Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!nanotech From: Hanson@charon.arc.nasa.gov (Robin Hanson) Newsgroups: sci.nanotech Subject: Down and Out in Nanoland Message-ID: Date: 31 Dec 90 23:46:50 GMT Sender: nanotech@athos.rutgers.edu Lines: 91 Approved: nanotech@aramis.rutgers.edu "With nanotechnology, most people may be living near the edge of poverty" The rest of this message offers arguments for this outrageous claim, to stimulate discussion. My baseline image of our nanotechnology future splits into three ages, "Replication", "Uploading" and "AI". In the Replication age, basic nanotechnology (including assemblers) allows a tremendous increase in total wealth, and as yet not clear ecological and military consequences. In the Uploading age, assemblers can dismantle a human brain and reimplement that person in new improved (computer-like) hardware. This only requires understanding how some low level of the brain works, not the higher levels. In the AI age, artificially intelligent programs become competitive with human minds, or we learn enough about human minds to modify or merge them substantially. A couple of questions naturally arise for each of these ages. 1. What will life be like for me (or my children)? 2. What will life be like for the typical person/agent? 3. What will life be like for the typical economically influential person/agent, i.e. for the people who have most of the wealth and therefore influence what happens most? In our present age, you and I live well. The typical person in the world lives much more poorly than us, but richer than a century ago. Most wealth is concentrated in the "industrialized" world, apparently because educating one person well is more economically efficient than making lots of uneducated children. Therefore the typical economically influential person lives fairly well. In the replication age, wealth will increase much faster than the number of people, so with reasonable investment instruments, most everyone should live much better than now. Wealth may be roughly concentrated among the same people it is now, so you and I may live very well by today's standards. In the uploading age things get more complicated. Since uploaded minds can be copied at fairly low cost, people can, if they so choose, multiply much faster than the rate at which total wealth increases. No doubt some people will so choose, and the average wealth per person copy may drop dramatically, till most people copies are at the edge of poverty. By "poor" I mean that poor people have most of their capital tied up in their physical body, must spend most of their time managing their capital carefully for fear of going bankrupt and therefore dying (having their mental state erased), must accept alien and harsh working conditions to survive, and many such agents die anyway. Of course you or I, or our children, may move from the Replication age into the Uploading age with great wealth, and so if we avoid copying we may live like kings regardless of all those poor folk around. But there is the question of where the bulk of the wealth and economy will be. It seems plausible to me that the economically most efficient way to invest any given capital (i.e. resulting in the largest growth rate as an investment), would be to put the bulk of it into making copies. A single mind directing a billion dumb nanocray-diggers wouldn't do as well at mining an asteroid as a thousand or million human minds with half a billion such diggers. If so, then people who avoid making copies, keeping just a couple very rich ones, would constitute a decreasing portion of the economy. The old rich may live the old way on their estates, but the driving force of change would be elsewhere. People, like me, who really want to influence and be part of the long-term future may choose to make many copies, even though most of them would be poor. Yes, some of these copies may live in much faster etc. hardware, and so when things go bad for them could maybe sell off the better brain and move into a slower/cheaper one. But this must end somewhere (tape archives?) and wouldn't most agents (and most of the wealth?) be at this low end? Also, a mind tuned to running at a certain speed, or with certain aids, may not compete as well at lower levels, and so once knocked from their niche may fall steadily through the hardware levels. In the AI age, the economically dominant agents, be they human or not, may be incrementally growable or reducible. Different humans copies might be merged back together when one of them was about to go bankrupt, and so not experience "dying". In general, though, I find it very hard to project into this period. There ... that's the argument. So where does it go wrong? It is not as precise as I would like it to be, but I figure this is a good forum to critique it at this stage. Robin Hanson hanson@charon.arc.nasa.gov "Stake Your Reputation" 415-604-3361 MS244-17, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA 94035 415-651-7483 47164 Male Terrace, Fremont, CA 94539-7921 P.S. I stole the subject line from Ravi Pandya