5 ms·

I thought the argument was good and convincing. Perhaps you could find the time to write something more substantive because I and others, as seen in comments, a

by 14 5y ago

I thought the argument was good and convincing. Perhaps you could find the time to write something more substantive because I and others, as seen in comments, agree he has some good arguments. I would be interested in seeing what parts you don’t agree with.

EricE 5y ago
Other than completely discounting innovation as a thing? How about starting with that one?
- 14 5y ago
  I think the point was you can’t innovate past the laws of physics not that people can’t innovate.
yyyk 5y ago
Everything is bad? Sorry, since you asked I'll explain. He's basically using an infinite timescale on one end (going as far as 1,400 years in the future) but bans quite a few futuristic technologies on the other end. This is super tilted. He wants to not talk about stuff like going to other planets. Sure, I can accept that in the next century. But in 400 years? 1,400 years? Please. When the timescales are so long, you're not merely doubting technological progress - you're either assuming collapse before it happens or making an impossibility theorem. The first isn't supported by the post (his mechanism is very slow), there's no reason for the second. I think the burden of proof is on the other end here, since we can come close to generation ships right now*, it's just absurdly uneconomic, nobody wants it and there's nowhere to send them to. Just a little research on suspension, and a slowwww generation ship is doable. Third, Virtual Reality is not what he should be looking at. He should be wondering if we can 'upload' our minds like some futurists suggest. Or if strong AI can be created and change everything. I don't usually bother with the 'Rationalists', but they do have some arguments that we can seriously expect AI in this century. And on the timescales he's using, he's making a very unsupported impossibility theorem. But lets accept all his arguments. He assumes people will be asked nicely to go to Virtual Reality. More likely, if resources are such a problem, costs of existing in the real world will increase so much they won't have any choice [were he an economist perhaps he'd have thought of this?]. This isn't nice, but it is compatible with the definition of growth he uses up to the last few paragraphs, which merely talks about GDP, not human happiness! * Scifi plot - future Earth sends out generation ships to limit overpopulation. The secret - they have nowhere to send them to. So the destinations are black holes and other disaster areas, the expeditions are meant to die so the plant can reduce energy expenditure thus increasing GDP. The colonists will never know since they're cryogenically suspended. One of the doomed generation ships somehow chances upon one of the rare relativistic black hole solutions that allow them to go back in time... To before they were sent. Now they go back and try to get even. But they can't change history, and they have few resources, so how will they achieve their revenge?
- ben_w 5y ago
  Pick a population growth rate and I can tell you when the minimum possible power used to keep each person’s consciousness running at 100% speed even if you strip away all the messy biology and just function as a uploaded mind on a perfect computer, still exceeds the fundamental capacity of the universe. Of course it may turn out there’s “One Weird Trick To Make More Matter And Energy In The Universe While It’s Expanding (Physicists Hate Him!)”, but that’s not something one can foresee, because if you could foresee that kind of thing reliably we’d already know about the trick.
  - colinmhayes 5y ago
    > Pick a population growth rate 0%. Many developed economies are already below replacement. No reason to expect population growth to continue forever.
  - yyyk 5y ago
    >Pick a population growth rate and I can tell you when the minimum possible power used to keep each person’s consciousness running at 100% speed I'm not sure which definition of 'growth' you're referring to here. If it's GDP (which the article linked earlier did), well, in many developed countries, population has been decreasing despite increasing GDP. So this issue does not prevent growth. But lets assume we're talking about population size, and assume also population keeps increasing: We don't have to run consciousness continuously. Since consciousness is now virtualized we can suspend it and make it appear to the person as if they never were suspended (or 'slept' if you will). e.g. give a tick every thousand years. If needed, we can increase the period. And if we synchronize everyone, nobody will notice. I daresay it's possible to maintain a large population indefinitely using this method.
    - ben_w 5y ago
      > I'm not sure which definition of 'growth' you're referring to here. One in which brain uploads are relevant, because you mentioned it. Literally any kind of efficiency has a maximum, an economy of pure minds was just the most extreme case which I took specifically to avoid any possible debate: there is (according to currently known laws of reality) definitely an absolute maximum in this universe, no matter what we do. Limit the population to current number or lower, and any other kind of efficiency also has a limit — lights can’t convert less than 0% into heat, resistance can’t be less than in a superconductor, reversible computers can’t beat the Landauer limit. You might fully automate manufacturing and give everyone alive today their own personal galaxy cluster [0] and it’s still finite. Big, still finite. > If it's GDP (which the article linked earlier did), well, in many developed countries, population has been decreasing despite increasing GDP. So this issue does not prevent growth. Indeed it is decreasing. Yet you may have to enforce that, because subgroups that grow faster rapidly dominate. This is unavoidable unless you take active measures to prevent it, because that’s what evolution does. (You can because evolution is dumb, but you have to). (I’d argue that in such a case, the license to reproduce would constitute a currency and in that currency humanity today world seem unimaginably wealthy; however this is not something I am prepared to make a keystone argument). > We don't have to run consciousness continuously. Can also just run them all slower. In neither case does this sound like an economy “growing” to me, but let’s say it is: Still only a finite quantity of stuff in any given light cone upon which to record the state. In the extreme case your storage is multi-AU wavelength photons on the edge of turning into a Kugelblitz black hole after all the stars have gone dark and the CMB has redshifted beyond detectability, and that’s still finite. I’m happy to believe that in my lifetime we’ll develop the tech to begin turn Mercury into a Dyson swarm and directly colonise half the accessible universe [0], but it’s still finite, there’s still a limit. Exponential growth hits even big numbers much faster than most people expect. You ever played an idle game? I find them annoyingly compelling, but they all seem to show this behaviour, rapidly getting into numbers much larger than quantities of any category of stuff in the real universe. [0] https://youtu.be/zQTfuI-9jIo https://youtu.be/zQTfuI-9jIo

by 14 5y ago

EricE 5y ago

Other than completely discounting innovation as a thing? How about starting with that one?

14 5y ago
I think the point was you can’t innovate past the laws of physics not that people can’t innovate.

yyyk 5y ago

Everything is bad? Sorry, since you asked I'll explain. He's basically using an infinite timescale on one end (going as far as 1,400 years in the future) but bans quite a few futuristic technologies on the other end. This is super tilted. He wants to not talk about stuff like going to other planets. Sure, I can accept that in the next century. But in 400 years? 1,400 years? Please. When the timescales are so long, you're not merely doubting technological progress - you're either assuming collapse before it happens or making an impossibility theorem. The first isn't supported by the post (his mechanism is very slow), there's no reason for the second. I think the burden of proof is on the other end here, since we can come close to generation ships right now*, it's just absurdly uneconomic, nobody wants it and there's nowhere to send them to. Just a little research on suspension, and a slowwww generation ship is doable. Third, Virtual Reality is not what he should be looking at. He should be wondering if we can 'upload' our minds like some futurists suggest. Or if strong AI can be created and change everything. I don't usually bother with the 'Rationalists', but they do have some arguments that we can seriously expect AI in this century. And on the timescales he's using, he's making a very unsupported impossibility theorem. But lets accept all his arguments. He assumes people will be asked nicely to go to Virtual Reality. More likely, if resources are such a problem, costs of existing in the real world will increase so much they won't have any choice [were he an economist perhaps he'd have thought of this?]. This isn't nice, but it is compatible with the definition of growth he uses up to the last few paragraphs, which merely talks about GDP, not human happiness! * Scifi plot - future Earth sends out generation ships to limit overpopulation. The secret - they have nowhere to send them to. So the destinations are black holes and other disaster areas, the expeditions are meant to die so the plant can reduce energy expenditure thus increasing GDP. The colonists will never know since they're cryogenically suspended. One of the doomed generation ships somehow chances upon one of the rare relativistic black hole solutions that allow them to go back in time... To before they were sent. Now they go back and try to get even. But they can't change history, and they have few resources, so how will they achieve their revenge?

ben_w 5y ago
Pick a population growth rate and I can tell you when the minimum possible power used to keep each person’s consciousness running at 100% speed even if you strip away all the messy biology and just function as a uploaded mind on a perfect computer, still exceeds the fundamental capacity of the universe. Of course it may turn out there’s “One Weird Trick To Make More Matter And Energy In The Universe While It’s Expanding (Physicists Hate Him!)”, but that’s not something one can foresee, because if you could foresee that kind of thing reliably we’d already know about the trick.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  > Pick a population growth rate 0%. Many developed economies are already below replacement. No reason to expect population growth to continue forever.
- yyyk 5y ago
  >Pick a population growth rate and I can tell you when the minimum possible power used to keep each person’s consciousness running at 100% speed I'm not sure which definition of 'growth' you're referring to here. If it's GDP (which the article linked earlier did), well, in many developed countries, population has been decreasing despite increasing GDP. So this issue does not prevent growth. But lets assume we're talking about population size, and assume also population keeps increasing: We don't have to run consciousness continuously. Since consciousness is now virtualized we can suspend it and make it appear to the person as if they never were suspended (or 'slept' if you will). e.g. give a tick every thousand years. If needed, we can increase the period. And if we synchronize everyone, nobody will notice. I daresay it's possible to maintain a large population indefinitely using this method.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    > I'm not sure which definition of 'growth' you're referring to here. One in which brain uploads are relevant, because you mentioned it. Literally any kind of efficiency has a maximum, an economy of pure minds was just the most extreme case which I took specifically to avoid any possible debate: there is (according to currently known laws of reality) definitely an absolute maximum in this universe, no matter what we do. Limit the population to current number or lower, and any other kind of efficiency also has a limit — lights can’t convert less than 0% into heat, resistance can’t be less than in a superconductor, reversible computers can’t beat the Landauer limit. You might fully automate manufacturing and give everyone alive today their own personal galaxy cluster [0] and it’s still finite. Big, still finite. > If it's GDP (which the article linked earlier did), well, in many developed countries, population has been decreasing despite increasing GDP. So this issue does not prevent growth. Indeed it is decreasing. Yet you may have to enforce that, because subgroups that grow faster rapidly dominate. This is unavoidable unless you take active measures to prevent it, because that’s what evolution does. (You can because evolution is dumb, but you have to). (I’d argue that in such a case, the license to reproduce would constitute a currency and in that currency humanity today world seem unimaginably wealthy; however this is not something I am prepared to make a keystone argument). > We don't have to run consciousness continuously. Can also just run them all slower. In neither case does this sound like an economy “growing” to me, but let’s say it is: Still only a finite quantity of stuff in any given light cone upon which to record the state. In the extreme case your storage is multi-AU wavelength photons on the edge of turning into a Kugelblitz black hole after all the stars have gone dark and the CMB has redshifted beyond detectability, and that’s still finite. I’m happy to believe that in my lifetime we’ll develop the tech to begin turn Mercury into a Dyson swarm and directly colonise half the accessible universe [0], but it’s still finite, there’s still a limit. Exponential growth hits even big numbers much faster than most people expect. You ever played an idle game? I find them annoyingly compelling, but they all seem to show this behaviour, rapidly getting into numbers much larger than quantities of any category of stuff in the real universe. [0] https://youtu.be/zQTfuI-9jIo https://youtu.be/zQTfuI-9jIo