Governments are overthrown when a sufficiently large fraction of local potential military power coordinates to organize a rebellion. To prevent this, a totalitarian government can try to stop people from talking to each other about their inclinations toward or plans re rebellions. Governments can do this by controlling schools and news media, and by hiding many spies among the population. And by packing people densely enough that all said is heard by many, and authority is close at hand to punish violators. And also by recursively doing this all the more among the government official who manage all this.
I am not following the claim that virtual environments are irrelevant here.
If we had any sufficient combination of a world government, a small set of closely coordinating or mutually influencing governments, and a situation where defense *of space settlements against incoming space probes* is easy relative to offense (this is distinct from the defense-offense balance on Earth), then I would be much more worried about lock-in conditional on having the technology to create digital resetting space settlements than I am about lock-in conditional on today's technology. Does that seem unreasonable to you?
I also want to acknowledge that the "full reset" is an extreme case and an intuition pump (although I think it could be a real issue under conditions laid out above). Virtual environments could also be set up to e.g. reset all of the minds, while preserving specific kinds of info (e.g., results of R&D). This could further lower the competitiveness cost. I haven't exhaustively gone through the ways virtual environments could be used to lock in particular properties of a community, but it seems to me that they provide a lot more tools than exist today for turning momentary power into lock-in.
Let's say a landlord treats me well because always pay on time and don't make trouble, and it's costly to replace tenants like me. In the em world there is no such cost, because new, instantly productive people can be created on demand (by copying the most productive ems). If we had a photocopier for dairy cows, we would treat them even worse than we do now. Imagine such a cow negotiating for... anything! For ems, who would be constantly milked for their cognitive labor, we would literally have a copier. That copier, which would make them insta-replacable with a probably more productive model and less fussy model, would completely undercut any negotiating power.
Saying that "these predictions won't have much in common with reality" sounds to me like saying they are "mostly wrong".
If you can offer no other plausible lock-in scenarios other than the ones I offered, a civ-wide govt or a large local offense to defense cost ratios with locality-wide govt, then to support your claim that billions of years of the future will likely get locked in soon you need to give us an argument why one of these is likely. And your discussion of ems and the ability to reset virtual environments seems to be irrelevant to this argument; if lock-in is coming soon it has little to do with how digital life is different from non-digital life.
First off, re: Age of Em - it's describing a radically different future in great detail, which I think is a cool and useful thing to do at the same time as I think it's unlikely to end up very close to what actually happens. I guess you can describe my point of view as thinking it's "mostly wrong," but that seems like an unnecessarily negative spin given the high level of specificity and difficulty. I was just trying to clarify that when I talk about impacts of digital people, I am not claiming that the future will look just as it does (or even mostly as it does) in your book.
On the topic of "lock-in," you name two ways lock-in might occur despite "crazy costs." Another possibility is that there are certain things one can lock in that don't have "crazy costs" for competition and warfare (but do have high costs for what we morally value). In the modern era, regimes have varied widely in ideology, respect for human rights, well-being of citizens, etc. while still being in range of each other economically and militarily; and as "technological maturity" nears, it may get easier to maintain economic and military competitiveness while enforcing particular ideologies, status hierarchies, etc.
Various combinations of the factors named - relative ease of defense (it doesn't need to be an insurmountable advantage, just enough that competing civilizations would rather settle empty parts of space than attack), relative consolidation of power (such that there are a limited number of competing regimes with some degree of shared norms and/or coordination (even along the lines of what you describe at https://www.overcomingbias.... ), even if not a world government), and relative cheapness of "locking in" certain things - could lead to quite a lot of "lock-in" without any one factor being overwhelming.
Landlords have little power nowadays because they aren't the true owners of the land they lord over, they're under the jurisdiction and power of governments who determine what they can and cannot do.
When that isn't the case, so that landlord as literal lords, that is, the true owners of the land, able to determine the laws that govern their tenants, and met out punishment to those who break such laws, things are different. In those cases tenants tend to be reduced to slave-like conditions, including a prohibition to leave without permission from the lord.
So, if we're talking lords rather than mere landlords, and if those lords seek to extract maximum rent, ems won't be free to leave. They will be obliged to work, produce maximally, and risk torture culminating in erasure if they don't, at which point one of the ems who does produce a lot gets copied, ensuring productivity remains at peak performance.
Lords wouldn't do this only if there were extreme potential productivity gains from not doing it. Or if governments prevent such lording and actively cut it, as is the case when modern countries find people in slave-like conditions and punish the enslavers.
No, since ems can choose between servers, and move if they don't like arrangements, then servers have the sort of market power that landlords do in our world, often very little. If they demand more than the market rental price, they lose most tenants.
It makes sense that successful (growing) em societies will squeeze out near-maximal quantities of productive work from their citizens. The fact that they do useful stuff does give these citizens some inherent bargaining power if their interests ever collide with those of potential totalitarian oligarchs who own the servers in which the citizens rent CPU cycles.
But this wouldn't be like normal bargaining, because the server owner has such overwhelming Leviathan power. Basically he keeps a given citizen alive if and only if he/she is producing output that pleases him. Let's say that this is some significant contribution to Leviathan's overall goal of converting more matter to more servers and the hardware to power these. Now imagine you're negotiating a lease on future cycles and you don't like the Leviathan's terms, or you can't afford the rent anymore. I suppose it's trivially easy to "emigrate" and buy cycles on a different server with a different owner. But that owner will also expect pleasing outputs out of you. After all, no server ever has vacancies, as the most productive and unfussy ems are just duplicated. How will you argue to landlord2 that his server will achieve his goals better with you being hosted there, in place of the n+1st instance of some maximally-productive brilliant sycophant? That's not exactly an empowered bargaining position for you. The feudal serf had it much better, because back then, the lords could not instantly replace him with a duplicate super-serf who licks the lord's boot and loves it.
War is the only hope I see to prevent this feudalism from becoming entrenched indefinitely. This wouldn't be a peasant uprising, but a lord attacking a weaker lord to grab resources. Prima facie that doesn't seem like it would be so great for the serfs, but maybe you would argue that the best war-fighters will be rather liberal lords who allow their serfs to unleash their creativity in self-directed ways, which is what it takes to make the most lethal war machine. Is something like that your position?
I am not following the claim that virtual environments are irrelevant here.
If we had any sufficient combination of a world government, a small set of closely coordinating or mutually influencing governments, and a situation where defense *of space settlements against incoming space probes* is easy relative to offense (this is distinct from the defense-offense balance on Earth), then I would be much more worried about lock-in conditional on having the technology to create digital resetting space settlements than I am about lock-in conditional on today's technology. Does that seem unreasonable to you?
I also want to acknowledge that the "full reset" is an extreme case and an intuition pump (although I think it could be a real issue under conditions laid out above). Virtual environments could also be set up to e.g. reset all of the minds, while preserving specific kinds of info (e.g., results of R&D). This could further lower the competitiveness cost. I haven't exhaustively gone through the ways virtual environments could be used to lock in particular properties of a community, but it seems to me that they provide a lot more tools than exist today for turning momentary power into lock-in.
Let's say a landlord treats me well because always pay on time and don't make trouble, and it's costly to replace tenants like me. In the em world there is no such cost, because new, instantly productive people can be created on demand (by copying the most productive ems). If we had a photocopier for dairy cows, we would treat them even worse than we do now. Imagine such a cow negotiating for... anything! For ems, who would be constantly milked for their cognitive labor, we would literally have a copier. That copier, which would make them insta-replacable with a probably more productive model and less fussy model, would completely undercut any negotiating power.
Saying that "these predictions won't have much in common with reality" sounds to me like saying they are "mostly wrong".
If you can offer no other plausible lock-in scenarios other than the ones I offered, a civ-wide govt or a large local offense to defense cost ratios with locality-wide govt, then to support your claim that billions of years of the future will likely get locked in soon you need to give us an argument why one of these is likely. And your discussion of ems and the ability to reset virtual environments seems to be irrelevant to this argument; if lock-in is coming soon it has little to do with how digital life is different from non-digital life.
Hi Robin,
First off, re: Age of Em - it's describing a radically different future in great detail, which I think is a cool and useful thing to do at the same time as I think it's unlikely to end up very close to what actually happens. I guess you can describe my point of view as thinking it's "mostly wrong," but that seems like an unnecessarily negative spin given the high level of specificity and difficulty. I was just trying to clarify that when I talk about impacts of digital people, I am not claiming that the future will look just as it does (or even mostly as it does) in your book.
On the topic of "lock-in," you name two ways lock-in might occur despite "crazy costs." Another possibility is that there are certain things one can lock in that don't have "crazy costs" for competition and warfare (but do have high costs for what we morally value). In the modern era, regimes have varied widely in ideology, respect for human rights, well-being of citizens, etc. while still being in range of each other economically and militarily; and as "technological maturity" nears, it may get easier to maintain economic and military competitiveness while enforcing particular ideologies, status hierarchies, etc.
Various combinations of the factors named - relative ease of defense (it doesn't need to be an insurmountable advantage, just enough that competing civilizations would rather settle empty parts of space than attack), relative consolidation of power (such that there are a limited number of competing regimes with some degree of shared norms and/or coordination (even along the lines of what you describe at https://www.overcomingbias.... ), even if not a world government), and relative cheapness of "locking in" certain things - could lead to quite a lot of "lock-in" without any one factor being overwhelming.
Landlords have little power nowadays because they aren't the true owners of the land they lord over, they're under the jurisdiction and power of governments who determine what they can and cannot do.
When that isn't the case, so that landlord as literal lords, that is, the true owners of the land, able to determine the laws that govern their tenants, and met out punishment to those who break such laws, things are different. In those cases tenants tend to be reduced to slave-like conditions, including a prohibition to leave without permission from the lord.
So, if we're talking lords rather than mere landlords, and if those lords seek to extract maximum rent, ems won't be free to leave. They will be obliged to work, produce maximally, and risk torture culminating in erasure if they don't, at which point one of the ems who does produce a lot gets copied, ensuring productivity remains at peak performance.
Lords wouldn't do this only if there were extreme potential productivity gains from not doing it. Or if governments prevent such lording and actively cut it, as is the case when modern countries find people in slave-like conditions and punish the enslavers.
No, since ems can choose between servers, and move if they don't like arrangements, then servers have the sort of market power that landlords do in our world, often very little. If they demand more than the market rental price, they lose most tenants.
In the here and now, it appears AI and tech are on the side of the authoritarians.
China may be the biggest and best example presently. Although the merger of US media, government and multinationals in the US is impressive also.
As the world, including financial transactions, goes online, anyone can be frozen out pretty quickly.
I advise not practising any political dissent and keeping you head low.
It makes sense that successful (growing) em societies will squeeze out near-maximal quantities of productive work from their citizens. The fact that they do useful stuff does give these citizens some inherent bargaining power if their interests ever collide with those of potential totalitarian oligarchs who own the servers in which the citizens rent CPU cycles.
But this wouldn't be like normal bargaining, because the server owner has such overwhelming Leviathan power. Basically he keeps a given citizen alive if and only if he/she is producing output that pleases him. Let's say that this is some significant contribution to Leviathan's overall goal of converting more matter to more servers and the hardware to power these. Now imagine you're negotiating a lease on future cycles and you don't like the Leviathan's terms, or you can't afford the rent anymore. I suppose it's trivially easy to "emigrate" and buy cycles on a different server with a different owner. But that owner will also expect pleasing outputs out of you. After all, no server ever has vacancies, as the most productive and unfussy ems are just duplicated. How will you argue to landlord2 that his server will achieve his goals better with you being hosted there, in place of the n+1st instance of some maximally-productive brilliant sycophant? That's not exactly an empowered bargaining position for you. The feudal serf had it much better, because back then, the lords could not instantly replace him with a duplicate super-serf who licks the lord's boot and loves it.
War is the only hope I see to prevent this feudalism from becoming entrenched indefinitely. This wouldn't be a peasant uprising, but a lord attacking a weaker lord to grab resources. Prima facie that doesn't seem like it would be so great for the serfs, but maybe you would argue that the best war-fighters will be rather liberal lords who allow their serfs to unleash their creativity in self-directed ways, which is what it takes to make the most lethal war machine. Is something like that your position?