I’ve argued that if future tech and law enable a supply-and-demand economy of creature creation, it will enforce a good simple principle of existence: Creature X should exist if it wants to exist [i.e., would want to exist if it existed] and it can pay for itself. … Most new creatures would have designs near the peak of factory profitability, and own little surplus relative to their cost. Residual control rights (e.g., “are they slaves?”) would rest in the hands of whomever could squeeze the most market value from them.
Jeffrey, Robin Hanson believes a "strong singleton control" scenario is unlikely. If such a scenario were to happen, we would expect either total extinction or an outcome much better than this "earn your existence" one.
Robin, you say you are concerned with Pareto improvements.
But moving from a scenario where X creatures exist, and are happy, to a scenario where X+Y creatures exist, and the additional creatures Y are only marginally happy, is not a Pareto improvement, as long as creatures X are equipped with empathy similar to that of humans today.
It seems evident that not all, but a large proportion of humans, are less happy than they might otherwise be, just because they know that there are other creatures who are much less happy than they are.
As long as many humans have trouble coping with the existence of even a few creatures whose existence is only marginally worthwhile, adding such creatures is not a Pareto improvement.
It seems to me that Gratitude, once it could be engineered, would beat the pants off all the others. With Slavery, Debt, Stock and Contract, there needs to be some legal enforcement system which will cost the factory. Shared Goals and Reproduction wouldn't, but might be vulnerable to goals wandering off. A creature with correctly designed Gratitude would not spend any time trying to cheat / escape / default, and would work itself to keep its goals stable.
Robin, I'm not objecting. I only stated that many people who are created today, are created through means other than "Reproduction". "Slavery" would seem more descriptive for children who are created for the purpose of being sold into prostitution or child labor.
This applies not only to people, but many other creatures, especially those in our food system. Those creatures outnumber people, and are created through a mechanism most like "Slavery".
As far as what system I'd like to see in place - I don't have certain convictions either way. I do dislike slavery, of animals or of people.
For animals exploited in the food industry, I would prefer fewer of them to exist, and I would prefer those who would exist to enjoy lives of much greater quality. I would be happy to accept a major increase in the price of animal products as a result, and would respect those products more.
If you want me to choose between a scenario where extra people exist who live their entire lives as slaves, and another scenario where those people don't exist, I would prefer such people not to exist.
It adds value to my life if I don't have to think about creatures who appear to be living lives of much less happiness than their potential. If I am aware of such creatures existing, the discrepancy between their real and potential happiness bothers me. Therefore I would prefer creatures to exist either near their optimal happiness levels, or to not exist at all.
I'm opposed to all the broad-definition examples of slavery you list, Robin. I'd add wage slavery too. With regards to creature creation, I find your fundamental premise misguided. Existence isn't necessarily good; many of us would rather we had never been born than to suffer. The nonexistent cannot be polled, therefore bringing someone to life is an inherently dubious act. It's not better to have a billion slaves than a thousand free sentients. There's no moral imperative to fill the universe with individuals.
Now, this assumes a measure of human psychology for the beings in question. Theoretically you could produce an intelligence that invariably loved enslavement. In a vacuum this might be fine, but it's a potential threat to those who value freedom. Producing happy slaves signals an affinity for domination. I would worry such people might confuse me for one of their thralls. Stressing the value of liberty in the abstract promotes my personal freedom.
Wei, no. roystgnr, we have many good reasons for assigning stronger physical than intellectual property rights.Peter, arrogance need not be groundless.Summer, we already accept many kinds of slavery.Elf, interesting; care to link to the relevant stories?Psycho, I'm arguing for Pareto improvements, not for utilitarianism.
Economists have not found much support for the claim that a few rich folk encourage much more innovation than lots of poor folk; it is mainly the size of the economy, and somewhat its capital intensity, that determines innovation rates.
"do more" consists of the number of subsitence malthusian existence. How does quantity = quality? Also a perfect optimal world will also be perfectly eqalitarian. So there will be no "rulers" to leverage the aggrerate "doing-power".
Unless you subscrive to some sort of super-organism theory where some "mind of the market" will emerge that will do wonderfull things. Literally a cog in the machine... yikes.
The problem is one word: "deflation". Once you reach peak efficiency your natural resource markets will freeze up. So anyone holding a resource stock would be a fool to sell because tommorow it will be worth more. Once mathusian equilibrium is reached, rents takes over. So no liquidity, so little "blood" for your market-mid/super organism.
This rather misses the significant point that if you have so much power that you can capture nearly all of the utility an entity generates, it makes little sense to concern yourself with the utility of the entity. If I'm the factory owner, and I can take 99.9 out of every 100 units produced by my workers, and they need to retain 5/100 to make their lives "worth living," why would I bother leaving them with that? Why should I give a damn how much they enjoy life?
In other words, your hypothetical world has a bizarre regard for aggregate utilitarianism that there's little reason to believe any market system would generate. So long as my workers value life to the extent of not killing themselves, I have no reason to not take everything from them I can take.
If there are two worlds, A and B, and any entity would rather be born into B than A, does that not make B a preferable world to A?
Sure, there may be more entities in A. But so what? No one is harmed by not being born. If you're not born, there's no "you" to be harmed. It is quite literally impossible to speak meaningfully about non-existent entities. They inherently have no properties.
Cyrus: In a universe which I would recognize, such a creature would still have resource constraints. It would have to (a) do resource acquisition itself, (b) enter into an exchange with resource brokers, or (c) desire a static stability as profound as the Transmuters did at the end of Greg Egan's "Diaspora."
While I don't disagree with Robin's thought experiment (indeed, he's given me a lot to think about), as an SFnal writer I years ago settled on gratitude, embedded as a core personal value, almost an instinct, in the manufactured beings of my long-running space opera.
As the series and the characters have matured, however, I've come to a rather horrific conclusion: what we have is people (for some definition of) who are not "emotionally repressed human beings," but who are beings with a value system that is not some arbitrary but contingent result of evolutionary pressures, but individuals with a different moral core from our own.
To the remaining human beings around, however, the environment in which they find themselves appeals to the inner sociopath: for the first time, the environment is filled with individuals who have an inescapable deference to others (indeed, they no more want to escape deference than Catholics do Catholicism, or any other meme to which human beings arbitrarily dedicate themselves), people who you can literally "put away when you're done with them."
A universe where "gratitude as a core value" is a basic tactic ensuring return for the investment in creating a sentient being would be inhabited with a lot of casual Leonard Lakes.
I certainly hope that society does not ultimately become as intensely competitive as Robin expects (hopes??). I agree that, with any luck, the fraction of the society's total computing power needed to simulate the human race (in our current numbers) would be trivial. Unfortunately, even if the total resources are enormous, if the per-capita resources are miserably close to subsistence even for the efficient AIs, then our prospects look very dim. Consider that, even as we type, some of our primate cousins are winding up as bushmeat...
I think that most people assume that we should maximize per-capita utility, under some constraints such as not killing existing people.
As an SF writer, have you noticed that Robin's scenario is that of the Vile Offspring in Accelerando?
Jeffrey, Robin Hanson believes a "strong singleton control" scenario is unlikely. If such a scenario were to happen, we would expect either total extinction or an outcome much better than this "earn your existence" one.
Robin, you say you are concerned with Pareto improvements.
But moving from a scenario where X creatures exist, and are happy, to a scenario where X+Y creatures exist, and the additional creatures Y are only marginally happy, is not a Pareto improvement, as long as creatures X are equipped with empathy similar to that of humans today.
It seems evident that not all, but a large proportion of humans, are less happy than they might otherwise be, just because they know that there are other creatures who are much less happy than they are.
As long as many humans have trouble coping with the existence of even a few creatures whose existence is only marginally worthwhile, adding such creatures is not a Pareto improvement.
It seems to me that Gratitude, once it could be engineered, would beat the pants off all the others. With Slavery, Debt, Stock and Contract, there needs to be some legal enforcement system which will cost the factory. Shared Goals and Reproduction wouldn't, but might be vulnerable to goals wandering off. A creature with correctly designed Gratitude would not spend any time trying to cheat / escape / default, and would work itself to keep its goals stable.
:) fair enough
Robin, I'm not objecting. I only stated that many people who are created today, are created through means other than "Reproduction". "Slavery" would seem more descriptive for children who are created for the purpose of being sold into prostitution or child labor.
This applies not only to people, but many other creatures, especially those in our food system. Those creatures outnumber people, and are created through a mechanism most like "Slavery".
As far as what system I'd like to see in place - I don't have certain convictions either way. I do dislike slavery, of animals or of people.
For animals exploited in the food industry, I would prefer fewer of them to exist, and I would prefer those who would exist to enjoy lives of much greater quality. I would be happy to accept a major increase in the price of animal products as a result, and would respect those products more.
If you want me to choose between a scenario where extra people exist who live their entire lives as slaves, and another scenario where those people don't exist, I would prefer such people not to exist.
It adds value to my life if I don't have to think about creatures who appear to be living lives of much less happiness than their potential. If I am aware of such creatures existing, the discrepancy between their real and potential happiness bothers me. Therefore I would prefer creatures to exist either near their optimal happiness levels, or to not exist at all.
I'm opposed to all the broad-definition examples of slavery you list, Robin. I'd add wage slavery too. With regards to creature creation, I find your fundamental premise misguided. Existence isn't necessarily good; many of us would rather we had never been born than to suffer. The nonexistent cannot be polled, therefore bringing someone to life is an inherently dubious act. It's not better to have a billion slaves than a thousand free sentients. There's no moral imperative to fill the universe with individuals.
Now, this assumes a measure of human psychology for the beings in question. Theoretically you could produce an intelligence that invariably loved enslavement. In a vacuum this might be fine, but it's a potential threat to those who value freedom. Producing happy slaves signals an affinity for domination. I would worry such people might confuse me for one of their thralls. Stressing the value of liberty in the abstract promotes my personal freedom.
Wei, no. roystgnr, we have many good reasons for assigning stronger physical than intellectual property rights.Peter, arrogance need not be groundless.Summer, we already accept many kinds of slavery.Elf, interesting; care to link to the relevant stories?Psycho, I'm arguing for Pareto improvements, not for utilitarianism.
Economists have not found much support for the claim that a few rich folk encourage much more innovation than lots of poor folk; it is mainly the size of the economy, and somewhat its capital intensity, that determines innovation rates.
"do more" consists of the number of subsitence malthusian existence. How does quantity = quality? Also a perfect optimal world will also be perfectly eqalitarian. So there will be no "rulers" to leverage the aggrerate "doing-power".
Unless you subscrive to some sort of super-organism theory where some "mind of the market" will emerge that will do wonderfull things. Literally a cog in the machine... yikes.
The problem is one word: "deflation". Once you reach peak efficiency your natural resource markets will freeze up. So anyone holding a resource stock would be a fool to sell because tommorow it will be worth more. Once mathusian equilibrium is reached, rents takes over. So no liquidity, so little "blood" for your market-mid/super organism.
This rather misses the significant point that if you have so much power that you can capture nearly all of the utility an entity generates, it makes little sense to concern yourself with the utility of the entity. If I'm the factory owner, and I can take 99.9 out of every 100 units produced by my workers, and they need to retain 5/100 to make their lives "worth living," why would I bother leaving them with that? Why should I give a damn how much they enjoy life?
In other words, your hypothetical world has a bizarre regard for aggregate utilitarianism that there's little reason to believe any market system would generate. So long as my workers value life to the extent of not killing themselves, I have no reason to not take everything from them I can take.
If there are two worlds, A and B, and any entity would rather be born into B than A, does that not make B a preferable world to A?
Sure, there may be more entities in A. But so what? No one is harmed by not being born. If you're not born, there's no "you" to be harmed. It is quite literally impossible to speak meaningfully about non-existent entities. They inherently have no properties.
Cyrus: In a universe which I would recognize, such a creature would still have resource constraints. It would have to (a) do resource acquisition itself, (b) enter into an exchange with resource brokers, or (c) desire a static stability as profound as the Transmuters did at the end of Greg Egan's "Diaspora."
While I don't disagree with Robin's thought experiment (indeed, he's given me a lot to think about), as an SFnal writer I years ago settled on gratitude, embedded as a core personal value, almost an instinct, in the manufactured beings of my long-running space opera.
As the series and the characters have matured, however, I've come to a rather horrific conclusion: what we have is people (for some definition of) who are not "emotionally repressed human beings," but who are beings with a value system that is not some arbitrary but contingent result of evolutionary pressures, but individuals with a different moral core from our own.
To the remaining human beings around, however, the environment in which they find themselves appeals to the inner sociopath: for the first time, the environment is filled with individuals who have an inescapable deference to others (indeed, they no more want to escape deference than Catholics do Catholicism, or any other meme to which human beings arbitrarily dedicate themselves), people who you can literally "put away when you're done with them."
A universe where "gratitude as a core value" is a basic tactic ensuring return for the investment in creating a sentient being would be inhabited with a lot of casual Leonard Lakes.
I certainly hope that society does not ultimately become as intensely competitive as Robin expects (hopes??). I agree that, with any luck, the fraction of the society's total computing power needed to simulate the human race (in our current numbers) would be trivial. Unfortunately, even if the total resources are enormous, if the per-capita resources are miserably close to subsistence even for the efficient AIs, then our prospects look very dim. Consider that, even as we type, some of our primate cousins are winding up as bushmeat...