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There will be android AI slaves, gen 3 or 5 or more before a useful Em. I don't think Ems will be the slaves, except maybe to gov't that allows them to become "immortal" this way...

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Selecting only from the most productive people would also seem to predispose to - well let's call it "nerdiness" - a property which is only sometimes useful and sometimes crazy but always unbalanced.

In any event, there would seem a drastic restriction in the range of personality types.

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The book only focuses on a roughly 2-year period anyway (thousands of subjective years from the ems perspective). Growth could immediately level off at the end for all we know.

I'm skeptical that ems are necessary for this kind of extreme growth. Simple von Neumann probe with minimal supervision could convert the entire solar system to useful machinery in a few dozen doublings. Since that's just a matter of automating existing tech, it could happen much sooner than brain emulation.

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Bryan's concern about who gets uploaded and how they're treated seems like a red herring. In the end, in the absence of strong centralized control, efficiency wins. Sometimes we apply external morals and call the result evil, and other times we call it progress. One of the lessons of economics is that when regulations, perceptions, and values prefer (significantly) less efficient results, it takes massive coordination to prevent competition from causing change. This is particularly true when the growth rate potential is as fast as your model indicates.

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Thanks Don. I made an apparently rash assumption about what Robin meant by “mental tweaks and training methods to apply”, in the process forgetting that a merely scanned brain is not understood, much less configurable.

I *am* left scratching my head about the “mental tweaks” mention (which is probably a good thing – it will encourage me to read the book before spouting off again:-)

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The volume of space within our lightcone grows cubically in time, hence the amount of matter-energy accessible by time t should vary at most cubically with t, assuming bounded fluctuations of density of the universe.

Therefore, even under WILDLY idealized optimistic assumption, exponential gdp growth can only last for a short time.

E.g. the Milky way has ~10^68 atoms and a radius of 50,000 light-years. If GDP were just getting new atoms, and it doubled every month, we'd have the whole milky way in just 225.9 months < 19 years. If GDP is also better organizing the atoms, let's say we manage an improvement similar to that of enriched uranium over meat in terms of energy density; 1 kg of U-238 contains 11 million times more energy than 1 kg of meat. That buys us another < 2 years of month doubling GDP, for a total of < 21y.

If instead you go off of the improvement in FLOPS from early human brains to current computers, or even all computers in the world combined (~2B computers, < 1 TFLOPs each, assume 1 human can do one FLOP a minute), you get maybe an extra 4y of such doubling, for a total of 25y.

If we very generously double that figure (which in exponential growth is like SQUARING gdp), we come to a 50y time frame for monthly-doubling gdp to eat the entire galaxy AND optimize the atoms to a degree that is several orders of magnitude larger than anything that has ever been seen in 100k years of human history.

The problem is, it necessary takes 50 THOUSAND, not 50 years to even have a chance of reaching half the atoms in the galaxy (remember, the radius is 50k LY and we are at the edge).

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I'm happy to hear reviews from experts in most any field.

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I think this topic is much too important to be confined to economists! Brian and Robin are just wrangling about freedom v's efficiency (again). But there are broader perspectives that each belong to other fields. For example I would wonder whether bodyless brains would not go mad (and bad)....entering into loops of craziness (and software rot). Selecting only from the most productive people would also seem to predispose to - well let's call it "nerdiness" - a property which is only sometimes useful and sometimes crazy but always unbalanced. So anthropologists, opticians and the man-in-the-street, unite.

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The whole point of "ems" -- as opposed to constructed AI -- is that their internals are not understood to human civilization, and so can't be "tweaked" at all. You only get copies of existing humans, you don't get to modify them.

Once you can design human-level computer intelligences, you move into the realm of an AI world, which is totally different from Robin's em world.

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Monthly doubling would be astounding. More likely, what is in abundance falls steeply in price while what is not will get extremely expensive and always remain the bottleneck though just which one could continually shift. While physical resources may fall in price, they will likely not fall nearly as fast as computing which will limit its contribution. It might cure unemployment though, always having the next physical tasks ready.

If really based on scanning, we might see mental aging and faster the faster they operate. Attempts to prevent this may destroy its operation. While they could be reset, this could lose everything not turned into an artifact.

They won't act like robots because robots need to be told what to do and who would be able to keep up with them.

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My guess is that ems would be different in this respect.

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there isn’t any literature on such tweaking of such ems, is there

Data, if it exists, on whether the most productive humans are least self-focused would seem relevant. Seems to me it depends on the occupation.

[I'd think there are order-giver ems and order-taker ems. Their relations seem more interesting to me than those between ems and humans.]

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Robin re: "half of his disagreements"-I guess you think that an em scanned from one of the most productive humans wouldn’t be made *more* productive by e.g. tweaking her self-focus close to zero and her satisfy-the-boss focus close to one. I guess Bryan might think the opposite. But there isn’t any literature on such tweaking of such ems, is there?

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