[ExI] Forking

[Keith Henson]

On Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 4:49 AM,  Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
>
> Keith Henson wrote:
>> On Mon, Dec 26, 2011 at 5:00 AM,  Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
>>
>>> Forking is not necessarily driven by a drive to reproduce. It might be
>>> economic, it might be intellectual, it might even be religious - as soon
>>> as there is somebody with pro-forking views a lot of forking is likely
>>> unless the cost of computing space is very high.
>>
>> To me this discussion has the flavor of banging your head on a wall or
>> putting beans up your nose.
>>
> Ah. I think I see the fundamental problem. We likely have different
> views of personal identity, and that colors our perceptions. I regard
> myself as the equivalence class of all sufficiently Anders-like
> processes, and this (together with my value theory) make me think
> forking can add value. Your identity and value theories likely do not
> see it as useful as I do.

Don't forget that I practically invented forking as a way to crew star
ships for the Far Edge Party.

" The only way clearly available is to explore the Galaxy in parallel.

snip

 "   To explore the Galaxy in parallel, we need to make only a few
starships, say
100 and recruit crews for perhaps 10, but we make copies of the crews to fill
all 100.  At 1,000 people per ship, and 100 ships (100,000 adventurers) this
would probably be necessary anyway.  I doubt there are as many as 10,000 people
in the entire world who would board a starship.  Misfits who want to *do*
something . . . . we take all roads (or at least a fair sample of
them).

"   People have talked about making a copy of themselves and having the copy do
the unpleasant chores.  That's silly.  A good copy would be indistinguishable
from the original right down to desires.  You could neither make a copy to go
visit the stars nor one to stay on Earth that would be happy unless you didn't
care which you did (unlikely) or someone messed with their personalities
(unethical).  In fact, I think it would be unethical to distinguish between
copies (a case where the Golden Rule applies in its strongest form).  The only
case I can see where copies are justified is a situation where a person really
has no preference between two mutually exclusive choices."

(Dated on the net 1987, hard copy in Baen's New Destinies dated fall 1990)

http://www.hackcanada.com/blackcrawl/elctrnic/megascal.txt

(Rereading it made me realize just how old the ideas we have been
talking about are.  Scary)

>> Resources will always be limited.  Forking will on average cost a
>> person (or society) half the computation space they had.  So after a
>> fork, you run half as fast or are half as smart and half as rich.
>> Someone with a madness for forking will soon have no more hardware per
>> second than an Apple II.  There may be a lot of you, but at the rate
>> they think it hardly matters.
>>
>
> If I fork myself, there will now be twice as much me-experience, twice
> the amount of human capital and twice as many entities sharing my goals.

You will also have half the resources per capita.  Widespread,
uncontrolled forking is isomorphic to gray goo.

> This has a certain value to me. It is also valuable to others if I have
> useful skills - now these services can be bought a bit more cheaply, and
> at a greater quantity or speed. This later value equates to income: two
> forks of me can under these circumstances earn more than one of me.
> Also, even if the forks earn less per unit of time they can still save
> earnings and invest them.

2x zero is still zero.  It's not at all obvious to me that human labor
will be worth *anything* in a future where the technology is up to
forking.  It's also not obvious in such a world that "saving" and
"investing" will have their current meaning.

> There are interesting issues in fork economics, for example whether it
> is better to be twice as fast as twice as many, and how much the cost of
> computing substrate will be relative to the median mind salary. I think
> there are many domains where the advantages go in different directions.

I have a strong opinion that forking is a bad idea, but not that much
confidence that my opinion is right.  Still, I think forking in a
limited environment is a path to grinding poverty and probably wars
from activating human psychological mechanisms by projected "looming
privation."

I suppose forking should be added to excessive population growth rate
as a reason we don't see the works of aliens.

Keith