From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@www.aeiveos.com)
Date: Thu Sep 30 1999 - 13:20:10 MDT
On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Robin Hanson wrote:
> Robert B. wrote:
> >Nanotech stands a good chance of leaving bankrupt most older
> >forms of wealth storage. If you aren't alive to manage it,
> >I would doubt you are going to wake up wealthy.
>
> I'm skeptical about this. A broad-based index mutual fund
> should work fine, as long as the index is remixed frequently
> to include new upstart forms of wealth. Even a stock fund
> would probably do fine, as new corporations should be big
> players in whatever the nanotech economy turns out to value
> most.
I agree, in theory. You may have to remix very fast or have
an AI managing things however. In terms of "older forms",
I was mainly thinking of gold, bonds, funds managed by
risk-averse individuals, etc. Land remains an interesting
question in my mind since as the saying goes "they aren't
making any more of it" and the places with the naturally
great weather, views, etc. are limited. Whether the desire
for these places is offset by nanotech moving many more
people into tall cities will be an interesting question.
Does one want to live in the small house on Malabu Beach or on
the 538th floor of the Floating Bahamas Tower?
> > (b) Reanimate using the first upload technology. ...
>
> That is my choice. I expect the first unfrozen will be uploads,
> and the first uploads will be the unfrozen. As I've argued
> before, descendants of the first uploads stand a good chance of
> grabbing a big chunk of all future wealth, just from selling
> their labor.
>
By "descendants", should I assume you mean self-evolved or
copied entities?
So you think there are/will be frozen people who say "use the
first available technology to upload" (even if the failure rate
is say 70%)?
The question becomes what is "future wealth" and to what degree
"labor" in any traditional sense will be displaced by "non-conscious"
machines. From my perspective, the only wealth that might exist in
the future is intellectual property (i.e. designs). But I think
their value may be quite limited by open source designs.
The control of matter or energy might be considered wealth, but
only to entities that put themselves on an exponantial "self"-growth
path. If the first successful unfrozen does that, then one potential
result would be the rest of us getting left in the cold and dark. If
societies see that in advance then presumably they would try to
outlaw it. So you could have the conscious entities operating
in such a way as to prevent the unconscious entities from
regaining consciousness.
Robert
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