Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University, writes about futarchy, prediction markets, the Great Filter, brain uploads, and health spending.
Commenters bring up his Great Filter essay and futarchy idea in threads on expert groupthink, voting, and forecasting.
> It just means those welders will need to move on to more gainful employment.
Easier said than done. Not everyone can be a programmer, and robots can easily build other robots. There will be some room left for human work, but there won't be enough to cover 300 million people. The social danger I see is an incredibly high portion of the work force out of work and out of money (with no government support structure), if people become desperate for their basic survival needs that they're used to now things can get very ugly.
And if we expand the term 'robot' to include simulated human minds, we get into a worse position with "normal human" jobs.
http://hanson.gmu.edu/IEEESpectrum-6-08.pdf
"Would robots be slaves? Laws could conceivably ban robots or only allow robots “born” with enough wealth to afford a life of leisure. But without global and draconian enforcement of such laws, the vast wealth that cheap robots offer would quickly induce a sprawling, unruly black market. Realistically, since modest enforcement could maintain only modest restrictions, huge numbers of cheap (and thus poor) robots would probably exist; only their legal status would be in question. Depending on local politics, cheap robots could be “undocumented” illegals, legal slaves of their creators or owners, “free” minds renting their bodies and services and subject to “eviction” for nonpayment, or free minds saddled with debts and subject to “repossession” for nonpayment. The following conclusions do…
There's an alternative explaination in
`Burning the Cosmic Commons: Evolutionary Strategies for Interstellar Colonization` (http://hanson.gmu.edu/filluniv.pdf):
"Attempts to model interstellar colonization may seem hopelessly compromised by uncertainties regarding the technologies and preferences of advanced civilizations. If light speed limits travel speeds, however, then a selection effect may eventually determine frontier behavior. Making weak assumptions about colonization technology, we use this selection effect to predict colonists' behavior, including which oases they colonize, how long they stay there, how many seeds they then launch, how fast and far those seeds fly, and how behavior changes with increasing congestion. This colonization model explains several astrophysical puzzles, predicting lone oases like ours, amid large quiet regions with vast unused resources."
The point of the submitted article seems to be already mentioned in:
"The Great Filter - Are We Almost Past It?" (first version August 1996) (http://hanson.gmu.edu/greatfilter.html)
"Humanity seems to have a bright future, i.e., a non-trivial chance of expanding to fill the universe with lasting life. But the fact that space near us seems dead now tells us that any given piece of dead matter faces an astronomically low chance of begating such a future. There thus exists a great filter between death and expanding lasting life, and humanity faces the ominous question: how far along this filter are…
> [KSR on the Fermi Paradox] My feeling is, the universe is too big, and life too planet-specific for intelligent life forms to communicate with each other, except for by accident and very rarely.
What does the possible variation in life forms have to do with the nature of communications mediums or techniques? Encoding might be different but the mediums used will depend on level of technological advancement and not the specifics of how the life forms communicate face to face. (That's speciesist. I meant lifeform-to-lifeform.)
I love that KSR mentions Banks' Culture novels.
While I'd agree that biosphere sustainability is critical, I don't think it's the only critical problem, or even the most short-term problem, we may have. I may be paranoid, but I'm very worried that there is a Great Filter[1], and that it is some sort of abuse/misuse/weaponization of biotech at, or just beyond, our current level of technology. Just past that would be concern about unfriendly AI.
There are also some existential threats to modern advanced civilization due to low-probability but unmanageable-if-they-occur problems. Other than an asteroid we can't detect in time, there are also supervolcano eruptions that decimate world food supplies (volcanic winter).[2]
[1] http://hanson.gmu.edu/greatfilter.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervolcano
This article is good background to understand Hanson's health care perspective: http://hanson.gmu.edu/feardie.pdf
Unfortunately his argument really only addresses marginal health care and shows that we may be over-cared-for and suboptimal, not that basic health-care is worthless. The effectiveness of work against polio and eradication of smallpox are perhaps the easiest examples of unqualified success.
There's a vast difference between saying that we have too much or suboptimal health care, and that hospitals are worthless.
Robin's post criticizes Grass's spending as worthless "signaling," but it seems to me to be guilty of the same thing. This post doesn't do anything to prove the claims that hospitals and academics are worthless, or that profit motive is the only way to do good.
I actually agree with many of Hanson's broader points about ways to be more effective, but classifying all charitable spending on libraries, hospitals, and universities as "pissing it away" is needlessly sensationalist.
[edited to reduce my own needless sensationalism]
I agree about the few rich people running the world. I'd even be surprised if no such group were at least trying to. The catch is, it's probably not secret: our financial system for instance is basically designed to put all the money in the pockets of bankers (wild oversimplification). Finance is complicated and boring (for most people), but it's not secret. "Not secret" has a strong tendency to imply "no big deal" (scarcity bias), so we don't pay attention. This is frighteningly brilliant: the absence of actual secrecy (and conspiracy) tend to enhance the de-facto secrecy (and conspiracy).
Minor point about the aliens: if aliens had FTL interstellar travel, they would have built a galactic civilization before they found us. Such a civilization would be visible from Earth. See http://hanson.gmu.edu/greatfilter.html for more details on these speculations. So, there may be more avenues to the abduction theory, but this one is closed.
We used Robin Hanson's logarithmic market scoring rule (http://hanson.gmu.edu/mktscore.pdf). The combinatorial aspect allowed us to try to answer questions about the correlation between different securities in the market - hopefully more interesting for policy analysis than a simple predictor of the future.
The main securities in the market were 5 statistics that we were tracking quarterly in 8 different Mid-East countries (things like civil stability, military activity, US aid, etc). Then there were supposed to be a handful of one-off type events; we hadn't decided on them yet, but gave some "ripped from the headlines" examples that were the main focus of the criticism. The values of all these securities were to be judged by the Economist Intelligence Unit.