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elharo comments on Comparative and absolute advantage in AI - Less Wrong Discussion
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There is nothing here that is specific to AIs. You could replace AI with "foreign nation" or "competing company" and it would read the same. E.g.
Thus I suggest considering how this plays out in the real world today. I.e. why does comparative advantage exist instead of one big maximally efficient monopoly? Answer that question first, and you'll be much better positioned to consider the case where a self-directed AI is added to the market.
Well, it is and was relatively rare through history for one country to have an absolute advantage over another. And when they do, or think they do, yes, often invasion is in the air.
It is a little hard to believe that the entire colonial era did not consist of nations with absolute advantage taking resources from other humans with much less of an economy. Even now, there is nearly a factor of 300 between the most and least productive (per capita) countries. Tell me how that is not a good measure of absolute advantage.
Perhaps you consider post-Renaissance Europe with its industrial age and so on to be a blip on the human radar? I think you are going to find Greek and especially Roman domination of its neighbors to be easily traced to economic absolute advantages, although I'll leave that as an exercise for the readers.
Remember, absolute advantage means being better at everything. As such it is far from trivial to find a case were true absolute advantage is held. Of course, invasion and exploitation are not done only in conditions of complete absolute advantage...
A US hour of labor produces 9 times the tradable value of a Chinese hour of labor.. Absolute advantage would mea that there is NOTHING that China could produce with fewer labor hours than the US could produce. In fact, as you suggest, there is probably something. Things like Chinese art. Chinese tourism. Perhaps even a few special gourmet Chinese items of food.
But how much does the existence of these items change the big picture? In terms of labor hours, we outproduce the Chinese on the stuff we sell them by on average a little more than a factor of 9 while we outproduce them on the stuff they sell us by some factor much greater than 1, but less than 9. Would some collection of highly unique products that comprise way under 10%, possibly under 1% of the total economic value traded really change anything?
I don't think so. I think absolute advantage framed as "everything" is an oversimplification of the concept that really matters, which is overwhelming superiority in the hours required to produce stuff.
Do you actually disagree with this idea?
Absolute advantage meaning literally everything would mean China would have NOTHING we would buy from China. In fact, with thousands of items that could be traded
Your link is broken. You need to escape the underscores as "\ _" (without the space).
Thanks. Couldn't fix it by escaping underscores ,instead I made it a hyperlink and escaped the right parenthesis which is part of the link.
Oh, that's weird. It's always worked in the past. Or my memory is foggy. Sorry.
The code that turns things that start with "http colon slash slash" into clickable links doesn't treat Markdown characters like the underscore and the backslash specially. (This is probably meant to be convenient, but I consider it a bug.) It also does not allow close parens in links, which is what messed up the first version of mwengler's link.
Francis Bacon (1561-1626) is known for the scientific method, which was a key factor in the scientific revolution. Bacon stated that the technologies that distinguished Europe of his day from the Middle Ages were paper and printing, gunpowder and the magnetic compass, known as the Four great inventions. The Four great inventions important to the development of Europe were of Chinese origin.[6] Other Chinese inventions included the horse collar, cast iron, an improved plow and the seed drill.
It is much more difficult for America to invade, say, Iraq, and build the necessary infrastructure or whatever it needs for Iraq to become another America then it is for an AI to kill you and use your resources to make another AI.
If we could easily turn Iraq into another America, Iraq would have done it already. As great as it is to be the dictator of a third world country, it's much better to be the dictator of a developed country.
ygert is right. See colonialism and hostile takeovers and whatever monopolies do exist.
There’s no maximally efficient monopoly because it is rare for a tuple (large company, small competitor) to have a 500 times absolute efficiency advantage for the large company at everything at the same time, and most companies tend to care about one particular thing rather than all of them.
Take a large oil company. It probably is more lots of times better than a single human at extracting oil, as well as at a few other tasks, let’s say transporting oil where it needs to go. Now imagine you have some land, and it's discovered to be above a rich oil field. Do you think the company will prefer to trade oil extracting and transporting with you, or to just buy (or force) you out of that land? What do you think will happen in practice? Also, what do you think it would happen if oil companies’ motivations weren’t at all structured by laws (like a UFAI would not be), and they didn’t expect to lose occasionally from fines and such.
Who says an AI's motivations and decisions won't be affected by laws? As you point out, economic entities' actions are constrained and influenced by the laws of the societies they operate in. Laws form a structure that modifies how an economy operates. An AI would simply be another entity operating within an economy built around laws and regulations, as are corporations, persons, nations, and families today. AIs might break the laws, as corporations and people do today; but they will nonetheless be constrained by the ability and willingness of governments to enforce those laws.
AIs are not magic genies. They can't just wave a wand and say, "Alakazam. I want the world to give me all its resources" and expect it to happen. There are no magic genies.
if it is rare for a large company to have a 500 times absolute efficiency advantage for everything at the same time, then it is very unlikely an AI will have such an advantage; and there's your answer. The same factors that make such advantages hard to accumulate today will likely prevent an AI from accumulating them in the future.
I guess that depends on what level of AI we’re talking about. I mean, it’s true in a literal sense, but starting from a certain point they might approximate magic very well.
Insert analogy with humans and dogs here. Or a better example for this situation: think of a poker game: it’s got “laws”, both “man-made” (the rules) and “natural” (probability). Even if all other players are champions, if one of the players can instantly compute exactly all the probabilities involved, see clearly all external physiological stress markers on the other players (while showing none), has an excellent understanding of human nature, know all previous games of all players, and is smart enough to be able to integrate all that in real time, that player will basically always win, without “breaking the laws”.
I’m not convinced. If the AI was subject to the same factors a large company is subject to today, we wouldn’t need AIs. Note that a large company is basically a composite agent composed of people plus programs people can write. That is, the class of inventive problems it can solve are those that fit a human brain, even if it can work on more than one in parallel. Also, communication bandwidth between thinking nodes (i.e., the humans) is even worse than that inside a brain, and those nodes all have interests of their own that can be very different from that of the company itself.
Basically, saying that an AGI is limited by the same factors as a large company is a bit like saying that a human is limited by the same factors as a powerful pack of chimps. And yet, if he manages to survive an initial period for preparation, a human can pretty much "conquer" any pack of chimps they wanted to. (E.g., capture, kill, cut trees and build a house with a moat.)
If you think about it, in a way, chimps (or Hominoidea in general) already had their singularity, and they have no idea what’s going on whenever we’re involved.
You are proposing that AIs are magic genies. Take your poker example. While a computer program can certainly quickly calculate all the probabilities involved, and can probably develop a reasonable strategy for bluffing, that's as far as our knowledge goes.
We do not know if it is even possible to see clearly all external physiological stress markers on the other players or have an excellent understanding of human nature. How is a computer going to do this? Humans can't. Humans can't predict the behavior of dogs or chimpanzees and they're operating on a level way below ours.
It's not enough to say "But of course the AI will figure this out. It's smarter than us, so it will figure out this thing that eludes all humans." Show me how it's going to do all these things, and then you're treating the issue seriously. Otherwise you're just assigning it magic powers by fiat.
See an example for one stress marker. That’s an order of magnitude above noticing blushes. Dogs have much better sense of smell, and technology exists to simulate that. You can probably detect the pulse of each person in a noisy room with just an array of sufficiently-accurate microphones.
Note that human intellect was sufficient to discover the technique, and the technique is powerful enough to allow human senses to see the movements directly, you don’t even need to examine Fourier transforms and the like.
I can’t and you can‘t. But dog and chimpanzee experts can predict lots of things I couldn’t. And experts on human behavior can predict lots of things about humans that might seem impossible to non-trained humans. Psychiatrists and psychologists can often deduce with decent confidence lots of things from seemingly innocuous facts, despite the mess their discipline might be in bulk. Sociopaths can often manipulate people despite (allegedly) not feeling the emotions they manipulate. Salesmen are often vilified for selling things the buyer doesn’t want, and the fact that there exist consistently better and worse salesmen indicate that it’s not just luck. Hell, I can predict lots of things about people I know well despite not being smarter than them.
Note that the hypothetical poker player (or whatever) doesn’t need to predict perfectly. They just need to do it much better than humans. And the fact that expert human poker players have been known to win poker tournaments without looking at their cards is evidence that even human-level prediction is hugely useful.
Hell, Eliezer allegedly got out of the box using only a text channel, he didn’t have the luxury of looking at the person to judge the emotional effects of his messages.
Laws, the costs of breaking them, the costs of making different ones, are just another optimization problem for businesses. Indeed, my singular insight about the intelligence services of nations is that the laws that constrain civilians within a country in commercial interactions are explicitly not applied to government intelligence agents and police generally, and especially when they are operating against other countries.
An AI will be as constrained by laws as would a similarly intelligent corporation. An AI which is much smarter than the collective intelligence of the best human corporations will be much less constrained by laws, especially as it accumulates wealth, which is essentially control of valuable tools.
One would expect in the mid term (as opposed to the long term) AI's to be part of corporations, that there would be an AI + human alliances which would be the most competitive.
If we get Kurzweil's future as opposed to the lesswrong orthodox future, AI will be integrated with human intelligence, that is, I will have modifications made to me that give me much higher intelligence than I have now. Conceivably at some point, the enhancements will have me jumping to a non-human substrate, but the line between what was unmodified human and what is clearly no longer human will be very hard to define. As opposed to the lesswrong vision which is AI's running off to the singularity while humans sit there paralyzed relying on their 1 kHz clocked parallel processor built entirely of meat. In which case the dividing line SEEMS much clearer.
Modified humans: human or not? I'm betting CEV when calculated will show that they are. I know I want to be smarter, how 'bout you?
And the laws of modified humans will be a whole lot more complex than the laws of bio-humans, just as the laws of humans are much more complex than the laws of monkeys.