Two years ago I posted on an article saying most psych data comes from a weird source, US college students: Americans are, on average, the most individualistic people in the world. … American parents, for example, were the only ones in a survey of 100 societies who created a separate room for their baby to sleep. … Compared with other Western industrialized societies, Americans were found to be the most patriotic, litigious, philanthropic, and populist. They were also among the most optimistic, and the least class-conscious.
I highly doubt that reduced per person income is inevitable. That would only be true if the populating kept increasing indefinably, and that seems unlikely; population trends right now imply that the world population should stabilize around 10 billion.
It's hard to estimate just how technology will change that (extreme longevity or EM's or whatever), but I would tend to think that extremely long lived humans would be more interested in long-term social stability, if they expected to personally live to see the future. Anyway, so long as population is stable, there's no reason for standard of living to not go up to some very high point as technology improves and then stabilize.
Unemployment tends to be higher in europe. Lots more people on long term disability which does not seem to be explained by a higher rate of actual disability.
Don’t so much imagine the low religion, marriage, and work effort typical of today’s US working class...
Any actual justification for "low...work effort"? Even Murray is talking about Europeans (and in my part of Europe, at least, the bulk of the working classes labour bloody hard).
I also believe that it is in some sense an illusion, but you can still make a mind that doesn't suffer from those illusions. The question is simply how much of a functional impediment that would be.
In fact, the likelihood that there won't be substantial functional impairment is, I think, well-predicated on the illusory character of these "gifts." But I don't think the existence of suffering depends on the illusion of qualitative pain. Is it compelling that an agent's moral status require that it harbor an illusion?
If my speculations on the cause of the free will illusion are accurate (see "How free will?" — http://tinyurl.com/2uy5oyg ), then the illusion might be eliminated by writing an exception to whatever generates the function for stimulus generalization. Would the resulting creature cease to be a "person"?
I also believe that it is in some sense an illusion, but you can still make a mind that doesn't suffer from those illusions. The question is simply how much of a functional impediment that would be.
But in truth, "people's" sense of free will and subjective experience is illusion. (See my The supposedly hard problem of consciousness and the nonexistence of sense data: Is your dog a conscious being? — http://tinyurl.com/c3zq8ht ) A strange morality that makes personhood depend on experiencing illusion!
Or if the winds of technological fortune dictate that ems are going to be very easy to make compared to other kinds of artificially intelligent systems, we could take measures to mitigate the tendency towards a population of poor ems.
For example, we could try to develop ems with their intelligence intact but with their sense of subjective experience and free will removed, so that they wouldn't be able to suffer and wouldn't really be people.
If that's not possible, we could allow a large but limited number of ems and ban the production of more of them, This situation is analogous to workers' rights in the developing world. It seems that protecting the rights of, for example, workers at the Foxconn factory in China has met with limited success due to consumers having some degree of "social conscience". I would expect something similar in the future.
But in that post, you talk only about limits to economic growth. You don't talk at all about why the number of people will keep increasing. And to get reduced per-person income, you need both continued population growth and bounded total economic wealth.
"So, there's a caste system built into it, and because of the miracles of compound interest, the organics are going to end up very privileged indeed."The same is true of today's sweat shop workers vs. billionaires, and this is usually not a cause of genocide. As far as its legitimacy is concerned, the em economy resembles the caste systems of South Africa or Rhodesia more than it does U.S. capitalism.
But why genocide? The ems need only refuse to pay the tax.
"Now, though, there is selective pressure towards greater desire for children, and eventually, it will reverse the decline in fertility seen with the introduction of contraception."
Desire for children can be fulfilled more cheaply than having children. Today, pedophiles watch lolicon and old women collect dolls and treat cutesy doggies like they would babies. In just a few decades, they will all have perfect little artificial angels with which no real child will ever compete.
It's not about evolving so that contraception is ineffectual. It's about evolving towards higher preference for fertility. For the vast scope of human history, there was no such pressure, because the desire to have sex was good enough. Now, though, there is selective pressure towards greater desire for children, and eventually, it will reverse the decline in fertility seen with the introduction of contraception.
"This variety of utilitarianism carries not a whit of weight in my mind or most anyone else's. I view things from the standpoint of existing populations, not "possible lives." More importantly, I think most everybody (being members of these existing populations) does the same."
I didn't mean it in a utilitarian sense. If the ems are copies of people who want such existence, and identify with them, it will be more like a personal desire of these individuals, not some kind of abstract utilitarian motivation. "I want there to be more of me" is something a good percentage of people can probably relate to whether they are utilitarians or not.
And the part about most everybody cares only about existing people is very shaky. Tell people they can't have children, or only infertile children, and you will probably get serious public backlash.
"Well, whatever the figure is, it's going to be high enough to compensate for transition to a subsistence world. It must ensure that their standard of living go up (or at least stay the same) where the mass standard of living takes a big plunge."
But the latter is only true because people can exist that would otherwise not exist at all. Total wealth still goes up. That makes it comparatively easy to pay for existing individuals to provide an incentive for the initial transition. If em existence is more energy efficient than organic existence, then it would be even easier to pay for at least one copy of each original person running a free, full subjective lifetime (at least for people whose self-identity includes their em copies).
"So, there's a caste system built into it, and because of the miracles of compound interest, the organics are going to end up very privileged indeed."
The same is true of today's sweat shop workers vs. billionaires, and this is usually not a cause of genocide.
The 0.1% was an arbitrary number, my idea was that the existing people need to get an incentive to accept the em transition even though they could prevent it through force; a cut of the increased productivity is an adequate and productive solution to this problem.
Well, whatever the figure is, it's going to be high enough to compensate for transition to a subsistence world. It must ensure that their standard of living go up (or at least stay the same) where the mass standard of living takes a big plunge. So, there's a caste system built into it, and because of the miracles of compound interest, the organics are going to end up very privileged indeed.
The subsistence-living prediction comes from cheap and fast reproduction, not oppression. And before you demand bans for reproduction, consider that it can be consensual and therefore in the interests of the beings who would otherwise have less (wanted) existence.
This variety of utilitarianism carries not a whit of weight in my mind or most anyone else's. I view things from the standpoint of existing populations, not "possible lives." More importantly, I think most everybody (being members of these existing populations) does the same.
"Despite the minuscule direct drain on individual income, the result is a an extremely privileged, aristocratic stratum which would control the whole society in the interest of organics. Any chance of ems emerging from subsistence-level living would depend on overthrowing the organics."
The reasoning behind this isn't sound. The 0.1% was an arbitrary number, my idea was that the existing people need to get an incentive to accept the em transition even though they could prevent it through force; a cut of the increased productivity is an adequate and productive solution to this problem. At least the people powerful enough to stop an em transition would have to benefit from it somehow, or else there's no incentive to allow it. Clearly such a legal obligation would have to be implemented by some mechanism of enforcement, but your jump to "control the whole society" does not logically flow from that.
The most mistaken part is your assumption that subsistence-level living would be an effect of oppression - and thereby preventable by overthrowing someone or something. This is like saying poverty can be abolished by killing all billionaires. Not so. The subsistence-living prediction comes from cheap and fast reproduction, not oppression. And before you demand bans for reproduction, consider that it can be consensual and therefore in the interests of the beings who would otherwise have less (wanted) existence.
I highly doubt that reduced per person income is inevitable. That would only be true if the populating kept increasing indefinably, and that seems unlikely; population trends right now imply that the world population should stabilize around 10 billion.
It's hard to estimate just how technology will change that (extreme longevity or EM's or whatever), but I would tend to think that extremely long lived humans would be more interested in long-term social stability, if they expected to personally live to see the future. Anyway, so long as population is stable, there's no reason for standard of living to not go up to some very high point as technology improves and then stabilize.
Murray's book is almost entirely about the US.
Unemployment tends to be higher in europe. Lots more people on long term disability which does not seem to be explained by a higher rate of actual disability.
Don’t so much imagine the low religion, marriage, and work effort typical of today’s US working class...
Any actual justification for "low...work effort"? Even Murray is talking about Europeans (and in my part of Europe, at least, the bulk of the working classes labour bloody hard).
I also believe that it is in some sense an illusion, but you can still make a mind that doesn't suffer from those illusions. The question is simply how much of a functional impediment that would be.
In fact, the likelihood that there won't be substantial functional impairment is, I think, well-predicated on the illusory character of these "gifts." But I don't think the existence of suffering depends on the illusion of qualitative pain. Is it compelling that an agent's moral status require that it harbor an illusion?
If my speculations on the cause of the free will illusion are accurate (see "How free will?" — http://tinyurl.com/2uy5oyg ), then the illusion might be eliminated by writing an exception to whatever generates the function for stimulus generalization. Would the resulting creature cease to be a "person"?
@f26939f398e5b2e21ea353b06370c426:disqus
I also believe that it is in some sense an illusion, but you can still make a mind that doesn't suffer from those illusions. The question is simply how much of a functional impediment that would be.
But in truth, "people's" sense of free will and subjective experience is illusion. (See my The supposedly hard problem of consciousness and the nonexistence of sense data: Is your dog a conscious being? — http://tinyurl.com/c3zq8ht ) A strange morality that makes personhood depend on experiencing illusion!
Or if the winds of technological fortune dictate that ems are going to be very easy to make compared to other kinds of artificially intelligent systems, we could take measures to mitigate the tendency towards a population of poor ems.
For example, we could try to develop ems with their intelligence intact but with their sense of subjective experience and free will removed, so that they wouldn't be able to suffer and wouldn't really be people.
If that's not possible, we could allow a large but limited number of ems and ban the production of more of them, This situation is analogous to workers' rights in the developing world. It seems that protecting the rights of, for example, workers at the Foxconn factory in China has met with limited success due to consumers having some degree of "social conscience". I would expect something similar in the future.
But in that post, you talk only about limits to economic growth. You don't talk at all about why the number of people will keep increasing. And to get reduced per-person income, you need both continued population growth and bounded total economic wealth.
"So, there's a caste system built into it, and because of the miracles of compound interest, the organics are going to end up very privileged indeed."The same is true of today's sweat shop workers vs. billionaires, and this is usually not a cause of genocide. As far as its legitimacy is concerned, the em economy resembles the caste systems of South Africa or Rhodesia more than it does U.S. capitalism.
But why genocide? The ems need only refuse to pay the tax.
@e14388d37b666c44f1847ef151ab6160:disqus
"Now, though, there is selective pressure towards greater desire for children, and eventually, it will reverse the decline in fertility seen with the introduction of contraception."
Desire for children can be fulfilled more cheaply than having children. Today, pedophiles watch lolicon and old women collect dolls and treat cutesy doggies like they would babies. In just a few decades, they will all have perfect little artificial angels with which no real child will ever compete.
It's not about evolving so that contraception is ineffectual. It's about evolving towards higher preference for fertility. For the vast scope of human history, there was no such pressure, because the desire to have sex was good enough. Now, though, there is selective pressure towards greater desire for children, and eventually, it will reverse the decline in fertility seen with the introduction of contraception.
Humans can outthink evolution forever. Developing a new contraceptive every ten thousand years is not a difficult task.
"This variety of utilitarianism carries not a whit of weight in my mind or most anyone else's. I view things from the standpoint of existing populations, not "possible lives." More importantly, I think most everybody (being members of these existing populations) does the same."
I didn't mean it in a utilitarian sense. If the ems are copies of people who want such existence, and identify with them, it will be more like a personal desire of these individuals, not some kind of abstract utilitarian motivation. "I want there to be more of me" is something a good percentage of people can probably relate to whether they are utilitarians or not.
And the part about most everybody cares only about existing people is very shaky. Tell people they can't have children, or only infertile children, and you will probably get serious public backlash.
"Well, whatever the figure is, it's going to be high enough to compensate for transition to a subsistence world. It must ensure that their standard of living go up (or at least stay the same) where the mass standard of living takes a big plunge."
But the latter is only true because people can exist that would otherwise not exist at all. Total wealth still goes up. That makes it comparatively easy to pay for existing individuals to provide an incentive for the initial transition. If em existence is more energy efficient than organic existence, then it would be even easier to pay for at least one copy of each original person running a free, full subjective lifetime (at least for people whose self-identity includes their em copies).
"So, there's a caste system built into it, and because of the miracles of compound interest, the organics are going to end up very privileged indeed."
The same is true of today's sweat shop workers vs. billionaires, and this is usually not a cause of genocide.
The 0.1% was an arbitrary number, my idea was that the existing people need to get an incentive to accept the em transition even though they could prevent it through force; a cut of the increased productivity is an adequate and productive solution to this problem.
Well, whatever the figure is, it's going to be high enough to compensate for transition to a subsistence world. It must ensure that their standard of living go up (or at least stay the same) where the mass standard of living takes a big plunge. So, there's a caste system built into it, and because of the miracles of compound interest, the organics are going to end up very privileged indeed.
The subsistence-living prediction comes from cheap and fast reproduction, not oppression. And before you demand bans for reproduction, consider that it can be consensual and therefore in the interests of the beings who would otherwise have less (wanted) existence.
This variety of utilitarianism carries not a whit of weight in my mind or most anyone else's. I view things from the standpoint of existing populations, not "possible lives." More importantly, I think most everybody (being members of these existing populations) does the same.
"Despite the minuscule direct drain on individual income, the result is a an extremely privileged, aristocratic stratum which would control the whole society in the interest of organics. Any chance of ems emerging from subsistence-level living would depend on overthrowing the organics."
The reasoning behind this isn't sound. The 0.1% was an arbitrary number, my idea was that the existing people need to get an incentive to accept the em transition even though they could prevent it through force; a cut of the increased productivity is an adequate and productive solution to this problem. At least the people powerful enough to stop an em transition would have to benefit from it somehow, or else there's no incentive to allow it. Clearly such a legal obligation would have to be implemented by some mechanism of enforcement, but your jump to "control the whole society" does not logically flow from that.
The most mistaken part is your assumption that subsistence-level living would be an effect of oppression - and thereby preventable by overthrowing someone or something. This is like saying poverty can be abolished by killing all billionaires. Not so. The subsistence-living prediction comes from cheap and fast reproduction, not oppression. And before you demand bans for reproduction, consider that it can be consensual and therefore in the interests of the beings who would otherwise have less (wanted) existence.