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timtyler comments on The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology is soliciting ideas - Less Wrong
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We've been through this before. Very high returns by themselves give no guarantee that you'll be able to live off the interest on a modest amount, since the price of whatever you require for subsistence may be increasing at an even higher rate.
Re: "before we were assuming that the Robots (ems) were consumers. Here we're assuming the opposite, that humans and only humans consume."
More accurately, Martin Ford was assuming that - and I was pointing out that trucks, fridges, washing machines, etc. are best modelled as consumers too - since they consume valuable low-entropy resources - and spit out useless waste products.
The idea that machines don't participate in the economy as consumers is not a particularly useful one. Machines - and companies - buy things, sell things, consume things - and generally do participate. Those machines that don't buy things have things bought for them on their behalf (by companies or humans) - and the overall effect on economic throughput is much the same as if the machines were buying things themselves.
If you really want to ignore direct consumption by machines - and pretend that the machines are all working exclusively for humans, doing our bidding precisely - then you have GOT to account for people and companies buying things for the machines that they manange - or your model badly loses touch with reality.
In practice, it is best to just drop the assumption. Computer viruses / chain letters are probably the most obvious illustration of the problem with the idea that machines are exclusively "on our side", labour on our behalf, and have no interests of their own.
The mis-handling of this whole issue is one of the problems with "The Lights in the Tunnel".
Would this analysis apply to the ecosystem as a whole? Should we think of fungus as consuming low entropy plant waste and spitting out higher entropy waste products? Is a squirrel eating an acorn part of the economy?
Machines, as they currently exists, have no interests of their own. Any "interests" they may appear to have are as real as the "interest" gas molecules have in occupying a larger volume when the temperature increases. Computer viruses are simply a way that machines malfunction. The fact that machines are not exclusively on our side simply means that they do not perfectly fulfill our values. Nothing does.
Not without some changes; yes - and: not part of the human economy.
Various machines certainly behave in goal-directed ways - and so have what can usefully be described as "vested interests" - along the lines described here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vested_interest
Can you say what you mean by "interests"? Probably any difference of opinion here is a matter of differing definitions - and so is not terribly interesting.
Re: "The fact that machines are not exclusively on our side simply means that they do not perfectly fulfill our values."
That wasn't what I meant - what I meant is that they don't completely share human values - not that they don't fulfill them.
By interests, I mean concerns related to fulfilling values. For the time being, I consider human minds to be the only entities complex enough to have values. For example, it is very useful to model a cancer cell as having the goal of replicating, but I don't consider it to have replicating as a value.
The cancer example also shows that our own cells don't fulfill or share our values, and yet we still model the consumption of cancer cells as the consumption of a human being.
I think I might have the biggest issue with this line. Nobody is pretending that machines are all working exclusively for humans, no more than we pretend our cells are working exclusively for us. The idea is that we account for the machine consumption the same way we account for the consumption of our own cells, by attributing it to the human consumers.
The idea being criticised is that - if a few humans dominate the economy by commanding huge armies of robot minions, then - without substantial taxation - the economy will grind to a halt - since hardly any humans are earning any money, and so therefore hardly any humans are spending any money.
The problem with that is that the huge armies of robot minions are consuming vast quantities of material while competing with each other for resources - and the purchase of all those goods is not being accounted for anywhere in the model - apparently because of the ideas that only humans are consumers and most humans are unemployed .
It seems like a fairly straightforwards modelling mistake to me. The purchase of robot fuel and supplies has GOT to be accounted for. Account for it as mega-spending by the human managing director if you really must - but account for it somewhere. As soon as you do that, the whole idea that increassed automation leads to financial meltdown vanishes like a mirage.
We already have a pretty clear idea about the effect of automation on the economy - from Japan and South Korea. The machines do a load of work, and their bodies need feeding - creating demand for raw materials and fuel - and the economy is boosted.
How does needing raw materials create employment for the rest of the population? If everything is mechanized, then raw materials come from those who own mines/wells, and the extraction is done by robot labor. That doesn't involve very many people.
It doesn't create employment for the rest of the humans. In this scenario, most humans are unemployed - and probably rather poor - due to the hypothesised lack of "substantial taxation" and government handouts. The throughput of the economy arises essentially from the efforts of the machines.
There is another take on the word "value" - which defines it to mean that which goal-directed systems want.
That way, you can say things like: "Deep Blue usually values bishops more than knights".
To me, such usage seems vastly superior to using "values" to refer to something that only humans have.