If there is genuine interest here I will go into more detail but right now I should lay out some brief responses.
Background:
In the future there will be robots. These robots will have their wages driven down to subsistence level. Yes, robots will have wages. Yes, they will have a “subsistence level.” Just go with it. If doesn’t make sense we can take care of that issue in later posts.
Matt Yglesias says
If the “robots” are really mere machines, then it should be easy to peacefully divide up the surplus more-or-less equitably, we’ll transition to socialism and everyone will be happy—it’ll be like Star Trek. If the robots are sentient beings, then we’d presumably be looking at an eventual slave revolt and Communist revolution.
Bryan Caplan responds
Yes, the robots will be mere machines. But these mere machines will be owned by people. And though these people will be awfully rich by our standards, even rich people rarely take the "transition to socialism" lying down. They (or their robot stewards) will have every reason to resist expropriation like any other capitalists. In the short-run, that means investing less and consuming more – and capital flight if the transition to socialism looks serious.
So I am just going to stake this out hardcore. The robots will be people. The will not be Stems, the term I use. Stems are flesh and blood people like you and me.
The robots will be EMs. But, they will be as much a person as you or I. Indeed, they will likely remember having been a Stem.
This is because the most feasible way of making a robot is to just copy a flesh and blood human brain. Since we don’t know how the brain works, we have to replicate it wholesale to get a robot brain just as powerful.
You are going to want a robot brain as powerful as a human one. Sub-human robot brains will be driven out of the market.
This means the robots get the ability to feel jealousy right along with the ability to engineer new products. Unless, someone figures out how to separate one from the other, we are getting both.
However, the analogy isn’t as Matt suggests a return to the late 1800s. It’s a return to the 1600s. The Stems won’t be capitalists. Indeed, robots will probably own and control most of the capital, and earn relatively low profits doing so.
There is an issue with intellectual property but I am betting that the intellectual property rights are significantly weakened in the wake of the Em revolution. Many minds means that thinking is much cheaper and the monopoly rents from IP will be less tolerable.
The Stems will be landed gentry. Their wealth will come from the fact that Stems own the natural resources of this world and those will be in extremely high demand.
I am willing to bet that all Stems will enjoy some level of extreme wealth because it will be given to them by other Stems. Not as high as the richest Stems, of course, but far far above an EM. Being wealthy will likely be seen as a Stem birthright; something that differentiates us, from them. Since, this birthright is cheap to confer and it supports a status hierarchy I think it is likely to evolve.
Further, the EMs will likely not be slaves because there will be no reason to enslave them. The rent on land will exceed the profits from running a slave operation.
Lastly the EMs will not revolt because there will be little to gain. The enormous wealth of the Stems comes from the fact that there are so few of them in comparison to the EMs. If land commands no larger fraction of world income then it does today, it would be trivial to redistribute it.
However, if world population is literally billions of times higher, then STEMs are extremely wealthy because you are taking a tiny slice of a huge amount of economic output and then giving it to an incredibly tiny fraction of the population.
Lastly, I haven’t bounced this off of Robin, but I tend to think democracy goes the way of the Great Abundance. That is, into oblivion. There is no reason for the common EM to bother being involved in politics when no policy can change the basic living standards of your class.
The future is oligarchy.
8 comments
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Monday ~ May 23rd, 2011 at 1:09 pm
Ethan D
I think you may be overstating the functional autonomy of robots, at least in the “near-future” state. You readily admit that we will have a difficult time making robots with brains smarter than human brains – this appears to be a constraint in your future markets. But then why would you assume we would just replicate the human brain? There is an easier way – neural interface. I’m far more concerned that possibly before the end of the century, neural interface will advance to the point that the hybrid human-computer will be the relevant economic agent, and that anyone who doesn’t integrate their brain with computers simply won’t be able to compete in any desirable labor market. Moreover, it is probably through neural interface that we will ultimately map the brains functions, so this innovation is probably a requirement for the advanced robot brain you imagine. So by the time that happens, at least one important shift will already have occurred. In some sense, who cares if robots are people in 200 hundred years if people are essentially robots in 100 years?
Monday ~ May 23rd, 2011 at 1:56 pm
Gepap
Most productive tasks simply do not need sapience to be performed – an basic “animal” level of intelligence is all that is necessary for the vast majority of tasks that we would need robots to perform, particularly those most important to our basic needs, those jobs in agriculture and manufacturing.
Even if AI equivalent to human intelligence were necessary and desireable, how does your system work, really? Most machines will be run on electricity, so either they can be equiped with systems that draw energy from the environment (solar mainly) or will need to be constantly or periodically connected to a power source. We already have a centralized system of power generation, and there is no reason for that to change. Why then would robots gain control over that most fundamental of their needs? The economic system of 1600 you described existed only because land was fundamental to the maintenance of agriculture, and this was key because people have to eat and drink above all else (breathing is assumed given air’s nature) This system does not work for this robotic future. Their basic needs will come from large, established centralized systems or completely decentralized systems in which land ownership is immaterial.
And what about human needs? Having robots does not remove the basic human need for food – this means land. Will every human own their own plot of land that their robots will farm? I don’t see how we could go back to such a system, so the basic needs for most humans (agriculturally productive land) will still be controlled by only a minority of folks, as it is today. Currently, what most humans do to have access to this product of a few is conduct work for wages that they can then trade for food. What happens when most humans don’t have wages to earn? How do they get food?
Monday ~ May 23rd, 2011 at 3:19 pm
Bruce Hughes
In my opinion, you seriously underestimate the difficulty of making a copy of a human brain. The anatomical structure and functionality of a mature human brain is the result of a long, and path-dependent, process of establishing and pruning connections among an extremely large number of neurons. Using any process that I can conceive of that replicates this structure and functionality necessarily, in my view, requires dismantling the template. Moravec notwithstanding, I doubt you will find many willing candidates for this process.
Monday ~ May 23rd, 2011 at 4:47 pm
Alex
Sounds like a great place for us stems. Let’s just make sure not to give the robots emotions so that they can’t feel oppressed.
Robotopia!
Tuesday ~ May 24th, 2011 at 8:17 am
Barry
Bryan Caplan: “In the short-run, that means investing less and consuming more – and capital flight if the transition to socialism looks serious. ”
First, the rich are not in a position to consume more and invest less – perhaps Mr. Economist Bryan Caplan was sick that day when they covered marginal propensity to consume. Second, we’ve played with tax rates in the USA and have not seen what he’s talking about.
Third – capital flight? Why doesn’t he just say ‘going Galt’?
Tuesday ~ May 24th, 2011 at 2:07 pm
RickRussellTX
> This is because the most feasible way of making a robot is to just copy a flesh and blood human brain.
I think this claim is exceptionally hard to support. It’s impossible to copy anything from a human today, except things we can write down, and I don’t see that limitation being lifted in the near future. Human brains are very much unlike semiconductor-based computers, and inasmuch as computers have been built to emulate human behavior, that emulation has come at tremendous computational cost.
Watson, for example, was a room full of computers. 8 full racks with support equipment. And that was a computer designed to perform one very specific language task (and it was allowed to cheat in that it did not have to visually read or audibly understand anything like its human counterparts; the text was fed to it in pre-digested computer compatible form). Even if we imagine Watson being reduced to the size of a Speak & Spell (“The TI Answerman 1000!”), it’s still a very specific task.
You could certainly assemble enough of these very specific task systems to get fairly human-ish capabilities, but it would be nothing like a copy of a human brain.
Human brains are full of little analog states, highly interconnected with highly “parallel” implementation. Many tasks seem to light up the whole brain — tasks that, on a computer, would be performed by a specific subcircuit of the CPU with binary precision. Getting anything parallel to work right in a computer — at least where the problem doesn’t easily break down into pieces — is still a major computer science research area.
More importantly, there is no way to read the state of a human brain, and it’s not clear that there ever will be sufficient detection precision to do so. So even if you could create a perfect brain-analog computer, initializing it with somebody’s current brain contents is pure science fiction. How would you read the states of billions of neurons?
If you could make a sufficiently power brain-analog computer, you might be able to teach it from a first principles framework. But that’s very different than making a copy.
Friday ~ May 27th, 2011 at 4:27 pm
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