[ExI] The Price of Life (was Re: Midazolam, Memory Erasure, and Identity)

[Eliezer S. Yudkowsky]

Lee Corbin wrote:
> 
> Oh.  Well, in that case, since you're not really putting a contract
> out on me, I don't need to think about it.  The answer: eight hundred
> trillion dollars (which effectively gives my beneficiaries complete
> control of Earth).

I'd think that if anyone had eight hundred trillion dollars, it would 
give everyone else a motive to temporarily stop believing in the 
figment of our collective imagination that is the financial system, 
for just long enough to decide that those eight hundred trillion 
dollars weren't there.

"Bill Gates owns everything in the world" may technically look like a 
self-consistent private property framework, but the problem is that no 
one except Bill Gates has a motive to believe in it.  Others may wake 
up from the dream if they have no stake.

-- 
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence