Caplan Debate Status

In this post I summarize my recent disagreement with Bryan Caplan. In the next post, I’ll dive into details of what I see as the key issue.

I recently said:

If you imagine religions, governments, and criminals not getting too far out of control, and a basically capitalist world, then your main future fears are probably going to be about for-profit firms, especially regarding how they treat workers. You’ll fear firms enslaving workers, or drugging them into submission, or just tricking them with ideology.

Because of this, I’m not so surprised by the deep terror many non-economists hold of future competition. For example, Scott Alexander (see also his review):

I agree with Robin Hanson. This is the dream time .. where we are unusually safe from multipolar traps, and as such weird things like art and science and philosophy and love can flourish. As technological advance increases, .. new opportunities to throw values under the bus for increased competitiveness will arise. .. Capitalism and democracy, previously our protectors, will figure out ways to route around their inconvenient dependence on human values. And our coordination power will not be nearly up to the task, assuming something much more powerful than all of us combined doesn’t show up and crush our combined efforts with a wave of its paw.

But I was honestly surprised to see my libertarian economist colleague Bryan Caplan also holding a similarly dark view of competition. As you may recall, Caplan had many complaints about my language and emphasis in my book, but in terms of the key evaluation criteria that I care about, namely how well I applied standard academic consensus to my scenario assumptions, he had three main points.

First, he called my estimate of an em economic growth doubling time of one month my “single craziest claim.” He seems to agree that standard economic growth models can predict far faster growth when substitutes for human labor can be made in factories, and that we have twice before seen economic growth rates jump by more than a factor of fifty in a less than previous doubling time. Even so, he can’t see economic growth rates even doubling, because of “bottlenecks”:

Politically, something as simple as zoning could do the trick. .. the most favorable political environments on earth still have plenty of regulatory hurdles .. we should expect bottlenecks for key natural resources, location, and so on. .. Personally, I’d be amazed if an em economy doubled the global economy’s annual growth rate.

His other two points are that competition would lead to ems being very docile slaves. I responded that slavery has been rare in history, and that docility and slavery aren’t especially productive today. But he called the example of Soviet nuclear scientists “powerful” even though “Soviet and Nazi slaves’ productivity was normally low.” He rejected the relevance of our large literatures on productivity correlates and how to motive workers, as little of that explicitly includes slaves. He concluded:

If, as I’ve argued, we would copy the most robot-like people and treat them as slaves, at least 90% of Robin’s details are wrong.

As I didn’t think the docility of ems mattered that much for most of my book, I challenged him to audit five random pages. He reported “Robin’s only 80% wrong”, though I count only 63% from his particulars, and half of those come from his seeing ems as very literally “robot-like”. For example, he says ems are not disturbed by “life events”, only by disappointing their masters. They only group, identify, and organize as commanded, not as they prefer or choose. They have no personality “in a human sense.” They never disagree with each other, and never need to make excuses for anything.

Caplan offered no citations with specific support for these claims, instead pointing me to the literature on the economics of slavery. So I took the time to read up on that and posted a 1600 summary, concluding:

I still can’t find a rationale for Bryan Caplan’s claim that all ems would be fully slaves. .. even less .. that they would be so docile and “robot-like” as to not even have human-like personalities.

Yesterday, he briefly “clarified” his reasoning. He says ems would start out as slaves since few humans see them as having moral value:

1. Most human beings wouldn’t see ems as “human,” so neither would their legal systems. .. 2. At the dawn of the Age of Em, humans will initially control (a) which brains they copy, and (b) the circumstances into which these copies emerge. In the absence of moral or legal barriers, pure self-interest will guide creators’ choices – and slavery will be an available option.

Now I’ve repeatedly pointed out that the first scans would be destructive, so either the first scanned humans see ems as “human” and expect to not be treated badly, or they are killed against their will. But I want to focus instead on the core issue: like Scott Alexander and many others, Caplan sees a robust tendency of future competition to devolve into hell, held at bay only by contingent circumstances such as strong moral feelings. Today the very limited supply of substitutes for human workers keeps wages high, but if that supply were to greatly increase then Caplan expects that without strong moral resistance capitalist competition eventually turns everyone into docile inhuman slaves, because that arrangment robustly wins productivity competitions.

In my next post I’ll address that productivity issue.