From: Stuart Armstrong (dragondreaming@googlemail.com)
Date: Mon Feb 02 2009 - 02:54:38 MST
>> There are more than one kind of risk. I would rate the risk of tragic
>> exploitation of the faster-thinking humans as higher than the risk of
>> tragic exploitation of de novo AGI. The key word being "tragic". Large
>> numbers of really nice people working hard for small rewards,
>> inegalitarian principles systematically built into the physics of the
>> ems world. This seems moderately likely and significantly more tragic
>> than de novo AGI.
>>
>> Johnicholas
>>
>
> Exactly what would be competent to keep faster thinking humans under its
> thumb? What is to prevent them taking their brain power elsewhere or
> selling their talents for a much better price? The owner of the substrate
> rules? What keeps that owner in business if in competition with
> smarter/faster intelligences? What keeps another would be owner from buying
> them out if they prove too harsh and thus get less than stellar results form
> the uploads? A body can be enslaved. It is much more difficult to enslave
> a mind and still get full productivity from it.
I agree with your point entirely. But it is possible that Johnicholas
is refering to exploitations of faster thinking humans by other faster
thinking humans. If a small batch of fast thinking humans get slightly
ahead of others, they might boost themselves forwards even more, and
possibly capture control of the substrat on which the faster thinking
humans are based. And then enslaving a mind would not be hard - the
top fast-humans could easily tell if one of their slaves is
malignering in their mental outputs.
And if the gulf in intelligence is sufficiently wide, this slavery
could even become economically efficient - meaning there would be no
free market solution to it. As the top fast-humans are also likely to
capture political power, there would be effectively no solution at
all.
And as for normal humans... they would get entirely shafted.
Stuart
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