Re: poly: Modeling Economic Singularities

Peter M. writes:
>>A lack of ownership would deter investment, but would not stop a race to
>>be first with any investment privately worth taking.
>
> But doesn't it substantially delay the point at which the investments
>become worth making compared to when that would be if the investors got
>most of the benefits?

It might or it might not.

> ... I'm assuming the availability of machine intelligence will make
>programming problems much less of a bottleneck.

Which were you assuming first, assemblers or AI, and why do you think the
time between these events would be short?

> What would people be building that would use up much of the world's sand
>before assemblers were able to produce computing power?

I don't know, but whenever one can build replicating miners to process that
sand, people would find things to do with it, even if computer designs
weren't ready. Maybe build big stone castles?

> I'm not refering to markets. I'm talking about the replacement of quite
>specialized tools whose location is important with more generic tools,
>(e.g. a fully general purpose assembler would replace a wide variety of
>special purpose manufacturing machines with one generic type of manufacturing
>capital), and increased ability to move things of value around easily.

There are lots more kinds of capital than different shaped physical tools.

> I'm imagining one unusually large jump in the importance of assemblers
>as they make the transition from primarily research phase to widespread
>use. There will still be much trial and error needed to go from the
>specialized initial versions to general purpose versions, but I think
>each succeeding generation has the potential to be easier to build than
>the prior generation because of the improved tools each generation provides.

I'm not sure what "large jump" or "easier to build" means.

> I'm assuming that a few dozen uploaded humans or the artificial equivalent
>would provide adequate diversity of abilities to accomplish the kind of
>changes I have in mind.

Ah, I thought you meant some other AI type.

> The need for tech support varies widely from product to product. Even
>if AI doesn't make it cheap, there will be some products which don't need
>it and whose growth rates won't be limited by it.

But there may be diminishing returns to growth only in such products.

Robin Hanson
hanson@econ.berkeley.edu http://hanson.berkeley.edu/
RWJF Health Policy Scholar, Sch. of Public Health 510-643-1884
140 Warren Hall, UC Berkeley, CA 94720-7360 FAX: 510-643-8614
Received on Sun Apr 26 21:25:01 1998