From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu Aug 27 1998 - 11:29:48 MDT
"J. Maxwell Legg" <income@ihug.co.nz> writes:
> Yes, people here have proposed that the first SIs or what have you will come
> from the super wealthy. Also, excuse me; but when you sandbag by saying it
> takes a limited understanding of economics and politics to become worried over
> these matters aren't you being patronizing, to say the least?
Sorry if I did sound patronizing, that wasn't the meaning. But I'm
really serious about the need for understanding more about economics
before making assumptions that "only the rich will have access to
technology X" (and the common implication that they will transcend and
use the rest for feedstock).
The problem here is the assumption that technology doesn't spread, or
that it spreads very slowly. This is not borne out by observation (see
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/97/0707/6001170a.htm), and economics
suggests that there are strong incentives for the makers of technology
X to sell it to as many people as possible rather than a small
minority.
A typical example is cellular phones - ten years ago they were only
for the fairly well-off, today they are becoming extremely common
among ordinary people. Another example is penicillin. If you look at
how new technologies have spread, you will find that the rate of
spread in our society has increased over time (I'm not sure of the
between-society rate).
Limiting the production to keep the price high is usually unprofitable
compared to selling a lot more products to a lower price (especially
if you can get advantages of scale in the process and if the spread of
the technology is in the early stage when you don't have to compete
with many others for the still untapped market).
I'm not very knowledgeable about the theory of monopolies (which is a
rather contentious area), but as far as I know technological
monopolies are rather rare and unstable. If you can come up with an
invention, I most likely can do the same - there are today not many
"secret formulas" around that are impossible to replicate. Most of the
products are based on well-known information, earlier patents and
local engineering and design skills. This means that if you build a
frobnitz you will have a monopoly for a little while, until I come out
with my own version (it seems to be rather hard to patent away all the
competition; I think Xerox managed it for a while, but they lost it in
the end).
If somebody discovers a life extension therapy that works well, then
it will likely first be used by the rich and neophiliac. But the
market and demand is so huge, that even if it is very expensive a lot
of people are going to spend extraordinary amounts of brainpower to
find ways of bringing down the costs and mass-market it. In addition,
the competitors to the originators (if we assume the method has been
patented by a company) will be looking for something similar too - if
they can bring out their version, they might catch a large market
share. In the end, it is very likely (unless the method hinges on
something intrinsically expensive - which is rather unlikely) that
most people would have access to the therapy. The early adapters might
have got therapy a few years earlier than the others, but in the long
run that doesn't matter.
Now to my main rant (?):
What I really hate to see on this list is the postings that are really
based on "Hollywood" science, technology and economics, the kind of
stuff you see in movies: inventions are usually made by solitary
geniuses with no outside support, working completely from their own
principles in such a creative way that nobody else can replicate their
discovery without reading their secret notebooks; companies prefer to
sell products for exorbiant fees to ultra-rich people than go for the
mass-market, and they immediately try to use illegal means to squash
any competition; new inventions are always so profoundly new that they
give the owner nearly unlimited potential power and nobody can stop
him or her, and so on.
This is complete bullshit, of course. Scientists and engineers work in
large teams, exchanging information all the time and leaking quite a
bit, not even the theoretical breakthroughs are the domain of single
geniuses anymore, people often replicate each other's work (usually by
accident). Big companies are big because they sell to the mass market,
that's where the money is. Squashing competition or rival inventors is
very rarely done through illegal means, and as history shows
technological monopolies doesn't last. New discoveries and inventions
are usually gradual and never seem to be orders of magnitude better
than everything else (or invincible), and when the occasional
breakthrough occurs, the first prototypes are usually equivalent or
worse to the currently dominant technology, never totally superior.
What I want to warn against is basing arguments about the future on
"Hollywood thinking". If you try to think about (say) the Singularity
and fall for the Hollywood style of economics, it makes a lot of sense
to worry about evil geniuses taking over the world. But that has very
little to do with real world economics and technology, which predicts
something completely different.
Just think about what Hollywood would do with my life extension
scenario above: most likely the result would be that an evil monopoly
immediately is created, selling longevity only to the rich, hiring
agents to squash all competing research everywhere in the world and
becoming awfully rich (and then the hero will appear to steal the
secret formula, or destroy it since there is only one copy and nobody
can replicate it...). It is dramatic, but in the end unrealistic and
silly.
Some might object that the rules may change in the future. This is
true, but then it is up to the person arguing that (say)
nanotechnological monopolists will emerge and rule the world to give
evidence for why this is more credible than the alternative that their
monopoly will be broken by the emergence of competitors, and show how
this relates to known economics and other areas. This is exactly the
same situation as discussing future technology - you have to base what
you say on what is known, not handwave "Oh, the superintelligences
will find a way".
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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