This thread reminds me of some mcdojo/bullshido kung-fu guy trying to mock muay thai and jiu-jitsu.
Roan Carratu,
Perhaps I have an excellent grasp of economics, which is why I find it a naive and foolish paradigm. Can you honestly tell me that the wealth in real terms which has been generated in the last hundred years came from money? Or did it come from applied technology? Do you think we cannot have one without the other?
Nobody arguing that wealth has been a product of money. Austrians hold that wealth is created through capital accumulation and the application of said capital through investment and entrepreneurship. Many times this investment is done through innovation, which includes the development of technology. This technology, then applied as capital-goods, leads to greater productivity.
You misunderstand the role of money in economics. Money is nothing but a common medium of exchange, which makes the distribution of resources much more efficient. It is a method by which multiple actors can partake in indirect exchange to make this entrepreneurship, innovation, and investment to take place.
And since I am putting in question the very foundation of this forum, I’m not surprised you would find my words useless. But I didn’t come here to argue about this stuff, so I am bowing out. I do not wish to step upon your ‘religion’. (which is another conceptual system people mistake for reality…)
Instead of insulting us, maybe you should just be more open minded to at least recognize what you are arguing against, instead of setting up a straw man.
He is not a troll, and it is incredibly unproductive to call someone a troll, and then think you can lecture to them.
Address his ideas, not his person.
"He is not a troll, and it is incredibly unproductive to call someone a troll, and then think you can lecture to them.
Address his ideas, not his person."
That may have been intended as a compliment, since the alternative is that he actually believes what he’s typing.
Maybe he does. And maybe some people here lack the rhetorical and social skills to communicate effectively to him why his ideas may not be very good.
Addressing his person is very sloppy argumentation.
Agreed
Friends,
This Wednesday, June 30th, at 3:00pm EDT [(2010-06-30 19:00 UTC)] will be
Peter Joseph’s Bi-Weekly Radio Address.
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/Peter-Joseph
This 2 hour program will specifically focus on common criticisms of The
Zeitgeist Movement and The Venus Project.
Thank You for listening.
I’ll be the first to say it - 2 hours is a little long for some of us. Are there transcripts published so that we can skip to the relevant bits?
I suspect he will address strawmen, just as most critiques of one movement by another focus on strawman arguments.
I think I have the highest post count on this forum, and might be in the top 20 most knowledgable posters, so I would much rather spend 2 hours debating Peter Joseph on economics and social organization, than to listen to him respond to hand picked charicatures of his own position without any interaction from those with legitimate concerns.
Stuff like this is generally done for the benefit of “the troops” (aka true believers) who might stop shelling out $300 for a 5 DVD set that LvMI, the (cue eyeroll) “money philistines”, would give away for free.
You know, I think this quote by Rothbard sums up the Zeitgeist movement accurately:
Zeitgeist seems to be some kind of post-scarcity Singularity cult. I think that most of the responses, while valid, miss the point and will never reach any of the believers.
You have to keep in mind that the calculation argument literally does not apply to a post-singular AI (the computer algorithms that are supposed to run everything in their utopia). We have no way to know what a super-computer the size of Jupiter, with access to its own source-code for rapid self-improvement, could calculate.
Human central planners can not calculate - godlike AIs could.
It most likely will be able to allocate ressources better then a free market of present-day humans. In fact, it could even figure out their preferences - either by analyzing their brains, or by scanning them atom-by-atom and simulating them in a virtual reality to see their revealed preferences. Thats the kind of power level we are talking about.
There is nothing wrong with a ressource-based economy, because in a physical world, the economy is actually based on ressources. Its just that humans do not calculate in atoms of iron - because thats not the simplest method to get things done.
In a world of godlike supercomputers and universal nano-assemblers that can build anything atom-by-atom from a block of raw materials, a ressource-based economy seems pretty likely. Now there could still be “money” - rare elements maybe. But trade and division of labor depend heavily on the exact details - things like aviability of faster-than-light travel, computational cost of centralisation vs distribution etc. Details we cannot really know, because the Singularity is the point in time after which everything is beyond our understanding.
Now the singularity is great science fiction - but the hard part is actually building the very first seed AI that gets everything going, without turning mad and destroying the world. Thats the real and only task - everything else is just talk. So their entire agenda can be summed up with “more AI research!”.
Maybe i am wrong, and Zeitgeisters actually believe they can build their robot socialism utopia without post-singularity tech. In that case, they simply write fan-fiction to reality (of the power fantasy wish fullfillment kind). The question of wether vampires sparkle in sunlight is not that relevant in the grand scheme of things.
Its so good that people would agree to it voluntarily?! I could talk about the validity of the science, but that aside I don’t see any fundamental conflict with libertarian anarchism.
So if I understand this correctly, these people wish to substitute algorithms for free will, correct?
Human central planners can not calculate - godlike AIs could.
Maybe within certain arbitrary catagorical frameworks, but I don’t see how it can go beyond that. The word “value” has no real meaning, it is merely a descriptive short hand word.
I think this is what he would say:
If one were to take these plans seriously, one would not have to deal with them in a discussion of the problems of interventionism. One would have to realize that syndicalism is neither socialism, nor capitalism, nor interventionism, but a system of its own different from these three schemes. However, one cannot take the syndicalist program seriously, and nobody ever has. Nobody has been so confused and injudicious as to advocate syndicalism openly as a social system.
Just replace syndicalism with resource based economy
This sort of misses the entire point of the calculation argument. The computer, even if it exceeds the capacity of the human mind to calculate, or the sum of all human minds to calculate (at which point, people become more like pets, than the center of civilization) still cannot know more than its datapoints. It’s still limited epistemically.
While it is designed to produce miracles, it still cannot replace God. Because God can fundamentally change reality with his miracles, this machine can at best attempt to perfect a fundamentally imperfect reality it cannot correct.
Until it can mimic and exceed the sum of all human minds, rendering humans as relevant as dolphins or monkeys, it cannot allocate resources better. And again, this comes to understanding the calculation argument. A price system helps signal profit and loss. A centrally planned price system has no conception of loss, since all tradeoffs made are acceptable to the only arbiter of their value, the central computer.
Nassim Taleb likes to talk about how nature breaks things before they get too big to fail. These cats want to cook up a system to solve a world where nature is breaking man’s best [sic] centralized plans, by coming up with yet an even bigger plan, one that is so big, and so centralized, that it is built on the premise that it cannot fail. In other words, it has to defy nature (the way the universe is).
This zeitgeist stuff reminds me of Huxely’s “Brave New World”.Any one else feel the same way?
Basically we’re no longer dealing with individuals, but of course this is contingent on the mind being reducible to atoms that can be incorporated into such a super AI. Unless it irons out individuals altogether in this manner (which is not what the socialist calculation argument seeks to address, you’re right), granting this assumption, such AIs will remain fiction, and there is moreover the question of whether one would even wish for this to happen to them to begin with. It’s aggravated by the fact that AIs do not in fact think like humans do, they work in a rather different, more formulaic manner which in fact cannot neatly approximate human reasoning at more complex levels. Hence whether such super-AIs are even possible is an open question in itself, and has as you say nothing to do with the real world and likely won’t ever until very remote futures, if even then. Basically then there’s two issues to deal with, one being whether the incorporation of individual minds into an AI is even possible and the other whether such an I is itself possible.
No matter how big or smart a computer gets, it can never find a way to make 2+2=5. The calculation problem isn’t one of having enough brainpower, it’s one of epistemological impossibility. It is impossible to calculate profitability without property rights.
I think the problem is much more dire than you suspect: In order to be able to accurately do so, the Transcendant would have to simulate, particle for particle, the entire universe. Including itself. In other words in order to be able to calculate the future with certainty the AI needs to be smart enough to be able to predict its own behavior which, as I’m sure you’re aware, is computationally impossible.
Even with nanoassembly resources will still be scarce: There are still a limited amount of particles in the universe and a limited amount of energy to power the assemblers. Although the material wealth that could be created by them is far beyond our wildest imaginations, it’d still be scarce: There would still be nowhere enough to satisfy every last desire a being could possibly have (infinite). How will they decide which ones should be fulfilled and which ones should not?
Ultimately the Transcendants will have to operate in the same (praxeological) way current entrepreneurs do. Their methods of production and distribution will be unrecognizable but praxeology cannot be negated by any change in society.
This is why I left the transhumanists. They seriously believe that, once the first transhuman AI is turned on, everything else will just spring into being. And they seriously suggest diverting all the resources of mankind into making this happen.
And another thing: Their constant scaremongering. Ooh, we have to achieve immortality before we kill ourselves through nuclear war/global warming/whatever! That’s why it’s worth it to just drop everything else!
“We have no way to know what a super-computer the size of Jupiter, with access to its own source-code for rapid self-improvement, could calculate.”
But would its calculations be able to properly take into account the subjective preferences and thoughts of itself and of other transapients and similarly-gifted archailects? Will its intellect keep up at the same pace with the unimaginable growth in the complexity of the market and technologies and complexity of other marklet participants?
It most likely will be able to allocate ressources better then a free market of present-day humans.
Unless the human inherently prefers resources not allocated by an overbearing non-human. A simple example is a Luddite who wants to grow his own food. For him, the archailect can do nothing to help him, unless it involves underhanded deception (e.g. sending nanobots into his garden to secretly accelerate growth).
“In a world of godlike supercomputers and universal nano-assemblers that can build anything atom-by-atom from a block of raw materials, a ressource-based economy seems pretty likely.”
Yet there is always scarcity. As a human I might want to experience 1,000,000 years of virtual reality each physical day, but because of limited processing power, I will find it cheaper on the free market to purchase only 500,000 years of VR per day. Instead of purchasing only 1000 remotely located VR backups of my brain, I prefer the safety of purchasing 1001 copies.