[ExI] Digital identity

BillK pharos at gmail.com
Fri Apr 26 12:54:21 UTC 2013


On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 1:08 PM, Anders Sandberg  wrote:
> Actually not. People with wealth have a stronger reason to have rule of law:
> they cannot personally protect all their wealth, and much of it is based on
> well-functioning markets with low friction. No laws: plenty of friction,
> ownership becomes unstable. There is a reason rich Russians have their money
> outside Russia.

Once politics comes in to the discussion, it gets complicated and
prejudices take the stage. :)

Rich Russians don't control the dictator style government and the FSO
etc. (formerly KGB).
In the West, to a great extent the rich do control governments.
Freedom means anyone can be bought and those that can't be bought get
moved.


>
> That property rights are not as stable as they should be in many places is
> true, but look at economic growth rates. One of the best ways of wrecking
> your growth rate is to destabilize property rights, and economies that take
> off long-term (rather than just because of raw materials or industrializing
> from a low level) all have firm property rights. I would hence predict that
> the places where brain emulation is successful will not be the
> kleptocracies.


Forget growth rates. That's past history. Once you are a nano-scale
self-supporting virtual universe drifting in space, growth means
little to you. Communication also means little as the outside universe
has frozen due to your internal clock speedup. You might want to
communicate with other nearby uploads, but who knows???


>
>
> This depends on how scanning cost and computing cost scales. If scanning is
> expensive compared to computing, then there will be few different minds but
> they could run many of copies. So after the first crazy test subjects you
> get rich uploads, who presumably do not want to copy too much. But sooner or
> later you will get a widely copied worker upload, and then things get very
> different. If computing is expensive, then there will be few copies and the
> wealthy will dominate... as long as computing remains expensive. Which may
> not be long: given Moore's law timescales, if you can afford one upload now,
> in ten years you can run thousands.
>

The problem is that uploads process much faster than humans. Once
uploaded, to them the rest of the world appears to stop. This is the
same problem as a runaway AGI. Once it happens, they choose what
happens next.



> Space empires might be fun, but that is not how you remain wealthy. Wealthy
> people today are connected to the market, and will not disconnect. Rather,
> they would like to see more market growth since it will benefit their
> capital. Hence, I suspect they will actually invest in getting more people
> uploaded, since that is going to boost the fast growing part of the market.
> It might not be a nice altruistic motivation, but it is rational for them.
>

Wealth means something different when you have moved off earth and
become a virtual universe inside a self-supporting football in space.

But these things don't usually happen all at once. There will be an
intermediate period when lots of confusing behaviours will be going
on. Let's call it the Singularity, if you like.  :)


BillK



More information about the extropy-chat mailing list