From: Stuart Armstrong (dragondreaming@googlemail.com)
Date: Tue Apr 22 2008 - 09:38:50 MDT
> > What is interesting about a "super AI" is that it could run an
> > efficient command economy. And it could run it in ways that minimise
> > the negative philosophical consequences to people. Would we want that?
>
> It can do so iff people can express demand curves. If it knows I will buy 3
> apples at $1 each, it has enough information to manage the status quo (which
> the market can do just fine already). What it needs to know is how I would
> react to apples at $2 or $4 -- and that's not even getting into how I react
> when oranges fluctuate, too. A partial solution is for all of us to start
> ceding control of our small purchases to automated agents that will, for
> example, order more of stuff we like when it's cheap, hedge against the risk
> of huge price increases, etc. I imagine that this will happen with fuel
> first -- I suspect that most drives would prefer using derivatives to get a
> flat price for gas to paying a fluctuating price at the pump.
>
> The problem with this is that the AI is suddenly redundant. The information
> it gets from the agent transactions is already being used by the agents to
> accomplish the same goals as the AI. All it can do to make things run better
> is to create central clearinghouses for this information. And why would we
> need an AI to know that collecting this information and managing
> transactions would be a great business. All one has to do is look at the
> current market value of the NYSE or CME or NASDAQ (the companies running the
> exchanges, not the products traded on them) to know that this is an
> incredibly profitable business.
Yes, but an AI could incorporate externalities, and probably
out-perform the market (real markets are not pareto-efficient, and
even when they are approximately so, there may be non-local peaks that
AI's could move to).
But agreed - the AI would have to be monstrously beyond us to run the
whole economy. But it is possible that a 90% AI run-10% free market
(or some other proportions) would turn out to be the most efficient.
> when there is a *collection* of AIs
This gets interesting, but scary for humans. The law of comparative
advantage does not work when there are scarce resources involved; even
if uploaded, we would probably consume much more resources than the
AI's would find useful. If there are competitive AI's, then we may be
deemed expendable...
Stuart
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