3 ms·

You're assuming there's not a more economically efficient use for farmland than feeding really, really, really poor people. The floor for the price will be the

You're assuming there's not a more economically efficient use for farmland than feeding really, really, really poor people. The floor for the price will be the opportunity cost of using the land to grow food rather than, say, covering it with solar panels and exporting computation or whatever else can be dreamed up. At some point, it costs more to feed people than their economic worth over their lifetimes. I think in the long term, computers and robotics will be ridiculously efficient replacements for labour. I don't really expect everyone to starve to death - and to be honest I think there are more-worrying implications of AI than this: http://selfawaresystems.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/ai_drives_final.pdf http://selfawaresystems.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/ai_drive... I do, however, want to point out that's there no economic law preventing the majority from being far worse off.

icebraining 12y ago
If the "really, really, really poor people" are a minority, I can believe that, but then again that's already the case. But if those poor people are most of the current salaried people, which is the threat of automation, who will buy that computation or whatever else? Do you think EC2 would be successful if all services running on it where only used by the very rich? When you only have a small number of buyers, there's only so much computation or whatever that is economically feasible to produce. To make an analogy to the current world, the profit margin of luxury cars is much higher than of small compact cars. If markets worked like you're saying, every car manufacturer would exclusively switch to making luxury cars.
- JamesArgo 12y ago
  You're starting to sway me. But suppose we cloned the least-productive 0.001 percent of the population such that they outnumbered us all one hundred to one. Suppose, too, that all resources on earth were multiplied by the same amount. Do you think that would end well for the clones? Would Honda start making cheaper cars for the clones? What forces are at work that would guarantee the survival of these unproductive clones?
  - icebraining 12y ago
    To keep the analogy fair, resources (like arable land) would also need to be cloned 100:1 - after all, automation doesn't affect the people:resources ratio. I think they would survive, yes. What forces? Greed from everyone who could see an opportunity to profit by selling stuff to an untapped market.
    - JamesArgo 12y ago
      Yes. I just noticed that - an idiotic oversight. I added that in. I think in general I'm more wrong than I thought I was. But at some point it breaks. If all the clones have an IQ of, say, 50 there's no way they would be able to survive. To take it to an absurd extreme, suppose we cloned chimps instead of people. The vast majority of the new 100x resources would end up in human hands. That is, it seems obvious to me that humans would find a use for that land that is more efficient than selling its outputs to the chimps, whose value would be absurdly low - 100 chimps being worth less than one human. I think it's more likely the humans would up their land use by 100 (even supposing a static population) than attempt to sell food for nearly worthless chimp labour.
      - icebraining 12y ago
        Define "end up". Humans could own the majority, but they couldn't possibly consume the majority, and in the end it's still more profitable to sell those resources to chimps as long as you get any benefit from it, as opposed to just letting it rot. Of course, that means chimps would be forced to work for humans to eat, but then again, is that new?
        randallsquared 12y ago
        I don't think there's anything chimps could do that would cause humans to provide for more than a tiny fraction of them; farmland that produced bananas for chimps last year might be converted to biofuel or parkland or just lie fallow this year. Ultimately the problem will be that for the vast, vast majority of tasks, it would be orders of magnitude cheaper to spawn a new process to take care of it than to ask a human to do it.

icebraining 12y ago

If the "really, really, really poor people" are a minority, I can believe that, but then again that's already the case. But if those poor people are most of the current salaried people, which is the threat of automation, who will buy that computation or whatever else? Do you think EC2 would be successful if all services running on it where only used by the very rich? When you only have a small number of buyers, there's only so much computation or whatever that is economically feasible to produce. To make an analogy to the current world, the profit margin of luxury cars is much higher than of small compact cars. If markets worked like you're saying, every car manufacturer would exclusively switch to making luxury cars.

JamesArgo 12y ago
You're starting to sway me. But suppose we cloned the least-productive 0.001 percent of the population such that they outnumbered us all one hundred to one. Suppose, too, that all resources on earth were multiplied by the same amount. Do you think that would end well for the clones? Would Honda start making cheaper cars for the clones? What forces are at work that would guarantee the survival of these unproductive clones?
- icebraining 12y ago
  To keep the analogy fair, resources (like arable land) would also need to be cloned 100:1 - after all, automation doesn't affect the people:resources ratio. I think they would survive, yes. What forces? Greed from everyone who could see an opportunity to profit by selling stuff to an untapped market.
  - JamesArgo 12y ago
    Yes. I just noticed that - an idiotic oversight. I added that in. I think in general I'm more wrong than I thought I was. But at some point it breaks. If all the clones have an IQ of, say, 50 there's no way they would be able to survive. To take it to an absurd extreme, suppose we cloned chimps instead of people. The vast majority of the new 100x resources would end up in human hands. That is, it seems obvious to me that humans would find a use for that land that is more efficient than selling its outputs to the chimps, whose value would be absurdly low - 100 chimps being worth less than one human. I think it's more likely the humans would up their land use by 100 (even supposing a static population) than attempt to sell food for nearly worthless chimp labour.
    - icebraining 12y ago
      Define "end up". Humans could own the majority, but they couldn't possibly consume the majority, and in the end it's still more profitable to sell those resources to chimps as long as you get any benefit from it, as opposed to just letting it rot. Of course, that means chimps would be forced to work for humans to eat, but then again, is that new?
      - randallsquared 12y ago
        I don't think there's anything chimps could do that would cause humans to provide for more than a tiny fraction of them; farmland that produced bananas for chimps last year might be converted to biofuel or parkland or just lie fallow this year. Ultimately the problem will be that for the vast, vast majority of tasks, it would be orders of magnitude cheaper to spawn a new process to take care of it than to ask a human to do it.