Carl Shulman: commitment

Transcript context

…Is a Malthusian state inevitable in the long run? Nature in general is in malthusian states. That can mean organisms that are typically struggling for food, it can mean typically struggling at a margin of how as the population density rises they kill each other contesting for that. That can mean frequency dependent disease. As different ant species become more common in an area their species specific diseases swoop through them. The general process is you have some things that can replicate and expand and they do that until they can't do it anymore and that means there's some limiting factor they can't keep up. That doesn't necessarily have to apply to human civilization. It's possible for there to be like a collective norm setting that blocks evolution towards maximum reproduction. Right now human fertility is often sub-replacement and if you extrapolated the fertility falls that come with economic development and education, then you would think that the total fertility rate will fall below replacement and then humanity after some number of generations will go extinct because every generation will be smaller than the previous one. Pretty obviously that's not going to happen. One reason is because we will produce artificial intelligence which can replicate at extremely rapid rates. They do it because they're asked or programmed to or wish to gain some benefit and they can pay for their creation and pay back the resources needed to create them very very quickly. Financing for that reproduction is easy and if you have one AI system that chooses to replicate in that way or some organization or institution decided to choose to create some AIs that are willing to be replicated then that can expand to make use of any amount of natural resources that can support them and to do more work produce, produce more economic value. What will limit population growth given these selective pressures where if even one individual wants to replicate a lot they can do so incessantly. So that could be individually resource limited so it could be that individuals and organizations have some endowment of natural resources and they can't get one another's endowments. Some choose to have many offspring or produce many AIs and then the natural resources that they possess are subdivided among a greater population while in another jurisdiction or another individual may choose not to subdivide their wealth. And in that case you have Malthusianism in the sense that within some particular jurisdiction or set of property rights, you have a population that has increased up until to some limiting factor which could be that they're literally using all of their resources, they have nothing left for things like defense or economic investment. opulation that has increased up until to some limiting factor which could be that they're literally using all of their resources, they have nothing left for things like defense or economic investment. Or it could be something that's more like if you invested more natural resources into population it would come at the expense of something else necessary including military resources if you're in a competitive situation where there remains war and anarchy and there aren't secure property rights to maintain wealth in place. If you have a situation where there's pooling of resources, for example, say you have a universal basic income that's funded by taxation of natural resources and then it's distributed evenly to every mind above a certain scale of complexity per unit time. So each second a mind exists to get something such an allocation in that case then all right well those who replicate as much as they can afford with this income do it and increase their population approximately immediately until the funds for the universal basic income paid for from the natural resource taxation divided by the set of recipients is just barely enough to pay for the existence of one more mind. So there's like a Malthusian element and that this I think has been reduced to near the AI subsistence level or the subsistence level of whatever qualifies for the subsidy. Given that this all happens almost immediately people who might otherwise have enjoyed the basic income may object and say no, no, this is no good and they might respond by saying, well something like the subdivision before maybe there's a restriction, there's a distribution of wealth and then when one has a child there's a requirement that one gives them a certain minimum a quantity of resources and one doesn't have the resources to give them that minimum standard of living or standard of wealth yeah one can't do that because of child slash AI welfare laws. Or you could have a system that is more accepting of diversity and preferences. And so you have some societies or some jurisdictions or families that go the route of having many people with less natural resources per person and others that go a direction of having fewer people and more natural resources per person and they just coexist. But how much of each you get depends on how attached people are to things that don't work with separate policies for separate jurisdictions. Things like global redistribution that's ongoing continuously versus this infringements on autonomy if you're saying that a mind can't be created even though it has a standard of living that's far better than ours because of the advanced technology of the time because it would reduce the average per capita income might have any more capital around yeah then that would pull in the other direction. That’s the kind of values judgment and social coordination problem that people would have to negotiate for and things like democracy and international relations and sovereignty would apply to help solve them.…

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