Path: utzoo!censor!geac!torsqnt!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!nanotech From: josh@cs.rutgers.edu Newsgroups: sci.nanotech Subject: Down and out in nanoland? Message-ID: Date: 4 Jan 91 04:19:12 GMT Sender: nanotech@athos.rutgers.edu Lines: 112 Approved: nanotech@aramis.rutgers.edu Robin Hanson writes: "With nanotechnology, most people may be living near the edge of poverty" with the intention of stimulating discussion on the issue. This is an interesting thesis, but one with which I happen to disagree, after a few day's thought, so here's my analysis: Extremely condensed nutshell version: This is a new version of Malthus, and is wrong for the same reasons Malthus is wrong. However, all the specifics are different, and need to be examined in detail. RH: "My baseline image of our nanotechnology future splits into three ages, "Replication", "Uploading" and "AI"." I think the "AI" age will come first, and that we are already in the beginning of it. The critical issue here is what we want to consider a person. If the microprocessor controller in my toaster is considered a person, it is a person with no belongings and no rights, and under that definition, Hanson's thesis is almost certainly true. I don't consider my toaster a person and I'm sure everyone agrees that such an appellation is silly. However, personhood has very fuzzy boundaries. It's beginning to be possible to write programs which have undeniably higher mentalities than babies or some mental patients. By the year 2000, I'm virtually certain that there will be systems that will be able to convince the average man on the street that there's "someone inside" (this is not to say that the system will necessarily be so indistinguishable from a human as to be able to pass a full- fledged Turing Test). More to the point, the mentality of systems that are doing economically valuable work will increase dramatically--there are tons of applications that could use expert systems writeable with current technology, much less that available in a decade. As time goes on, more and more such systems will actually be written. Will these systems be "people" in the sense of the thesis under consideration? Again, if so, the thesis will be true, since they will be numerous and won't own two cents to rub together. This all happens with or without nanotechnology. Nanotech throws in the wild card in the form of uploading, which leaves you fairly sure that the thing you've created is "really a person". However, by the time that is possible, I believe that purely synthetic systems will exist that can legitimately aspire to personhood. We can sum up this part of the argument by saying that it will be possible to create mentalities in a very wide range of types, and it is very much unresolved which ones we should be considering "persons". Let's adopt the nomenclature from Greg Bear's stories and refer to a class of less-than-full-fledged mentalities as "partials", whether they are simply partial copies of your full mind (as in the stories) or latter-day expert systems at the same level of competence. Now the question is, is it economically more useful to mine your asteroid with a crew of "full-personhood" copies of yourself, or with partials that embody your mining expertise but don't have your taste for expensive Venusian wines? Obviously you don't have a choice if your only option is to make a copy; but in the long run, once you're in the "AI" stage, you want to make a mentality appropriate to the job. Hanson writes further: "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." The interesting thing to note is that Darwin conceived the theory of evolution by variation and selection as he was pondering over Malthus' "On Population". Malthus' logic translates into a very potent force of nature--the population pressure of self-replicating organisms. But it isn't the only force operating: The full story is under Darwin's byline, instead. Why aren't the only living organisms bacteria? They reproduce a hell of a sight faster than humans--take two humans, and one bacterium, and assume the entire earth is made of food. In less than a month, the entire earth is made of bacteria. The pure ability to replicate is not sufficient: the qualities of a successful replicator are more complex. The most successful replicators of the animal world, in terms of biomass represented by the species, are the ants, although recently (in evolutionary terms) the mammals have been giving them some competition. The advantage an ant (or a human for that matter) has over a bacterium in reproducing is the ability to change its environment in its own favor to a substantially greater degree than the bacterium does. Thus in the post-nanotech world, the human-level mentality which can barely afford the rent on its simulator time-slice (much less the luxury of a real matter body) just isn't going to have the *wherewithal* to replicate itself. The raw human, as I'm sure you've guessed I'm about to claim, is the post-nanotech evolutionary equivalent of the bacterium. The logic of evolution seems to favor the organism somewhere in the center of the (logarithmic) scale, like the ant. I have no way to make this rigorous, of course, but I would suspect that the average person (optimal replicator) in the far post-nanotech world would equal in wherewithal and productive capacity a large company or small country of the present era. ...For a second or two anyway; remember, things will be changing much faster then than now! --JoSH ps--I would assume the title was originally derived from George Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London"...