I interpret this as pandering to people who cannot presently comprehend how you can be alive without a body. I doubt it is a serious plan. But I think its more likely there is no plan to do anything but get funded.
jhuffman
Karma: 959
So you would contrive to make it illegal and/or impossible for an upload to do any productive work? At least none that they receive more benefit from than the average of all others?
I still find myself tempted to make fun of people who are just today learning the lesson of that comic—e.g. those original down-voters.
This “mechanism” provides no facility for spontaneous generation of new matter and energy resources.
You probably shouldn’t spend 100% of your time exploring even very high quality counter arguments. Rather, you should probably spend some time on it.
I’m interested in your ideas for such an app—how would you interact with it? The only ideas I come up with amount to window dressing on a journal.
Yes, 100% is my expectation for both outcomes as well. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a fork.
Other issue is that it is a hostage situation, and even in normal human hostage situations, whenever you should, or should not give the money to the hostage holder, depends solely to whenever you have higher probability that the hostages will be killed (or tortured) if money are given, than if money are not given.
Actually in real life, we also consider the future consequences of unspecified potential future hostage takers who may be motivated to take hostages if they see a hostage taker paid off. This is ostensibly why the USG will not (directly) pay off a hostage taker.
Also, we have to consider the value of the money, and our next best alternative to saving a hostages life. For example, if Dr. Evil is holding a hostage (doesn’t matter who) for $1B, and you know we will not catch him if you pay him off, then you should probably just let him execute the hostage and use the money to buy food for a few thousand starving people somewhere who are just as desperate.
I’m sure this is true in some cases but not all of them. I’ve barely ever talked to anyone about my own fall from grace as a child and then again after a relapse in my teens, it was almost a completely introspective experience although what is interesting is that my relapse into Christianity was very much a social product. Still, atheism has never been an important part of my identity. In my mind the fact that I don’t watch televised sporting contests sets me further apart from my peers than the fact that I’m an atheist.
I de-converted my wife just by being an atheist and never making a big deal about it one way or another; I think she just needed to see an example of someone getting along fine without the theism.
Comes off as transparent and condescending to me. I’m sure I can tell the difference between my dead grandmother signalling me with spoons and my own memories, thank you very much.
Yes but these effects can be very short-lived.
On the subject of 2.
People have speculated “could a government stop Bitcoin”.
The answer is an unqualified “Yes”, and the project will tell you the same thing. All it takes is having over 51% of the computing power of the world’s mining operations.
A fork of Bitcoin called CoildCoin was killed by Luke-Jr. He explains his reasons for it a few pages into that thread, but basically he considered CoiledCoin to be fraudulent and/or a threat to Bitcoin. He claims he used only his own resources but its possible he used a large mining pool he operates.
Now the Bitcoin FAQ will tell you that there are a lot of limits to what you can do with 51% - little more than double-spending your own coins. That is enough though—once people know that the blockchain is corrupt they will walk away from it.
I’ve seen estimates that for only $80MM you could have an order of magnitutde more processeing power than the entire pool of miners that were operating at the peak last summer (many of who could come back online quickly). This puts the destruction of Bitcoin easily into the operating budgets of most Nation states, lots of companies and quite a few individuals.
Yes but this trade benefits both parties. While the labor is “cheap” it pays better than if there weren’t so many foreign companies building factories in that labor market. So in terms of aggregate quality of life I do not think this can be much of an objection in itself—the fact that all sorts of exploitation typically accompanies such trade not withstanding.
I understand what you are saying though: the total cost in person-hours to maintain a particular standard of living should maybe be taken into account—although I think this can be misleading. For example in places where labor for personal servants is very cheap there are a lot more of them—some of my peers who are from India had several servants working in their home, driving their cars etc. It was almost looked at as an obligation to hire these people. In every other way to measure wealth they made more money after immigrating to the US but of course could not afford such services here.
Maybe but its still easily 50 years away. People are “messy” but they are so cheap and you need so few of them—there is no capital tied up in them at all its just a month-to-month expense. Even if you lease equipment you are still paying for the cost of the capital tied up in it. The diminishing returns for automating such a small cost will ensure its continuity for quite some time I think.
Are you saying we should not buy things from poor people?
I think a lot of people make this mistake, to think that “very bad things” is equivalently bad to extinction—or even is extinction. It is unlikely that large scale nuclear war will extinguish the species, it is far beyond unlikely that global warning would extinguish humans. It is extremely unlikely large scale biological weapons usage by terrorists or states would extinguish humanity. But because we know for a certain fact that these things could happen and have even come close to happening or are beginning to happen, and because they are so terrible its just not really possible for most people to keep enough perspective to recognize that things not likely to happen really soon but that will eventually be possible are actually much more dangerous in terms of capability for extinction.
All these labor saving devices, even factories, are integrated by humans. While the productivity per worker skyrockets (fewer workers needed per X units of output), there is no factory that runs without people who do generally very easy tasks that are very difficult to automate.
The summer after high school I worked in a spray bottle factory. Yes, we made the spray nozzles like come on a bottle of windex. My job was to keep the bins full of the little parts that fed into the machine that assembled them. I also helped unload the boxes of the parts from the carts and stacked them near the bin where they needed to go. Someone else somewhere had a job to handle the “raw” plastic for machine that melted and molded the parts I needed. Someone else put the different parts in different boxes sorted for the cart driver.
These tasks were of course absurdly easy for any human to do with about five minutes of training. Somehow automating all this together into a single factory chain would have presented enormous challenges though. Because the labor is so cheap I could easily imagine that factory will run the same way for the next fifty years.
I think that may the only job that could be safe for a given length of time. Eventually what you own will be superseded by something owned by someone else, and what you own will be worthless. If you are constantly investing in different products, markets and technologies you might stay ahead of it for a long time but that isn’t what most people think of as a “safe job”. I think what people are asking for in a “safe job” does not and will not exist.
The set of average european noblemen from 500 years ago does not include 8th century anyones. Yes, I am aware that different people hold different opinions. You asked a very speculative question about what an average member might think. So, thats all I have to say about it.
I’ve never seen this or even imagined it can happen. I can’t even write comments or pseudo-code that fast (without pause) because I can’t design that fast.