tax the robots... | Eclipse Phase

Fri, 2013-05-10 12:20

#2

Maskin

For one, the TITANs happened

For one, the TITANs happened which means AGIs are not overly trusted and a large portion of transhumanity is more concerned with their long term survival than playing an endless round of golf. I do think the whole ability to copy AI, AGI and Infomorph minds is a bit understated in the EP setting (why not just create/find one loyal worker and make endless copies), but at least they finally acknowledged that starship astrogation and pilot jockey are not the going to be key skills in a future with super fast thinking computers. We should also acknowledge that after the trauma of the Fall humanity is trying to recover what it has lost and to resleeve as many infogees as possible. Personally I would prefer a synth to a biomorph.

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Transhuman Mind

Fri, 2013-05-10 12:33

#3

CodeBreaker CodeBreaker's picture

Quote:I do think the whole

Quote:
I do think the whole ability to copy AI, AGI and Infomorph minds is a bit understated in the EP setting (why not just create/find one loyal worker and make endless copies)

People have done that. People do do that. Then the other people found out about that and told them to cut it the hell out. The Planetary Consortium benefits from the current labour shortages. It gives them direct access to indentures, an easy to mistreat social underclass that they have full control over. If everyone was suddenly allowed to copy-paste themselves ad infinitum, that well spring of free labour suddenly disappears. You might have access to technically infinite amounts of new, also cheap labour, but so does everyone else. You lose your economic advantage.

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Tue, 2013-05-14 04:08

#4

Baalbamoth Baalbamoth's picture

but wait wasnt that the goal of the hypercorps

I mean they went to space to get away from those kinds of controls and yeah the constort's got a lot of power and wealth, but its not the only corner store, heck if it was up to them there wouldent be anarchs so I have trouble believing that everyone else is so intimidated they would rather loose gigantic sums of creds just because one large block of corps didnt like what they wanted to do. The arguement that people just dont trust AI, AGI, etc. makes more sense, especially if every now and then a hab blows up because somebody didnt want to follow the first law.

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"what do I want? The usual — hundreds of grandchildren, complete dominion over the known worlds, and the pleasure of hearing that all my enemies have died in highly improbable accidents that cannot be connected to me."

Sun, 2013-06-02 03:52

#5

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Baalbamoth wrote:of key

Baalbamoth wrote:
of key concern here to EP is why do we have infogees filling synths when we could just get AGIs to do it without wages, without free or down time?

I have sketched a bit of an answer in http://www.aleph.se/EclipsePhase/Transhuman%20capital.pdf * People prefer people to do certain jobs, whether that is prostitution, politics or being a priest. * AIs cannot be trusted for certain jobs. Of course, there are some jobs that cannot be trusted to transhumans either. * People can do some things AI are weak at. AI has fairly low active skills, cannot take much initiative, and often do not understand social relations. * AI cannot be held legally responsible, and some contracts may require a transhuman as executor. * Sometimes people are cheaper than AI. AGIs are almost as free-willed and idiosyncratic as transhumans, so there is no guarantee that AGIs will not demand free time (or require downtime; at least my take on them is that they were based so much on transhuman neuromorphic models that they might need sleep-analogs) - AI is where you can get higher reliability and no risk of them organizing into unions. Anybody whose most profitable skills are below 40 in EP can be replaced with an AI, unless they manage to sneak into one of the above categories. And 40 will creep upward as people get less afraid of more advanced AI (or develop better skillsofts), not to mention forking copyrations moving towards a Robin Hanson-like upload economy. EP is set in a very transient era.

Quote:
I sort of wonder when our tech gets to this level why anyone would have to do anything other than get virtual, golf, or party.

I would still work where I do, my research is interesting at least to me.

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Sun, 2013-06-02 04:40

#6

Trinary

Tangent

Arenamontanus wrote:
AGIs are almost as free-willed and idiosyncratic as transhumans, so there is no guarantee that AGIs will not demand free time (or require downtime; at least my take on them is that they were based so much on transhuman neuromorphic models that they might need sleep-analogs) - AI is where you can get higher reliability and no risk of them organizing into unions.

Eh, it's kind of trivial; but... Page 143 EP Core (third printing), under Synthmorph Advantages

Quote:
Lack of Biological Functions. Synthmorphs need not be bothered with trivialities like breathing, eating, defecating, aging, sleeping, or any similar minor but crucial aspects of biological life.

(emphasis mine) I find it kind of hard to believe that a human mind uploaded into a cyberbrain doesn't need to sleep despite decades of practice with that particular biological habit; yet an AGI infomorph who's never slept before does. Back towards the focus: Why get an infugee to do a job an AI can do? Have you seen how much it costs to get a copy of some software? Infugees are desperate; they'll work for literal slave wages. It's got to be cheaper to contract an infomorph artist than to license Adobe's latest Photoshop AI.

Sun, 2013-06-02 06:03

#7

Baalbamoth Baalbamoth's picture

Great Article Arenamontanus

but I think it all broke down to... "Rules and customs against mass-forking and copyrations were strongly supported by most factions, fearing what would happen if they were let loose. Critics pointed out that this would likely not work to stem the tide: copyable is copyable." so in essence the thing stoping mass forking of quality employees or slave laborers is "culture" IE its wrong to make AI slaves, its percieved as wrong to create alpha forks and put them through loyalty conditioning to make informorph slaves. the same way in the 1980s every movie and CD had a "it's wrong to illegally download music or videos, and you could be punnished by..." message and we all saw how well that worked to stop illegal downloading. (rolls eyes) so in essence... as mass forking, soul traders, and loyalty slaved AIs and informorphs continue to increase, eventually it will be a crime only in name, and most people will be either dead, enslaved, or out of work and waiting to die. nice.

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"what do I want? The usual — hundreds of grandchildren, complete dominion over the known worlds, and the pleasure of hearing that all my enemies have died in highly improbable accidents that cannot be connected to me."

Sun, 2013-06-02 23:12

#8

Trinary

Sounds like a good reason to

Sounds like a good reason to keep your @-Rep up.

Mon, 2013-06-03 15:20

#9

nezumi.hebereke nezumi.hebereke's picture

1)the fall polarized people

1)the fall polarized people against AIs of all sorts. 2) Copying AIs and forking create a homogenous environment, which is then more vulnerable to viruses, memetic attacks, TITAN weapons, etc. Given the threat level of the environment, I expect this is a poignant concern for many people.

Mon, 2013-06-03 15:52

#10

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

nezumi.hebereke wrote:1)the

nezumi.hebereke wrote:
1)the fall polarized people against AIs of all sorts. 2) Copying AIs and forking create a homogenous environment, which is then more vulnerable to viruses, memetic attacks, TITAN weapons, etc. Given the threat level of the environment, I expect this is a poignant concern for many people.

Yeah, but when your widgets sell for 39.99 credits and the widgets from Xoxes-R-We sell for 29.99, economic competition will start to nudge these views. This is a real issue in many markets, especially finance. Everybody knows taking too much risk is bad, but most of the time you turn a profit - it is just that occasionally you get wiped out. Now, if you have insulated your own personal risk well, this is pretty tempting. Five years of profit and bonuses, and then a sad crash you walk away from. Sure, you know that if too many do this the whole system becomes dangerously unstable, but it is not *your* job to fix the economy... (And the decision-makers trying to keep this from happening finds themselves having to work against a lot of highly motivated, smart people inventing new tricks in a distributed fashion, and mainly get rewarded by the voters for doing nice-looking gestures. ) I can totally imagine Firewall's macroeconomists trying to figure out clever counter-stratagems.

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Tue, 2013-06-04 05:23

#11

Baalbamoth Baalbamoth's picture

LOL

so your saying we can fix the spend and print obammaconomy problems we have now by forming a clandistine delta force (where are you chuck norris?!?!) to econo-hack the system?!?

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"what do I want? The usual — hundreds of grandchildren, complete dominion over the known worlds, and the pleasure of hearing that all my enemies have died in highly improbable accidents that cannot be connected to me."

Tue, 2013-06-04 05:50

#12

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Baalbamoth wrote:so your

Baalbamoth wrote:
so your saying we can fix the spend and print obammaconomy problems we have now by forming a clandistine delta force (where are you chuck norris?!?!) to econo-hack the system?!?

What makes you think there are not *several* delta forces out there, working at cross-purposes? Not to mention would-be hackers trying to subvert the system by innovation like the bitcoin crowd, market-manipulating cartels, followers of erroneous theories, and so on. Trying to get the global economy to go in a certain direction is fully on par with a world-domination scheme in terms of ease and plausibility.

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Tue, 2013-06-04 06:21

#13

Baalbamoth Baalbamoth's picture

heh

I'll call Robert Anton Willson using a medium and tell him about it.... "You simply cannot invent any conspiracy theory so ridiculous and obviously satirical that some people somewhere don't already believe it" "Everybody who has ever worked for a corporation knows that corporations conspire all the time. Politicians conspire all the time, pot-dealers conspire not to get caught by the narcs, the world is full of conspiracies. Conspiracy is natural primate behavior. " "You should view the world as a conspiracy run by a very closely-knit group of nearly omnipotent people, and you should think of those people as yourself and your friends". http://www.theconison.com/2009/11/robert-anton-wilson-on-conspiracy.html HAIL ERIS!

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"what do I want? The usual — hundreds of grandchildren, complete dominion over the known worlds, and the pleasure of hearing that all my enemies have died in highly improbable accidents that cannot be connected to me."

Tue, 2013-06-04 09:15

#14

Armoured

I think that a major factor

I think that a major factor behind the hypercorp's use of indentures would be that EP's economy is driven by innovation and resources, as opposed to our current economy built on mass-production. Fabricators make any product, so production capability is not nearly as large an issue. On the other hand, coming up with new ideas is where the money is. AIs are not creative like (trans)humans are, and so having 10,000 of them is not much more valuable than having 1 of them from a development point of view. Pushing AIs to become imaginative leads to poor outcomes in EP, and none of the hypercorps are willing to openly push AI research just to improve their bottom lines. Another idea that may explain why indentures are not forked ad infinitum is the growing field in EP of meta-intelligence. With the human mind a known quantity, it is possible to emulate someone and work out what they would do before they know it (or steal a backup, of course). For single people, this would probably be too expensive, but if your entire R&D/marketing/etc department is Fred, someone is going to steal/emulate Fred to find your weak-points. The hypercorps hold each other in a economic cold war, trying to gain ground on each other with black ops and sabotage; it wouldn't necessarily take a TITAN to make homogeneity a weakness.

Fri, 2013-06-07 04:31

#15

Baalbamoth Baalbamoth's picture

and thats a big question... what do people do?

mining is huge, the mass production available to fabricatiors still need raw materials. I'm sure a lot of this is robotic, or infugees in robotic forms, somebody has to push the button that says "mine" on the big robot, somebody has to watch it and push "stop" for the mantinance cycle. honestly... I think if you were some sort of a transhuman rights activist, you'd do everything you could to eliminate use of AIs or forked infogees. sabatauge, infogee viruses, politics etc etc so they were never seen as "safe" in the first place.

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"what do I want? The usual — hundreds of grandchildren, complete dominion over the known worlds, and the pleasure of hearing that all my enemies have died in highly improbable accidents that cannot be connected to me."