My Caplan Turing Test
At lunch today Bryan Caplan and I dug a bit into our disagreement, and now I’ll try to summarize his point of view. He can of course correct me.
Bryan sees sympathy feelings as huge influences on social outcomes. Not just feelings between people who know each other well, but also distant feelings between people who have never met. For example, if not for feelings of sympathy:
Law and courts would often favor different disputants.
Free workers would more often face harsh evaluations, punishments, and firing.
Firm owners and managers would know much better which workers were doing good jobs.
The US would invade and enslave Canada tomorrow.
At the end of most wars, the victors would enslave the losers.
Modern slaves would earn their owners much more than they would have as free workers.
In the past, domestic, artisan, and city slaves, who were treated better than field slaves, would have been treated much more harshly.
The slave population would have fallen less via gifts or purchase of freedom.
Thus most of the world population today would be slaves.
These views are, to me, surprisingly different from the impression I get from reading related economics literatures. Bryan says I may be reading the wrong ones, but he hasn’t yet pointed me to the correct ones. As I read them, these usual economics literatures give different impressions:
Law and economics literature suggests efficiency usual decides who wins, with sympathy distortions having a real but minor influence.
Organization theory literature suggests far more difficulties in motivating workers and measuring their performance.
Slavery literature suggests slaves doing complex jobs were treated less harshly for incentive reasons, and would not have earned much more if treated more harshly. Thus modern slaves would also not earn much more as slaves.
Of course even if Bryan were right about all these claims, he needn’t be right in his confident opinion that the vast majority of biological humans will have about as much sympathy for ems as they do for mammals, and thus treat ems as harshly as we treat most mammals.
This sympathy-driven view doesn’t by itself predict Caplan’s strong (and not much explained) view that ems would also be very robot-like. But perhaps we might add to it a passion for domination – people driven by feelings to treat nicely creatures they respect might also be driven by feelings to dominate creatures they do not respect. Such a passion for dominance might induce biological humans to force ems to into ultra docility, even if that came at a productivity cost.
Added 28July2016: Caplan grades my summary of his position. I’m mostly in the ballpark, but he elaborates a bit on why he thinks em slaves would be docile:
Docile slaves are more profitable than slaves with attitude, because owners don’t have to use resources to torture and scare them into compliance. That’s why owners sent rebellious slaves to “breakers”: to transform rebellious slaves into docile slaves. Sci-fi is full of stories about humans genetically engineered to be model slaves. Whole brain emulation is a quicker route to a the same destination. What’s the puzzle?
For docility to be such a huge priority, relative to other worker features, em rebellion must happen often and impose big frequent costs. Docility doesn’t seem to describe our most productive workers today well, nor does it seem well suited when you want workers to be creative, think carefully, take the initiative, or persuade and inspire others. Either way, either frequent costly rebellions or extreme docility, create big disadvantages of slaves relative to free workers, and so argues against most ems being slaves.
Evolutionary Psychology has something called an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy (ESS) that's about genetic code for a sort of behavior that moves within the gene pool between upper and lower bounds created by a feedback mechanism.
Psychopaths may fit this ESS model and seem to be about 1% of the general population, though a large fraction of the prison population.
It may be worth noting that when generalizing about sympathy, there may be more than one sort of human. Millions of people now may have no more sympathy for other humans than an alien AI even while normal humans in fact base a lot of behavior on sympathy and altruism. Psychopaths have great advantages under some circumstances and are disfunctional under others.
If in fact there's a distinctive hidden sub population that thinks quite differently it makes a difference to these issues. It may not be possible to just assume everyone's reactions are the same. Even if most people are repulsed by violence and cruelty all people are not. For some it's very natural and easy.
I think that even if we didn't know exactly how ems work and could only make crude changes at first, the fact that we can run them on computers would make experiments much easier, and therefore a cornucopia of modifications would be much easier. For one thing, we can easily see what happens with a particular change, and then reverse it and try again - not so easy with real animals!
So even if we didn't understand minds all that well before ems came along (and I think that's unlikely), we would quickly learn a lot more just because doing brain science got much easier.
But even that is giving human ems too much of a head start. It seems likely that ems would work well enough to be scientifically useful long before they are fully working and safe enough to use "in production". (That's usually the case in science.) Caution about ethical issues would make more machine-like ems easier to deploy and it seems likely that they'd become economically significant much sooner.
So even if the science evolved in a direction that would eventually make human ems likely, it might still result in not much of an economic niche remaining for them by the time they arrive.