From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Tue Aug 17 1999 - 04:13:34 MDT
Brent Allsop <allsop@fc.hp.com> writes:
> Anders Sandberg <asa@nada.kth.se> replied:
>
> > proff@suburbia.net (Julian Assange) writes:
>
> > > Those SI's which have motivation to control the substrates on which
> > > SI's are built shall proliferate and others will become food.
> > > The idea that SI's will do anything else with humanity but grind it up
> > > for spare atoms and is nothing short of religious faith.
>
> > So what about the law of comparative advantage?
[See the excellent explanations posted by J. R. Molloy,
Technotranscendence and Robert J. Bradbury; I knew I could count on
the list to produce much better answers that me (since I'm not that
good at economics yet). Thanks!]
Anyway, what has this to do with whether SIs like sauteed humans? As I
see it, it shows that it makes economic sense to have even "lesser"
creatures in your economic system.
Also, I'm not a big fan of the "instant god" scenario of posthuman
development, which assumes that the first AI/upload/whatever
self-improves so quickly it becomes a near-omnipotent entity able to
determine the future of everybody and lacks any allegiances to the
ants around it. I consider it much more likely that the ascent to
transcendence will be a continous process of self-improvement where it
is highly advantageous for the would-be-SIs to outsource much of the
work to other economic entities ("I'm too busy designing my new
cognitive core, I want you to write my new personality/user
interface. I pay you with an old cognitive core"). This would favor
specialisation rather than the SI being a jack-of-all-trades, and
would in the end lead to a situation with a long gaussian with a long
tail of interconnected economic entities and the SI(s) at the end of
the tail. This also disfavours eating people, since there are
competitors/partners of close to the same power level and economic
ties even with the "ants".
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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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