Wei_Dai comments on [video] Robin Hanson: Uploads Economics 101 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: mapnoterritory 05 August 2012 09:00PM

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Comment author: RobinHanson 09 August 2012 02:52:06AM 0 points [-]

In order for faster ems to talk to each other naturally, they have to be closer to each other, and thus occupy more expensive prime real estate. So they don't want to be faster than they need to be to match the other tasks with which they coordinate.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 09 August 2012 01:08:15PM 0 points [-]

That doesn't make intuitive sense to me. Surely even fast ems living in cheap real estate will still have plenty (millions? billions?) of people to talk to in real time, even if they have fewer people to talk to compared to those living in prime real estate? Given that running slower has significant costs (you have to pay the same storage costs as faster ems but can do less work, not being able to accumulate experience/knowledge as fast as others and losing competitive edge as a result) I don't see how it's worth those costs just to have more potential people to talk to.

Also, if you're assuming that it's fairly cheap to speed up and slow down emulations, which you apparently are, why don't they run at a fast speed normally and only slow down when they need to talk to distant others with low subjective latency, which may be pretty rare?

Comment author: RobinHanson 10 August 2012 01:16:48AM 0 points [-]

For any given task there will be particular people you need to talk to to get it done. I expect hardware would be specialized for particular speeds, but that minds could be moved between hardware of differing speeds in order to change speeds. In general most tasks have a particular time they need to be done, with only minor rewards for doing it much sooner.