From: bbrown@transcient.com
Date: Wed Dec 08 1999 - 20:22:14 MST
Robin Hanson <rhanson@gmu.edu> wrote:
> Anders seemed to be careful to say "if". I see very little chance that
> cheap fast upload copying technology would not be used to cheaply create
> so many copies that the typical copy would have an income near
> "subsistence" level. But I'd be interested to hear of contrary
> scenarios.
I notice that your paper does not explicitly deal with the possibility of a
single entity doing more than one job at once. This seems significant,
because I would expect that upload-level technology would make it possible to
create a wide spectrum of sentient and semi-sentient software entities. An
upload (or an artificial AI, for that matter) might be able to handle one job
or thousands, depending on its internal architecture and hardware resources.
The very simplest jobs could be done entirely by non-sentient AI, and the
boundary where sentience becomes necessary is likely to shift over time.
I would therefore expect to see a competitive landscape in which different
kinds of jobs are done by different kinds of entities. In some fields cheap
human-equivalent uploads might win out, but in others advanced
parallel-processing entities would have a competitive advantage. My intuition
says that an entity that upgrades its abilities agressively could enjoy an
increasing standard of living in such an environment, especially if the amount
of non-sentient AI is large and grows rapidly. What do you think?
One other detail that I noticed: Aren't you implicitly assuming that economic
growth remains constrained by our current physical limits? If most of the
economy consists of services and/or information, wouldn't it be capable of
growing on the same time scale as upload reproduction?
Billy Brown, MCSD
bbrown@transcient.com
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