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Demonstrate, please.

You know, this seems amusingly analogous to the scene in the seventh Harry Potter novel in which Xenophillius Lovegood asks Hermione to falsify the existence of the Resurrection Stone.

Estimate the Cost of Immortality

Xyrik9y00

The entire premise of Xyrik's scenario is that everything will be hunky-dory. Xyrik is just making a wish, and not thinking about how anything will actually work.

Well, to be fair, I never claimed that I had any ideas for how to actually achieve a scenario with a flawless AGI, and I don't think I even said I was under the impression that this would be a good idea, although in the case that we DID have a flawless AGI, I would be open to a reasoning that proclaimed so.

But all I was asking was what potential downsides this could have, and people have risen to the occasion.

Estimate the Cost of Immortality

Xyrik9y00

Not always. But too few people will choose mucking in the dirt and without money I'm not sure how are you going to persuade a sufficient number of people to go and do what they don't like.

That's a very good point, and I hadn't thought of that. This was basically why I made the post. Although I think I was mentioning somewhere that a scenario like this would only actually work if we had some AGI that could reliably judge who needed what resources when, in order to further the overall human endeavor.

2Richard_Kennaway9y

Wouldn't the AGI also need the ability to compel obedience to its diktats? Or do you imagine that everyone will do whatever it tells them to do because it must be the best thing to do?

Estimate the Cost of Immortality

Xyrik9y00

The lack of incentives (which, I think, exists in Xyrik's scenario as the alternatives are... much less palatable)

Basically the idea is that everyone realizes that if we do this that we could vastly accelerate the speed at which we develop, and thus solve many of our problems such as over-population, food, etc. by spreading among the stars, after which people could once again live a more free life and create their own systems, including but not requiring a governing body.

0Lumifer9y

This seems obviously, patently false to me. Even if you have in mind a far-reaching remaking of humanity into enthusiastic slaves of some god-like entity, I don't think that it would either "vastly accelerate the speed" or would lead to "more free life" in the future.

0ChristianKl9y

Yet you present no arguments why you believe such as acceleration will happen. Especially when it comes to the productions of commodieties such as food money driven markets are very efficient. The market consistently manages to kill companies that don't effectively produce goods.

2entirelyuseless9y

Do what? Let's suppose we abolish money this evening. What are you going to do tomorrow?

Estimate the Cost of Immortality

Xyrik9y-20

Yeah, part of what I was intending in the scenario would be that everyone realizes that we could make much faster technological advances (At least, that's the theory) if we didn't bother with keeping track of who owes who. We need resources such as metals, we get them, make the MacGuffin, and continue.

I suppose the real problem with this is some form of a game-plan, determining who needs what. So I guess what I'm thinking is a system that would require some flawless AGI to determine what group needs what resource at what time, to further the general human... (read more)

1Richard_Kennaway9y

So the AGI gives out the instructions, and the humans, or some of them, say "screw that". What happens next?

-1VoiceOfRa9y

Except you need to keep track of who (or which algorithm if we want to be sufficiently abstract) is doing the most to contribute and being most efficient so that his success can be repeated in other parts of the system.

0Lumifer9y

You're re-inventing Soviet central planning.

0entirelyuseless9y

No, even apart from greed no one has postulated such a system. Money isn't a perfect way to allocate resources, but no one yet has invented a better one, even assuming that people are perfectly altruistic.

Estimate the Cost of Immortality

Xyrik9y00

That was indeed what I was proposing. Like I said, this system were to assume that somehow humans solved that problem and are all willing to pitch in. I guess that would probably take some severe altering to our brains, potentially do the point to which we're all some hive-mind, which would be a debatable downside.

Estimate the Cost of Immortality

Xyrik9y10

Would someone be able to enlighten me on what the cons of a hypothetical situation in which everyone on the planet decides to temporarily get rid of the concept of money or currency, and pool our collective resources and ideas without worrying about who owes who? I mean on paper it sounds great, and obviously this is extremely hypothetical as it's virtually impossible to get all human life on Earth to actually do that, but are there hidden cons here that I'm not really seeing?

I've not really gone into too much thought on this, it was mostly a fleeting thought, and I was curious what others thought.

3mwengler9y

So far not mentioned in replies to this is that there are many examples of productive organizations that do not organize around money. Two leap to mind: * Military. Rarely do the various units and platoons trade with the other components of the military for their supplies, nor do they bid on missions. To the extent trade occurs it is usually barter and usually outside official accepted ways of doing things. * Business units. Large businesses may use separate calculations of returns to determine some very macro choices between business units. But there is essentially always some size of organization below which the subunits or individuals are not trading using money to get things done. Marketers don't bid to engineers to get the products they think they can sell. Engineers don't bid on the projects they want to work on within the organization. Indeed the fact that firms form to avoid a whole bunch of bilateral trading is analyzed by one of the most respected economists ever Ronald Coase on the Nature of the Firm. So another version of the answer to the OP would be that the reason EVERYONE on the planet doesn't do it is because the coordination problem without money and trade is too hard (meaning you will get a vastly suboptimal result) to do on a global scale, but it works on smaller scales. So whatever it is you want to achieve, form an organization to solve it, give them a pile of money to trade with the rest of the world, and do not require them to organize internally on a trade/money basis. If you make the organization too big, it will either organize internally using trade or it will be very ineffectual.

1entirelyuseless9y

I was thinking about this a bit more. In my first answer, I was talking about what would actually happen if you got rid of money. But the question implies that people are suddenly altruistic ("pool our collective resources"). The problem with this is how you decide who should do what. And it might turn out that the situation posited ("without worrying about who owes whom?") is impossible in principle. Even to keep things going as they are now, someone needs to decide what needs to be done and by whom. Someone needs to decide who should give you the things you need to survive, and how much to give you. All of that implies that someone is saying "A should give X to B" and this is just a way of worrying about who owes whom what.

3entirelyuseless9y

Assuming everybody does what they are doing now, the situation will remain the same as it is now. In other words, people will still go to their jobs and do their work, the stores will give them stuff, and so on. In practice everything would collapse, for the reasons implied by gjm in his comments. Namely, since the people in the store don't ask me if I have been going to my job, just as they don't do that now, that means I can get away with going to the store and getting stuff, but not going to my job. Or, even if I do go to my job, I can take a lot more stuff from the stores than I'm actually contributing by my work.

4mwengler9y

Another version of the starvation objection to this hypothetical is this: Such a system would rather quickly result in large groups of people inventing ownership and protecting it by force, by threat of violence. Maybe not the first time the half-ripe tomato you don't own but which you planted is eaten by someone else before you eat it you will not sign on to this alternative. But if you manage to stay alive long enough, you will soon be trading your labor for food and be incredibly grateful that the same system which is LETTING you trade your labor for food is also setting up powerful violent incentives for others to leave you in peace with "your" food. This is a version of my own "objection" to anarchism. Anarchy is unstable to the formation of what is, effectively, government, and the essence of government is a system that tells you what is NOT yours, what is yours, and provides powerful and violent responses to those who "disagree" with their characterization. If you are lucky, you get the American constitution, if you are half-lucky you get the Mafia in 19th and 20th century Sicily, and if your luck is lousy you get roving militias in Toyota pick-up trucks with machine guns mounted in the back. I await your counterfactual proposal on how to prevent the formation of a government or a militia.

8mwengler9y

Lumifer is a bit heavy-handed with his name-calling, but I think his objection is basically the right one. The market is an information processing machine that solves problems too complex to be solved by any other means we have yet tried. Our entire experience with non-money economies is a stupefying lack of efficiency. But the OP asks about getting rid of ownership, not money, and that hasn't been tried. So I have a refrigerator with some food in it and I'm set for the next day or two eating-wise. If I don't own the food in the refrigerator, by any reasonable definition of ownership I can think of this means I am NOT set for then next day or two as anybody who can reasonably predict that at least a few people have food in refrigerators can believe that THEY are set for at least the next few hours because they can walk up to those refrigerators and take the food. Without ownership how is that avoided? And don't tell me by "politeness" or "convention," the politeness and convention you would be appealing to is that you don't take other people's stuff, i.e., you have let ownership seep back in to your system. And beyond the food, I don't even own the refrigerator! And the good folks at the power company may conspire to make 99.99% reliable electricity for the refrigerator, but currently they do that because it pays well, so in this other system, do we have a mechanism to suggest that this will still happen? Considering the difference in productivity between market economies and non-market economies, empirically you'd have to estimate that the market system is about as important to production as are lungs to the metabolism of land based mammals. Sure, without lungs, there'd be some way of getting some oxygen to the cells, but probably 1e-3 o 1e-6 as much or some such crazy reduction. If you want to get rid of money, but you don't want mass starvation, pollution, diseases, dehydration, and all the other things that would occur with a cratering of production and dis

9The_Jaded_One9y

Money (AKA the free market economy) is a way of allocating resources efficiency. The alternative - a command economy - is where some central agent decides how resources should be allocated. By using money and buying and selling goods and services, we are already pooling our resources. The money thing is a way to decide what we should do with them, where decisions are made by people choosing to spend money on one thing rather than another.

0Tem429y

I think that under your example, there are by definition no drawbacks. If Ed is annoyed that everyone else has gone commie, then by definition we are not talking about your hypothetical (We didn't get 'everyone on the planet'). So we can't suppose drawbacks that involve 'someone not liking it'. Generally speaking, a situation in which everyone freely decides to work together has no downside (except in odd cases like everyone deciding to work together to burn down all the plants on Earth). If I were to look for a realistic problem -- other than probability, human nature, and logistics -- it would be the word "temporarily". I don't imagine that coming out of the universal accord would go smoothly.

1Lumifer9y

This is called "communism". Go read Karl Marx.

1Richard_Kennaway9y

Free shops and online equivalents like Freecycle work for people getting rid of stuff they don't want, but not for much beyond that. For people to create complex and valuable things, such as pencils, what institutions would you have instead of self-interest, security of property, contract law, and a medium of exchange? That is not to say that those institutions are the only possible ones, but I don't know of any others that do the job. Communes don't scale, or last. Central direction only scales up into a disaster.

1Simon799y

Free riding

Less Wrong EBook Creator

Xyrik9y00

When you say you've used it to create an ebook form of Rationality: From AI To Zombies, do you mean the one that is currently for sale, or some other version?

0ScottL9y

Rationality: From AI To Zombies is essentially a book version of 333 posts from Eliezer Yudkowsky with some extra introductions. The tool I created just amalgamates all those 333 posts with comments, if you want, and creates an ebook. The one for sale will be slightly different as I believe that some of the posts were rewritten for the book. The tool just pulls the posts from this site. The reason I created an ebook of it with this tool was that I also wanted to read the comments. If you don't, then I recommend that you just buy the book. It is “pay-what-you-want”.

Meetup : Austin, TX - Quack's

Xyrik9y00

Oh shit, I hadn't even noticed that it was past Midnight at the time LOL. I could still make it if I want.. I may show up.

Meetup : Austin, TX - Quack's

Xyrik10y20

Thanks for the info. I actually did not see that the latest meeting was today or I would have tried to come, although actually I was at work. Do these often happen during the weekdays, or are they also on weekends? At this point however I'm mostly coming along to listen to others and become more versed in the Methods of Rationality. I mean to eventually sift through as much content on LW as possible, as well as read Rationality: From AI to Zombies (As soon as I finish another book series that I do not want to interrupt). Something like today's meeting actu... (read more)

0Vaniver9y

The meetups at Caffe Medici are every Saturday at 1:30 pm. We have a group meal on Wednesday evenings, with details announced (and food orders coordinated) on the list. The list has day-of announcements of the Wednesday group dinners, and discussions of any of the irregular things that we do. For example, we might go see The Martian together tomorrow. When there's an established plan for the meetup, I've started announcing those by email but that's inconsistent.

Meetup : Austin, TX - Quack's

Xyrik10y30

Just out of curiosity, do many people show up to these? I'm curious about coming. Also, Eliezer himself does not live here, does he?

0Vaniver10y

This depends pretty heavily on the season, because we have a lot of grad students who get research postings elsewhere over the summer. Typical attendance over the summer has been in the 2-4 range, and typical attendance during the school year is in the 4-8 range. I know I'll be around on the 8th, and there are ~3 others that I suspect might attend. We'd love to have you come! Nope; he lives in Berkeley.

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