I think that, just like “takeoff-capable” AI is a wrong concept because technology advances everywhere and makes takeoff a moving target, “post-scarcity” is also a wrong concept because competition prevents post-scarcity. Competition can burn arbitrary amounts of resources, and if you unilaterally refuse to burn them, you just get taken over. Maybe we could have post-scarcity in a world with only one powerful benevolent agent giving handouts to everyone else, but that’s what the debate was about :-)
About wealth taxes, I think the point is pretty relevant: if people were good enough by nature, there wouldn’t be so much easily preventable homelessness today and so on. To me, history gives an upper bound on how “good by nature” we can consider people to be. That bound is quite low and there’s no reason to think it’ll be higher. But again this was covered in the debate.
Actually I think clarifies our difference in opinion for me.
I’ve been a bit puzzled about your projected futures. If you aren’t including post-scarcity as a big part of your model, the disagreement makes sense. If I weren’t, I’d agree with you that leaders would always be using the lions share and leaving scraps for the remainder. It’s just that the scraps become arbitrarily huge in a post-scarcity scenario.
Are you envisioning something like the US government, China, Altman, AModia, Zuckerbergerg, and/or Musk physically in other nations or in orbit, all of them building spaceships or weapons or fortifications or palaces with their self-replicating robotic factories? That seems like something that could happen, to me. But I’d think that period of intense competition would be fairly brief. You can’t spend all your resources on weapons forever without using them. The situaation seems likely to become stable somehow. And even if it doesn’t, spending even 1% of the new exponentially increasing pie on giving people what they want would provide more material well-being than we’ve ever had.
People like to feel like they get a say, but even in a democracy they really don’t have much say and don’ta feel they do. So I’m not sure that will make life worse either.
Anyway, I’d like to see more concrete scenarios laid out to flesh out your intuitions on competition preventing post-scarcity dynamics. You don’t have to do that, but I’d love it if someone would. Because I think you are in the majority in the whole population. I don’t know how opinions fall out in this community or other specific intellectual communities.
The first half of my debate statement was mostly about attacking the “they will give us 1%” argument. And a few months before that, I made another long comment attacking that argument, which you saw. Clearly we still disagree on this point, but I don’t want to argue it further; we’ve said our pieces.
As to my scenarios of the future, I think there’s no need to imagine orbital lasers and such. It’ll just be competition at the top and impoverishment at the bottom.
I think that, just like “takeoff-capable” AI is a wrong concept because technology advances everywhere and makes takeoff a moving target, “post-scarcity” is also a wrong concept because competition prevents post-scarcity. Competition can burn arbitrary amounts of resources, and if you unilaterally refuse to burn them, you just get taken over. Maybe we could have post-scarcity in a world with only one powerful benevolent agent giving handouts to everyone else, but that’s what the debate was about :-)
About wealth taxes, I think the point is pretty relevant: if people were good enough by nature, there wouldn’t be so much easily preventable homelessness today and so on. To me, history gives an upper bound on how “good by nature” we can consider people to be. That bound is quite low and there’s no reason to think it’ll be higher. But again this was covered in the debate.
Actually I think clarifies our difference in opinion for me.
I’ve been a bit puzzled about your projected futures. If you aren’t including post-scarcity as a big part of your model, the disagreement makes sense. If I weren’t, I’d agree with you that leaders would always be using the lions share and leaving scraps for the remainder. It’s just that the scraps become arbitrarily huge in a post-scarcity scenario.
Are you envisioning something like the US government, China, Altman, AModia, Zuckerbergerg, and/or Musk physically in other nations or in orbit, all of them building spaceships or weapons or fortifications or palaces with their self-replicating robotic factories? That seems like something that could happen, to me. But I’d think that period of intense competition would be fairly brief. You can’t spend all your resources on weapons forever without using them. The situaation seems likely to become stable somehow. And even if it doesn’t, spending even 1% of the new exponentially increasing pie on giving people what they want would provide more material well-being than we’ve ever had.
People like to feel like they get a say, but even in a democracy they really don’t have much say and don’ta feel they do. So I’m not sure that will make life worse either.
Anyway, I’d like to see more concrete scenarios laid out to flesh out your intuitions on competition preventing post-scarcity dynamics. You don’t have to do that, but I’d love it if someone would. Because I think you are in the majority in the whole population. I don’t know how opinions fall out in this community or other specific intellectual communities.
The first half of my debate statement was mostly about attacking the “they will give us 1%” argument. And a few months before that, I made another long comment attacking that argument, which you saw. Clearly we still disagree on this point, but I don’t want to argue it further; we’ve said our pieces.
As to my scenarios of the future, I think there’s no need to imagine orbital lasers and such. It’ll just be competition at the top and impoverishment at the bottom.