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Michaelos comments on SMBC comic: poorly programmed average-utility-maximizing AI - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (113)
Well, first of all, I'm assuming that you're doing that to both groupings (since otherwise I could say "Well, one has only one person and one has a massive number of people, which is a difference." but that seems like a trivial point)
So if you apply it to both, then it's just one person considering tradeoff A, (pay torture to go speck free for eons)
And another person considering tradeoff B(personally build pyramids for eons to get to live in your own collection of pyramids for some years.)
I could say that in once case the pain is relatively dense (torture, condensed to 50 years) and the pleasure is relatively sparse,(speck free, over 3^^^3 years) and that in the other case the pain relatively sparse (slave labor, spread out over a long time) and the pleasure is relatively dense (Incomprehensible pyramidgasm.).
I'm not sure if that matters or in what ways that difference matters. I'm really not up to date on how your brain handles that specifically and would probably need to look it up further.
No. Building pyramids as humans. And enjoying them much, much longer as they stand there, for Felix. Enjoyed by Felix.
Maybe the amount of our pleasure with Giza pyramids already exceeded the pain invested to build them. I don't know.
Can all the pains of a slave be justified by all the pleasures of the tourist, visiting the hole in the rock, he was forced carving for 50 years?
Or can a large group of sick sadists are entitled to slowly torture someone, since their pleasure sum will be greater than the pain of the unlucky one?
I don't think so.
Was it that much pain? I read in National Geographic, IIRC, that the modern archaeological conception was that the pyramids were mostly or entirely built by paid labor - Nile farmers killing time during the dry season. This may even be a good thing, depending on whether it diverted imperial tax revenue from foreign adventurism into monument/tomb-building.
I saw it, too. Had to use other example. Mayan or Aztec pyramids maybe.
Well, it's still a fun Fermi calculation problem, anyway.
Let's see, the Pyramids have been the targets of tourism since at least the original catalogue of wonders of the ancient world, Antipater of Sidon ~140 BC which includes "the great man-made mountains of the lofty pyramids". So that's ~2150 years of tourism (2012+140). Quickly checking, Wikipedia says 12.8 million people visited Egypt for tourism in 2008, but surely not all of them visited the pyramids? Let's halve it to 6 million.
Let's pretend Egyptian tourism followed a linear growth between 140 BC with one visitor (Antipater) and 6 million in 2012 (yes, world population & wealth has grown and so you'd expect tourism to grow a lot, but Egypt has been pretty chaotic recently), over 2150 years. We can just average that to 3 million a year, which gives us a silly total number of tourists of 2150 * 3 million or 6.45 billion visitors.
There are 138 pyramids, WP says, with the Great Pyramid estimated at 100,000 workers. Let's halve it (again with the assumptions!) at 50k workers a pyramid, 50,000 * 138 = 6.9m workers total.
This gives us the visitor:worker ratio of 6.45b:6.9m, or 21,500:23, or 934.8:1.
And of course the pyramids are still there, so whatever the real ratio, it's getting better (modulo issues of maintenance and restoration).
Maybe those pyramids in Egypt are not so bad, after all.
But with how much tourism you can justify Aztec pyramids, where people were slaughtered?
How many billion tourist should come to be worth to start with them all over again?
You'd need a heck of a lot more tourism than for Egypt... although apparently there's quite a range of estimates of deaths, from less than 20,000 a year to more than 200,000 a year. Given the substantially less tourism to the Aztec pyramids (inasmuch as apparently only 2 small unimpressive Aztec pyramids survive, with all the impressive ones like Tenochtitlan destroyed), it's safe to say that the utilitarian calculus will never work out for them.
It seems to me that any historical event that was both painful to the participants, and interesting to read and learn about after the fact, creates the same dilemma that's been discussed here. Will World War Two have been a net good if 10,000 years from now trillions of people have gotten incredible enjoyment from watching movies, reading books, and playing videogames that involve WWII as a setting in some way?
The first solution to this dilemma that comes to mind is that ready substitutes exist for most of the entertainments associated with these unpleasant events. If the Aztecs had built their pyramids and then never sacrificed anyone on them it probably wouldn't hurt the modern tourist trade that much. And if WWII had never happened and thus caused the Call of Duty videogame franchise to never exist, it wouldn't have a big impact on utility because some cognates of the Doom, Unreal, and similar franchises would still exist (those franchises are based on fictional events, so no one got hurt inspiring them).
In fact, if I was to imagine an alternate human history where no war, slavery, or similar conflict had ever happened, and the inhabitants got all their enjoyment from entertainment media based on fictional conflicts, I think such a world would have a much higher net utility than our own.
Big romances have been inspired by much smaller events, it should be noted.
The first approximation which springs in my mind would be an exponential growth rather than a linear one.
Sure - but can you offhand fit an exponential curve and calculate its summation? I'm sure it's doable with the specified endpoints and # of periods (just steal a simple interest formula), but it's more work than halving and multiplying.
Well... integral from t0 to t1 of exp(at+b) dt = (exp(at1+b)-exp(a*t2+b))/a i.e. the difference between the endpoints times the time needed to increase by a factor of e... a 6-million-fold increase is about 22.5 doublings (knowing 2^20 = 1 million), hence about 15 factors of e (knowing that ln 2 = 0.7) i.e. about one in 150... hence the total number of tourists is about 1 billion (about six times less than Rhwawn's estimate -- my eyeballs had told me it would be about one third... close enough!)
I'm actually a little surprised that his such gross approximation puts it off by only 6x. For a Fermi estimate that's perfectly acceptable.
I've heard that the labourers who made the pyramids were actually quite well paid.
Being very very outraged isn't really an argument.
Give us your own (non-utilitarian I assume) decision theory that you consider encapsulating all that is good and moral, if you please.
If you can't, please stop being outraged as those of us who try to solve the problem, even if you feel we've taken wrong turns in the path towards the solution.
Found this by random clicking around, I expect no one's still reading this, but maybe we'll catch each other via Inbox:
How about "optimize the worst case" from in game theory? It settles both the dust speck vs. torture and the the Utility Monster Felix problems neatly.