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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

You only need to optimize a single em a little to let it and its copies take over a whole industry. There's no reason a company would not take an em that does the same work but uses 10% less processing power. If the modified ems pay 5% of their wages back to the researchers because of the licensing, then the researches get to keep a 5% of the industry's worth of wages while there's no better em. And if they're the only such researchers, that would continue indefinetely. Which means such research is lucrative. Which means it would be done by a lot of people and would be much faster if not so lucrative.

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Sniffnoy's avatar

Hm. I'm still unclear though as to what reason is there then to think that ems will have any "leisure time", in the sense of time to work on whatever they choose to, regardless of whether they can find a buyer for it.

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