What you are observing are the effects of relatively small rates of immigration, small enough that all kinds of complex and non-obvious effects are possible in a dynamic and diversified economy, especially since the skills profile of the immigrants is very different from the native population. However, if you kept adding an unlimited number of immigrants to a country at arbitrarily fast rates, including an unlimited number of immigrants skilled at each imaginable profession, the wages of all kinds of labor would indeed plummet. At some point, they would fall all the way down to subsistence, and if you kept adding extra people beyond that, they would fall even further and there would be mass famine.
Remember, we’re not talking about a country that accepts an annual number of immigrants equal to 1%, or 5%, or even 10% or 20% of its population. We’re talking about a magical world where the number of people can be increased by orders of magnitude overnight, with readily available skills in any work you can imagine. That is what uploads mean, and there’s no way you can extrapolate the comparably infinitesimal trends from ordinary human societies to such extremes.
As for the issues of land, housing, and food production, that would also be fatal for humans. Uploads still require non-zero resources to subsist, and since the marginal cost of copying them is zero as long as there are resources available, they will be multiplied until they fill all the available resources. Now, a human requires a plot of land to produce his food and another plot of land for lodging (future technology may shrink the former drastically, but not to the level of an upload’s requirements, and moreover the latter must remain substantial).
Unless the human owns enough land, he must pay the land rent to subsist (directly for the lodging land and through his food bills for the farming land). But the rent of land must be at least as high as the opportunity cost of forsaking the option to fill it up with a vast farm of slaving uploads and reap the profits, which will be many orders of magnitude above what a human can earn. It would be as if presently there existed a creature large enough to fill a whole state and requiring its entire agricultural output to subsist, but incapable of doing more productive work than a single human. How could such a creature support itself?
One the one hand you express near certainty about what would happen (wages “would indeed plummet”), and on the other hand you caution about extrapolating from the known to the unknown.
My position, as you will recall, is not that Hanson is wrong, but that his argument is incomplete. My position is skeptical, in the sense that I see important gaps in the argument (at least as reproduced here). You are defending Hanson’s prediction—the prediction about which I am expressing skepticism. Warnings about extrapolating from the known to the unknown work in favor of skepticism about predictions and against confidence in predictions, and therefore they work in my favor.
Indeed they do, but my point is that if you look at the two ends of this spectrum—one end at which they take up the same amount of resources as humans, and the other end in which they take up nothing, at both ends there is no clear reason to believe that humans will die off. Now, this does not necessarily means that something funny won’t happen in between, but since it is very common that if A causes B then more of A will cause more of B, then the fact that taking A to an extreme does not obviously cause any more B should at least make a person who reasoned that A caused B start to suspect that maybe they missed something.
Imagining that the uploads take zero resources and charge zero for their services is unrealistic, granted—about as unrealistic as imagining that you are traveling along at the speed of light and trying to imagine what you observe. Unrealistic, yes, but not necessarily useless. It’s inherently hard to think about most things, and so as an assist—a dangerous assist granted—it is useful to consider cases which are simpler to think about, as extremes often are.
You are tremendously confident in a certain prediction. I am not confident. I am objecting, pointing out why certain supposed extrapolations do not really follow because the larger picture matters—the larger picture being what you call “all kinds of complex and non-obvious effects” and which you continue to neglect and which you argue does not matter if the increase is sufficiently fast—as if increasing the speed of the transition would by magic somehow enhance the effects that you happen to have considered while negating the effects that I have pointed out. Which is not the case. If an upload replaces a human at some task because the upload does it better for less, then the customer is immediately benefits. So the speed of that neglected effect (benefit to customer) is precisely as fast as the speed of the considered effect (harm to competitor). Speed up one by a million times, and the other also speeds up by a million times, because they are flip sides of precisely the same occurrence.
To say that one quantity would be much larger than another does not mean that the second quantity would be absolutely low. The first quantity could be absolutely very high.
We already have a kind of land use similar to what you are describing: skyscrapers. These allow an enormous number of people to occupy a minuscule square footage. So, where is the mass starvation? Do you think that the American economy would be enhanced by blowing up skyscrapers full of people? Or do you think that the American economy would be harmed? I think the latter.
But rent would definitely be lowered in NYC if all of its buildings were blown up. So, yeah, rent is high because of the high concentration of minds. But lowering the rent would not accompany a net benefit to humanity. I don’t think we would be benefited by lowering rents in NYC by means of blowing up the buildings with the people in them. So, why would we necessarily be benefited by blowing up a square yard of land with trillions of minds on it? And if we would not be benefited by their destruction, then we would not be harmed by their introduction.
That scenario imagines a creature with a certain absolute size and a certain absolute productivity. Given that absolute size and that absolute productivity, the creature cannot support itself. But given only that a human is much less productive than a trillion minds in a box, then we cannot draw any conclusions about how well the human can support themselves.
I don’t caution about extrapolating from the known to the unknown in this case—on the contrary. The economic effects of the (relatively) low rates of migration and population growth in today’s world are unclear, complicated, and controversial, since these phenomena are intertwined with many others of similar magnitudes. In contrast, the economic effects of the upload scenario (or the infinite immigration in the thought experiment) are much clearer, since these feature a few simple effects that are strong enough to dominate everything else.
In the first case, a straightforward analysis leads to the classic Malthusian scenario, i.e. both human and robot wages are reduced to the barest subsistence, which happens to be the same for both. (This assuming robots can be multiplied cheaply and rapidly.)
The second case is more interesting. Suppose we find a way to summon magical ghosts which will do any work doable by humans for nothing in return. Now all labor becomes free, like air. The cost of capital becomes equal to the cost of land (which in economic parlance also includes other natural resources) necessary to produce it -- once you have that, you can just summon the ghosts to make whatever you want out of it. Your fate as a human depends on whether you own enough land to enable you to subsist with the help of ghosts. If not, you’re screwed, since you can’t sell your labor to afford the land rent to lodge and feed yourself, and even the ghosts can’t summon land out of thin air.
The realistic upload scenarios are somewhere between these two grim possibilities.
However, Manhattan is situated right next to a vast and much less densely populated continent from which it’s cheap to bring stuff, so that food prices in Manhattan reflect the farming land rent in these neighboring places, not Manhattan itself. If the land rents in the whole world were as high as in Manhattan, you bet there would be mass starvation. (And with uploads, it’s hyper-Manhattan everywhere.)
The only effect that I discern that dominates everything else involves hitting the Malthusian limit—which I have already allowed is a strong argument (though not, I think, decisive—but I’m putting off that discussion for some other time). The other elements of the argument look to me like a question of ignoring the unseen, of assuming that the non-obvious is trivial.
Again my response to mention of the Malthusian scenario is that I want to put off discussion of that. However, the first case as I intended it (without cheap duplication) was essentially what we have now, which is not a Malthusian scenario. I assumed all costs are the same as for humans, including duplication. So, we would simply have two kinds of human, a flesh one and a silicon/metal one (say).
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 and high productivity don’t have any clear effect one way or another, because consider the following two scenarios:
1) You have a trillion minds in a cube (hence: low resource use and high productivity).
2) You have a cube-shaped portal to another world, and on that other world there are a trillion minds.
The scenarios are (from your point of view) effectively identical. But the second scenario is just the international trade scenario. Free trade is usually better, draft horses notwithstanding.
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). So now the population of Manhattan is half the (previous) population of the US, because of the people in the box. The net economic impact is positive, for the same reason that the impact of trade with Japan is positive. Rent goes up in Manhattan a bit, because of the advantage of being near the portal to Japan. But the higher rent necessarily is counterbalanced by the higher advantage of being near the portal since that is the reason for the higher rent, so that the net effect is not obviously either positive or negative (I could argue that it is actually positive). Notice that at this point there is not necessarily any displacement of Americans out of the economy, even though there are 150 million minds in a box. Displacement doesn’t even begin at this point, even though the population of the box is comparable to the population of the US (i.e. half).
If this is about right, then everything happens at or near the Malthusian limit. That’s what we need to look out for. Not merely the existence of masses of uploads, so long as the Malthusian limit remains far.
Let’s specify the scenario more explicitly. We assume the ghosts are completely friendly, innumerable, will do anything we want for free, but need powered bodies to do it (they have only the minutest ability to direct physical events). I think this comes closest to the upload scenario. (If we assume the ghosts have significant psychokinetic power then the scenario is I think very different from the upload scenario). The ghosts are essentially Indian subcontractors, only much cheaper (free) and much more numerous (infinite).
Immediately I think we can see that there are fairly severe bottlenecks on the ability of uploads, sorry, ghosts to direct significant physical activity. There may be infinitely many ghosts, but there are at any given time only so many powered bodies for them to direct. Alongside these powered bodies directed by external ghosts, there are powered bodies directed by internal ghosts—namely, human bodies, which have their own ghosts. There is no upper limit on the mental work that ghosts can do, but there is a severe limit on the physical work that ghosts can do no matter how many ghosts there are. So we would have an economy which was essentially all a mind-work economy, with only a minuscule fraction (zero percent, considering the infinity of minds) of the population (human or ghost) doing any physical work.
Anyway, for there to be any Malthusian result, it seems to me that it would have to involve competition for resources between human bodies and robot bodies, not between humans and ghosts directly. But I wanted to discuss events prior to hitting any Malthusian limit.
So, all a person has to do to get a ghost to help him is to build a robot with a ghost interface and supply the robot with energy. One more specification—we suppose that ghosts will help whoever owns the bodies (that easily takes care of the decision about who they help).
In principle, once a person owns a number of ghost-directed robot bodies, the bodies can do all the work required to keep themselves (and him) alive and might furthermore be able to increase their own number (by buying raw materials on the market and constructing another body, which can then be inhabited by a new ghost).
For a long time, until the Malthusian limit is reached, it’s not obvious that this would significantly affect the employability of humans. Some humans would create robots and get their robots to work for them, but not all humans would have robots, and those humans would have to trade with each other as usual. And even the humans with robots would have to trade with the wider economy to get raw materials (just as slave plantation owners did), and therefore probably trade with robotless humans. After a long time, a very long time, a Malthusian limit might be reached, but the unemployability of people before that happens seems to me to be greatly exaggerated.
You are again assuming that the Malthusian limit is already reached. You have relied over and over on the Malthusian argument, which in my original comment—the one that you objected to—I had already acknowledged as strong (and as not specific to uploads), and I had already said that I was not critiquing it (yet).
Initially, long before the Malthusian limit is reached, it makes sense to situate the uploads in a highly populated area, like Manhattan (a cousin of mine explained that companies are buying warehouses near Wall Street and filling them with computers, because light speed is a limiting factor; it’s no good to have the trading computers situated far from Wall Street). And the effect of placing the uploads in Manhattan should be much like the effect of turning a city into an international port—which raises the local rents high only to the extent that it is made more worthwhile to be close to the port, so that the net effect of the raised rents is not obviously negative (in fact I would argue positive). Far from Manhattan rents would not be much affected, and meanwhile people would benefit to some degree, just as they would increased trade from a port.
It would be a long time before the whole world turned into one large city.
Adding one new upload box is a bit like adding one new port. Imagine that every day somebody opens a new port to a new Japan on a new planet. What’s the effect? Well, suppose that there is already five ports open to five Japans within a ten mile radius, and somebody opens a new port to a new Japan right next door. You ask me, this has the aroma of diminishing marginal returns about it. The port owner tries to profit from trade to a Japan via his port, but the nearness of the other ports (and the existence of hundreds or thousands of ports further away) means that he can’t charge monopolistic prices. The amount of profit that a person can make from his port to a new Japan rapidly approaches the cost of setting up the port, possibly long before the countryside is completely covered with ports to Japans, and beyond that point there is no net profit to building yet another port to yet another Japan. Since that happens long before ports to Japans completely cover the landscape, then there is still much land left over for people to live on.
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.
No, these are not the same. Labor-saving machines replace humans with a smaller number of humans, at some ratio. If the economy grows by that same ratio, then the demand for humans is back where it started. Labor-saving machines also apply only to some domains but not others, so the tasks which machines can’t do become limiting and expand. But with uploads, there is no such ratio; no operators are needed, and there are no domains of things uploads can’t do. so growing the economy further does not make humans valuable again.
It does not matter whether they are the same or not—what matters is whether the differences change the conclusion.
Why does this change the conclusion? You need to explain how this makes the conclusion any different. You have an “if” there. I can propose an equivalent “if” in my scenario—and I did, which is that the total economy, both supply and demand, expands along with the population (where population = human + upload). Remember, the uploads are potential demanders, not just suppliers.
Again, why does this change the conclusion? You say that there are no domains of things that uploads can’t do. But you could say the same thing of new babies. There are no things that new babies can’t do. So, suppose that our population is increased a hundredfold by new babies. Now we have 99 new-population for each old-population. And they can do everything the old-population can do. So, is the old-population no longer valuable? No—the economy simply expands a hundredfold. The 99 new-population compete for the exact same jobs that the old-population were doing, sure, but they are also 99 new customers. The new people buying stuff exactly matches the new people selling stuff. So the old-population remains in business.
Real wages for most Americans have gone down over the past few decades.
Admittedly this is speculated to be due to returning to a more “natural” two-class society rather than population changes.
There is no way for me to answer that without getting deeply into politics.