I would contest the frame here. In particular I think it won’t hold up because things won’t stay as capital-bound as they are now, and that seriously messes with the continuity required for today’s investments to maintain their relative portion of the pie. What do you think of this part?
(EDIT: Okay I think you are referencing this sort of thing with “most people can’t invest in assets that grow at the average rate”, but I still take issue with some picture in which everything is apportioned to assets that grow or something like that.)
To expand: I think today’s capital earns its gains mostly because it is a required input, which thereby gives it a lot of negotiating power. And I think this falls off pretty sharply in time, in the limit of technological development.
(I should say, so long as it remains the case that we need lots of coordinated work to build compute engines to run intelligence, “capital” seems to remain meaningful in the old ways. But a lot of things seem possible with a nanofactory and the right information about how to use it, and at a point like that eld-capital isn’t a relevant bottleneck.)
And while we can imagine some way that neo-capital continues to project its force in a profit-grabbing way in the future, I think the mechanism is pretty different than today, and probably has to involve more literal force, and is unlikely to have solid continuity with today-capital.
Can you be more specific about what the bottlenecks are when capital and labor are no longer bottlenecks?
If different factions control different amounts of mass and energy in the industrializing solar system, won’t that also translate into military power if they need to? This is true even if the economy is doubling every 6 months or faster, though if it’s doubling every 2 weeks, maybe things are different.
I would contest the frame here. In particular I think it won’t hold up because things won’t stay as capital-bound as they are now, and that seriously messes with the continuity required for today’s investments to maintain their relative portion of the pie. What do you think of this part?
(EDIT: Okay I think you are referencing this sort of thing with “most people can’t invest in assets that grow at the average rate”, but I still take issue with some picture in which everything is apportioned to assets that grow or something like that.)
To expand: I think today’s capital earns its gains mostly because it is a required input, which thereby gives it a lot of negotiating power. And I think this falls off pretty sharply in time, in the limit of technological development.
(I should say, so long as it remains the case that we need lots of coordinated work to build compute engines to run intelligence, “capital” seems to remain meaningful in the old ways. But a lot of things seem possible with a nanofactory and the right information about how to use it, and at a point like that eld-capital isn’t a relevant bottleneck.)
And while we can imagine some way that neo-capital continues to project its force in a profit-grabbing way in the future, I think the mechanism is pretty different than today, and probably has to involve more literal force, and is unlikely to have solid continuity with today-capital.
Can you be more specific about what the bottlenecks are when capital and labor are no longer bottlenecks?
If different factions control different amounts of mass and energy in the industrializing solar system, won’t that also translate into military power if they need to? This is true even if the economy is doubling every 6 months or faster, though if it’s doubling every 2 weeks, maybe things are different.