Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Florin's avatar

In a worst case scenario, immortalists might avoid competition with pro-growth ems by leaving the solar system and making sure that they're one step ahead of any expanding wave of pro-growth em colonization.

Expand full comment
Karl Hallowell's avatar

For this, I have a couple of observations. First, if one knows in advance that redesign is likely, one can make a design more flexible and capable of redesign. For example, one could maintain a network structure of usual design states. The "stock car" of the car example above could be a base state, with a truck and race car state as well. If there was a lot of demand for shifting between the truck and race car, then one could develop direct transitions. Else one could transition back to the stock car and then to the new state.

Second, we also need to keep in mind that a system that can change and has recently done so (that is, hasn't settled down as evolutionary systems tend to do), is probably more likely to be changeable again than a system that hasn't changed in a long time. The critter that evolved into a new niche may well have tricks that allow it to evolve quicker to a new niche than the old critter.

Looking at the ems discussion about the declining value of ems "labor", I have to say that capital is the big missing factor. Not only can having the right capital make your existence cheaper and easier, but it can be used to generate passive income on its own or to leverage your ability to make income.

I find a good analogy here is to the gaming ideas of "grind" income versus "passive" income to be quite relevant here. Assume that you have a game with some sort of economic aspect to it. Grind income requires that you sit at the keyboard/console and actually play the game in order to get income or something of value. Passive income means that you don't need to be playing in order to rake it in. It turns out that successfully creating passive income (well in games that have such) usually differentiates the wealthiest players from everyone else. Another path is via cooperative behavior. Leaders in a group or "guild" can earn income well over what they could earn on their own, just through the efforts of the teammates they coordinate.

Frankly, a lot of massively multiplayer online games are very close to ems in character. You can run many characters and cooperate between them (it's common that cooperative behavior results in better grind and passive income in such games). So it is possible just to run many characters and harvest the income yourself. That's a bit different from ems since you have a scarce resource, your time at the keyboard. So there's only so much time you can spend running your characters.

Anyway, I think capital is the missing ingredient in this soup. If you can create ems without creating corresponding support capital (so that they have to work work work in order to continue to exist), then eventually the value of their "labor" is going to drop to near subsidence. Some factors can aggravate this, such as a tax on capital that transfers wealth from capital owners to poor ems. Other policies could work differently, such as requiring a gift of capital to every created em either from society or from the ems creator. It'll be much harder to flood the system with ems, if one has to sacrifice capital everytime an em is created.

Expand full comment
54 more comments...

No posts