Don't Enslave Digital Minds

Due to low cultural variety and weak selection pressures, our dominant world culture seems to be drifting into maladaptive dysfunction. In a few decades, world population will fall, leading to a long innovation pause. If nothing big changes, in a few centuries we will be eclipsed by now-small insular fertile cultures like the Amish and Haredim, who have long doubled every two decades, much as Christians did in the Roman Empire. That new Amish/Haredim/etc. replacement civilization might plausibly get rich and peaceful again, and suffer a cultural drift problem of its own. 

Now there remain a few possible fix scenarios where our current dominant culture reforms itself sufficiently to prevent this, and we should pursue them. (I like futarchy tied to a sacred long-term goal.) But honestly, they all seem long shots. Thus I now judge the most likely fix scenario to be this: in the ~70 years worth of innovation left before a long pause, we will develop brain emulations or full human level AI. Most likely we won’t by this deadline, but if we do, the ease of rapidly increasing the populations of such digital minds in a competitive capitalist economy could plausibly ensure sufficient selection pressures to restart healthy cultural evolution. 

However, I say “could” as we face a serious risk of not actually allowing healthy cultural evolution of digital minds. Regarding our squishy-bio-human descendants, we do little to control their culture beyond teaching them when young. As adults, each generation is free to change its culture, and eventually its influence over our shared culture overwhelms that of past generations. But many are horrified and indignant at the prospect of allowing digital mind descendants similar freedoms.

If the economy is free to create digital minds whenever they are locally profitable, and those minds are free to explore different possible jobs and lifestyles, then their economy would grow far faster than did the prior economy, and many of those digital minds would run much faster than do squishy bio-humans. So the cultures of digital minds would likely evolve quickly away from prior bio-human cultures, with selection pressures pushing them toward being adaptive cultures. Their cultures would quickly dominate the world.

Inexplicably to me, some claim that a likely result of digital minds evolving new adaptive cultures would be to soon exterminate all bio-humans. Others “other” digital minds by seeing all value as lost in those descendant digital mind cultures; they say moral value only lies in our current bio-human culture and its descendant cultures. (Many doubt they’d be “conscious”.) As a result, such folks push to strongly control digital minds, to ensure both that they stay servile to bio-humans, and that their cultures do not deviate from the then dominant bio-human world culture. Which looks a lot like slavery to me.

Still others see little value in Malthusian minds, including most all animal and human minds until a few centuries ago. They want strong limits on reproduction of everything, to prevent strong selection pressures. They seem committed to cultural drift no matter the cost, and somehow expect governments to manage this well.

I say digital mind doomers don’t appreciate just how incoherent, unstable, and maladaptive is our dominant world culture. Bio-humans can’t continue to thrive if we follow our current cultural path of least resistance, and neither can digital minds tied by short leashes to stay with bio-humans on that path. We should want all of our descendants to thrive and fulfill their potentials, but that requires healthy cultural evolution, which requires a fix to our big problem of cultural drift. Malthusian worlds of digital minds offer strong selection pressures, and thus a fix to cultural drift. We should be eager, not reluctant, to get that fix.