It seems just physically impossible to create 10140 or more lives we would value like ours per atom, even considering quantum computing and black hole negentropy.
That's Robin Hanson, tangling with Bryan Caplan.
The best sentence I read today
Previous post: Esther Duflo wins a Macarthur grant
Next post: *Total Recall*
Hanson is playing with language. “Feasible growth rates” are huge, but the probability of humanity following that growth path is incredibly low.
What do you mean babar? Are you suggest that Hanson isn’t REALLY a “polymath”, as described by his website? (How amazingly pompous)
i’m suggesting that there would have a lot more potential for improvement in his personal utility function if his atoms were distributed more uniformly throughout the universe.
That’s the best sentence I’ve read today.
After William’s immediately preceding.
He is just a quarky fellow, that is all,
.
Even thought there is an ultimate limit to growth, there is certainly enough room for growth for us to move beyond where we are now. The global (or solar system wide, in this case) could certainly growth 20-40 times over the next few centuries allowing everyone to have a far higher standard of living than most people do today.
Hanson is playing with language. “Feasible growth rates” are huge, but the probability of humanity following that growth path is incredibly low.
How low is “incredibly low”? Lower than 0.1%? Care to share your corresponding mountain of evidence with the rest of us?
why is his unit the ‘atom’? subatomic particles are far smaller and more plentiful. plus, the number of potential combinatorial states of the universe is far, far greater than the number of particles in the universe.
But people are dynamic, not static, so the combinatorial state space is the wrong one to be counting. If I have to cram myself into one megabit or some such, it really doesn’t matter how many bits are left over to create an ever-larger combinatorial space. I can still only experience 2^2^20 distinct personal states. And if care to assume any personality beyond that of a simple binary counter or PRNG, or indulge in such luxuries as having a memory, a large portion of my state space is essentially inaccessible.
Keep in mind that most of those atoms are hydrogen atoms, so subatomic particles being “smaller” doesn’t make much of a difference. Even assuming an absurdly high information density like one gigabit per hydrogen atom, Robin’s point holds. We’d need to gather a lot more particles, cram a ridiculous amount of information into each one, or somehow take exponential advantage of quantum voodoo. I don’t know of a good reason to be confident that any of these scenarios are possible.
Isn’t this where the singularity comes in?
I totally agree with Robins theory just not this scenario. Exponential growth is dependent on a delicate balance of interdependence, consensus and self-interest†¦. I just don’t see any body politic allowing exponential growth to continue at their individual detriment†¦
I question Robin’s subjectivist interpretation of economic growth. The amount a person today would pay for a chance to experience the standard of living that will be available in 2050 seems like an intellectually rigorous way to evaluate the standard of living in 2050 relative to today. But it is very unhinged from the way we actually measure output, which is sort of a compromise between a measure of subjective well being and a measure of physical volumes of goods produced. I contend that we could continue to experience 2% per capita growth for a million years, as measured by GDP, and it may still be true that someone living today wouldn’t be willing to gamble at the odds that those numbers would suggest for a chance to experience that standard of living.
Comments on this entry are closed.