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

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

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Comment author: CarlShulman 06 August 2012 04:23:59AM *  1 point [-]

Parallelizable tasks can all be solved whenever (again, plumber), and all the work that remains will be in serial. Ems will be tasked with jobs on their instantiation, and will return their results to whoever needed it when their task is completed (which could just be another worker). This brings corporations outside of the realm of bosses and economists and pulls them into the realm of computer scientists. Corporations will look a lot less like pyramids and a lot more like computer programs.

This doesn't make sense to me as an objection. Some tasks are not very short and parallelizable, so you need extended serial work. And some of those tasks will profit from coordination between different minds with different skills, or different memories from earlier in the project. Coordinating those units would require some kind of communication and management.

Comment author: Xachariah 06 August 2012 06:18:47AM 0 points [-]

I'm sure it says more about my imagination than the nature of future work, but I still can't imagine anything one can meaningfully work on that can't be either parallelized, or treated like a computer program. It makes it hard to think about the subject without a concrete example to wrap my head around.

Comment author: CarlShulman 06 August 2012 06:56:15AM 0 points [-]

Take 50 researchers working on related topics to improve an algorithm to do object recognition in industrial robots. Each topic involves lemmas building upon lemmas, experiments selected based on previous experiments, and other serial steps. The steps are different for the different subtopics. As intermediate results come in, communication and management are used to allocate resources between subtopics, to determine which researchers spend how much time explaining their work to one another to cross-fertilize insights, and so forth.

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