An economist would rightly lambasted for writing a popular article where perpetual motion machines, or anti-gravity, were central elements. Especially if that economist didn’t even notice that these violate well-established scientific consensus.
It seems to me that the central economic question is "Who is gonna pay for the hardware on which my afterlife clone runs?" You can say that people don't like to die, but if you look at their choices, they often aren't willing to pay much net present value to lengthen their lives. Hell, it's hard to stop people from endangering their access to a religious afterlife *even if they completely believe in it*. People who put their money into immortal electronic copies aren't going to have that money to spend on propagating their genes, and we can easily imagine natural selection working against people "investing" in electronic immortality.
And while we're at it, why would we want to duplicate humans if we want to make electronic minds as useful workers?
What is dark energy but anti-gravity? That something isn't possible now doesn't say much about what may be desired if it was, though I think the prevalent form would be experimentation, slicing and dicing ems to figure out how they worked.
Which is true and nice to know but has absolutely nothing to do with what I wrote.
The point is you cannot know what path future humans will choose. You can have intuitions and ideas about it, even models, but you cannot know for sure. It is just not the same as physics. Also I do not think you can just claim Graziano doesn't think EMs will be productive. Virtual heaven can be a place where you still have to work 4 hours per week, but as technology progresses it will be possible to live comfortably with less and less work being done by sentient minds, this process asymptotically approaches a scenario where the life is all play and no work. It's all about the choices future humans will make.
Is Robin seriously comparing a prediction of a choice future humans might make and that he happens not to agree with, with writing about perpetual motion machines? There's a reason economics isn't a real science, it's because the vast majority of it does not have much of a consensus or is just an extrapolation of past trends, not an unavoidable fate dictated by the laws of physics.
It seems to me that the central economic question is "Who is gonna pay for the hardware on which my afterlife clone runs?" You can say that people don't like to die, but if you look at their choices, they often aren't willing to pay much net present value to lengthen their lives. Hell, it's hard to stop people from endangering their access to a religious afterlife *even if they completely believe in it*. People who put their money into immortal electronic copies aren't going to have that money to spend on propagating their genes, and we can easily imagine natural selection working against people "investing" in electronic immortality.
And while we're at it, why would we want to duplicate humans if we want to make electronic minds as useful workers?
What is dark energy but anti-gravity? That something isn't possible now doesn't say much about what may be desired if it was, though I think the prevalent form would be experimentation, slicing and dicing ems to figure out how they worked.
Which is true and nice to know but has absolutely nothing to do with what I wrote.
The point is you cannot know what path future humans will choose. You can have intuitions and ideas about it, even models, but you cannot know for sure. It is just not the same as physics. Also I do not think you can just claim Graziano doesn't think EMs will be productive. Virtual heaven can be a place where you still have to work 4 hours per week, but as technology progresses it will be possible to live comfortably with less and less work being done by sentient minds, this process asymptotically approaches a scenario where the life is all play and no work. It's all about the choices future humans will make.
Predicting a perpetual motion machine in the future would be just as much a mistake as positing it in the past.
Is Robin seriously comparing a prediction of a choice future humans might make and that he happens not to agree with, with writing about perpetual motion machines? There's a reason economics isn't a real science, it's because the vast majority of it does not have much of a consensus or is just an extrapolation of past trends, not an unavoidable fate dictated by the laws of physics.
most don’t think economics really exists as a source of reliable insight.
Is it news to economists that they have low status among physicists?
Yet economists need no consolation. What they lack in scientific status they more than make up in political power.