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talkpoliticsThis post is going to be a little scattershot but it ties in with enders_shadow's recent post and the monthly topic.
I've mentioned in a few threads that I have been writing a Science-Fiction novel with my friend Chris. The story is set in the near future and focuses on the developement of the first true (sentient) AIs. A recurring (perhapse central) theme is the question of "What is wealth?", and "How do you negotiate with someone who's wants, needs, and frame of mind are utterly alien to your own"
The more I think about it, the more I have become convinced that goods or labor have no absolute value. Thier value is entirely dependant on how badly someone wants them.
If the government were to demand that you pay for the air you breathe they'd be a laughing stock and large-scale noncompliance would be the norm. But in an orbital colony the man (or woman) who controls the O2 supply controls everything. We may see the same phenomena among AIs trading for bandwidth or electrical power.
This is why Marx's idea's are unworkable, food that nobody eats is equal in value to no food at all, no matter how much labour goes into producing it.
This is why The libertarians/Gold-Standard crowd is wrong, "Fiat Currency" is the only way to accurately model a system where-in the value of everything, even the currency itself, is negotiable.
Don't worry, Chris is acting as my editor so the novel (should it ever be completed) will be easier to read than most of my posts.
I've mentioned in a few threads that I have been writing a Science-Fiction novel with my friend Chris. The story is set in the near future and focuses on the developement of the first true (sentient) AIs. A recurring (perhapse central) theme is the question of "What is wealth?", and "How do you negotiate with someone who's wants, needs, and frame of mind are utterly alien to your own"
The more I think about it, the more I have become convinced that goods or labor have no absolute value. Thier value is entirely dependant on how badly someone wants them.
If the government were to demand that you pay for the air you breathe they'd be a laughing stock and large-scale noncompliance would be the norm. But in an orbital colony the man (or woman) who controls the O2 supply controls everything. We may see the same phenomena among AIs trading for bandwidth or electrical power.
This is why Marx's idea's are unworkable, food that nobody eats is equal in value to no food at all, no matter how much labour goes into producing it.
This is why The libertarians/Gold-Standard crowd is wrong, "Fiat Currency" is the only way to accurately model a system where-in the value of everything, even the currency itself, is negotiable.
Don't worry, Chris is acting as my editor so the novel (should it ever be completed) will be easier to read than most of my posts.
(no subject)
Date: 24/10/11 03:16 (UTC)It goes back to the root of what "money" is and isn't. It's a common medium of exchange that has value either intrinsically or by fiat. But it's value is never absolute.
(no subject)
Date: 24/10/11 04:42 (UTC)Gold has NO "intrinsic value"
Date: 24/10/11 05:18 (UTC)There is no intrinsic value. Value is entirely subjective and context dependent. Fiat currency is just a mechanism allowing the person or persons with fiat authority over it to in effect veto the value imputations of consumers and traders acting in the market. That is why statists want a "valueless" fiat currency, because it gives them power over others.
Read Hans Hermann Hoppe: Why the State Demands Control of Money (http://mises.org/daily/5749/Why-the-State-Demands-Control-of-Money) for an understanding of money and how it works and why those who run the State always want control of it.
Re: Gold has NO "intrinsic value"
Date: 25/10/11 18:56 (UTC)Currency by it's very nature is devoid of any objective or intrinsic value.
Re: Gold has NO "intrinsic value"
Date: 25/10/11 22:21 (UTC)True, currency, like every other good or service, has no objective or intrinsic value. To say that though, is missing the point. Currency is not an end in itself. People trade one good or service for another good or service. Money is a means. One trades something for dollars not because one wants the little green pieces of paper for themselves. Rather, they want the purchasing power of those pieces of paper. They want what it is for which those dollars can be exchanged. All money evolves from the most univerally tradeable commodity. That commodity, like all others, has no intrinsic value. On the other hand, real currency, like the commodities from which it arises, has objective properties, to which the individual imputes value. One of the most important objective properties of a tradeable economic commodity is its scarcity. The value imputations of people trading with a particular commoidity can effectively be overriden, and their real wealth transferred away from them involuntarilly, when the scarcity of a currency can be tampered with and the law forcibly imposes legal tender obligations on contracts.
Re: Gold has NO "intrinsic value"
Date: 26/10/11 01:25 (UTC)Functionally speaking unless you're trying to build high-grade reflector, or corrosion-proof some metalwork gold is worth no more (and in many cases signifigantly less) than an equivilent mass of paper. (
The mistake you've made is thinking that there is a distinction between your so-called "real currency" and those issued by the state.
Re: Gold has NO "intrinsic value"
Date: 27/10/11 21:39 (UTC)Oh? The density of gold is a subjective quantity? The density of gold has one measurement in place A and another in place B?
No, you selectively impute less value to gold than an equivalent mass of paper. This does not mean that gold has objectively less value than paper. Neither paper nor gold have an objective value, despite the fact that they may have an objectively observed trading price. Prices are historical data. In addition, you are entirely free to impute value to goods and services according to your own criteria and economics cannot declare that your imputed valuations are wrong. You are, nevertheless, in a very small minority.
There are plenty of significant distinctions. Despite the fact that the dollar and other fiat currencies function, for a time as currency, that function cannot be sustained. Furthermore they permit involuntary wealth transfer to occur, which will eventually destabilize the economy to the point where these currencies will collapse, impoverishing even more people.
Re: Gold has NO "intrinsic value"
Date: 27/10/11 22:59 (UTC)What bearing does the density of a material have on it's value?
Neither paper nor gold have an objective value, despite the fact that they may have an objectively observed trading price. Prices are historical data. In addition, you are entirely free to impute value to goods and services according to your own criteria and economics cannot declare that your imputed valuations are wrong.
That's my point. If I have no need or desire for gold the gold is effectivley valueless. It only has value because many people have agreed to treat it as such.
In this regard Gold and funny colored paper issued by the Fed are exactly alike.
Re: Gold has NO "intrinsic value"
Date: 27/10/11 23:45 (UTC)That is an excellent question. Outside of economics very few people would even consider it consciously. Density is one of the objective physical properties of gold. We value things in terms of their opportunity cost, in other words, the next most highly valued thing we would forgo in order to obtain the thing we value higher. We rank the things we value according to their ability to satisfy our wants, or as the Austrians put it, their ability to remove a sense of unease: we value things for their ability to improve our perceived circumstances. The physical properties of an object (which are objective) determine the potential uses for an object. Density is but one of many of these objective physical properties. One easy to ascertain benefit of the particular property of gold's density is its near uniqueness and ease of measurement. The density of gold is one of the properties that enable gold to be easilly identifiable by people. Identifiability is one of the properties which tend to cause people to impute more value to a potential monetary commodity. Of course, almost any use to which gold is put can be traced back to one or more of its objective properties like malleability, thermal and electrical conductivity, lustre, color, chemical reactivity, reflectivity, etc.
You would have to have a pretty darned spartan set of values for you to logically impute nearly zero value to gold. If nothing else its easy tradability would tend to induce you to value it higher than say an equal mass of lead or a single meal. Again though, value is not only subjective it is also context dependent. You might not be willing to exchange a meal for an ounce of gold if your circumstances were such that food was in very short supply at the time. This circumstantial context is explained by the Theory of Marginal Utility (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility). People tend to impute more value to diamonds than water for a reason, despite the fact that water is a necessity and diamonds a luxury.
The fact that both have various values imputed to them by individuals, yes, they are "exactly alike." Nevertheless, due to the fact that they have vast differences between their objective physical properties, the values typically imputed to each of these items is very different and constantly fluccuating. One of those objective properties is scarcity. The ratio of barrels of crude oil to ounces of gold has been almost constant since the industrial revolution began. Consequently, the exchange rate between ounces of gold to barrels of oil has remained fairly constant. Conversely, the ratios of dollars in circulation vs barels of crude oil and dollars vs ounces of gold have both been rising. This trend is reflected in the rising prices of both oil and gold ounces in terms of dollars.
Re: Gold has NO "intrinsic value"
Date: 28/10/11 01:29 (UTC)This is where your unvoiced assumptions shoot your argument in the foot. The whole idea of tradability is dependant on finding someone willing to trade with you.
The ratio of barrels of crude oil to ounces of gold has been almost constant since the industrial revolution began. Consequently, the exchange rate between ounces of gold to barrels of oil has remained fairly constant. Conversely, the ratios of dollars in circulation vs barels of crude oil and dollars vs ounces of gold have both been rising. This trend is reflected in the rising prices of both oil and gold ounces in terms of dollars.
This is a circular argument, its bad form to use dollars both as a variable and as a unit of measure.
Re: Gold has NO "intrinsic value"
Date: 28/10/11 17:56 (UTC)No, you are the one attempting to argue in real-world terms, not hypothetical realities and the real-world truth today is that gold is extremely tradeable. The dependency upon finding willing traders is indeed there and it is indeed true, but it is true of every commodity selected as a medium of exchange and it is entirely true of dollars and other fiat currencies as well. Do you have a point? You've lost the thread of your own argument here. You want to disparage gold because "you can't eat it," therefore gold is "valueless," according to you. Are you forgetting that you can't eat dollars either? Despite the fact that you can't eat gold, there are plenty of other uses for it for which people will exchange other goods and services to aquire it. The same cannot be said of dollars.
Do you know what you're arguing here, because I don't. This argument is not circular. The argument is making the case that in terms of relative values commodities like gold and oil are not changing in terms of their general traded ratios against each other. When compared against dollars, both oil and gold are trading higher and higher against them. Price in dollars, in this case, is not referring to some abstract "unit of measure" but in a quantity of tradeable items. Why does it take more and more dollars to trade for most goods and services? It is because dollars are not scarce and there are ever increasing numbers of dollars offered in trade for goods and services. The utility of dollars as a medium of exchange is being steadilly bled out.
(no subject)
Date: 24/10/11 03:38 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 24/10/11 03:49 (UTC)Nor do I want to be.
(no subject)
Date: 24/10/11 03:56 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 24/10/11 04:40 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 24/10/11 04:45 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 24/10/11 04:58 (UTC)MACRO!
Date: 24/10/11 06:28 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 24/10/11 07:29 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 24/10/11 20:17 (UTC)Keep going; you're onto something
Date: 24/10/11 05:28 (UTC)You are close to a fundamental truth here. "How badly someone wants" something is measured in terms of what they are willing to forgo in order to have it. Every last human action is an expression of a decision involving trade-off.
If you're exploring value in this direction, you may want to examine the concepts you've identified in comparison to what the Austrians have written, specifically, what Mises wrote about a study called praxeology. A good, very accessable tutorial on the subject is a series of YouTube videos, most less than five minutes in length, created by a user named Praxgirl. The series starts with a four and a half minute introduction (http://www.youtube.com/user/praxgirl#p/u/12/MoNU_-__LlQ) and has thirteen episodes so far.
(no subject)
Date: 24/10/11 19:12 (UTC)Not a whole lot. It is only valuable because people want it.
The jumping off point for the whole project was a series of conversations Chris and I had about what would an artificial or alien intelligence actually want? Would traditional human concepts of value even apply to them?
(no subject)
Date: 24/10/11 20:52 (UTC)Not very, and they are more like the "HAL9000" variety of sentient program then Asimovian Robots.
The idea is that due to the prevailence of drones in modern warfare Faction A starts invests heavily in research into adaptive programing both to control thier own drones and nuetralise thier opponents'. "Victory" (AKA Vic) is the first true sentient AI and is supposed to be their ace in the hole. Upload upload him into an enemy's network and sit back to watch the fireworks. The catch of course, is that Faction A's generals/political leaders don't really understand what they've got until after they've let the figurative cat out of the bag.
One of my other AI characters was essentially some college kid's get-rich-quick scheme. He was trying to to design a program that would analylise financial markets, but in order to effectively do so he needed to be able to assess motivations. That means asking questions. As the "motivation routine" is refined the questions become increasingly constructive and even suggestive. Pretty soon our college kid has a program that can reliably pass a turing test and thats where things get wierd.
(no subject)
Date: 25/10/11 01:39 (UTC)AI generals also emphasize logistics far more than organics do, to the degree that AI generals are absurdly well-equipped and seemingly cautious but an organic army can and will occasionally logistically overextend itself with catastrophic results, the inflexible logic of AIs means this happening is impossible.
(no subject)
Date: 24/10/11 19:26 (UTC)http://www.kuro5hin.org/prime-intellect/mopiidx.html
You're absolutely right about the value of goods; value is a contextual property of goods, which exists only as a byproduct of how people treat those goods and prioritize their actions around them.
To get to the guts of this question I think you'll need to spend a while fleshing out what motivates an AI, and what it seeks to achieve by getting [whatever has value to it].
Humans have created massive, intricate structures of "wealth", "value", "goods", etc. as a by-product of pursuing our natural drives to eat, to mate, to try and impress each other, and so forth.
In order to conceive of an "AI economy" you're going to have to work out what kinds of (un)natural drives an AI will have. Does ai AI want to be bigger and faster, such that it will try and grow exponentially onto more and better hardware? Perhaps running in a faster computer "feels better" subjectively somehow, causing it to grow exponentially in a sort of addictive cycle; or perhaps the AI is indifferent to its own size and scope, but finds itself having to grow exponentially in order to match its capabilities to solve some sort of real-world problem. But which real-world problems are of import to the AI; simply the ones associated with keeping its own hardware fed and watered, or does it have some sort of raison d'etre distinct from its own self-preservation and instinct for growth? Is there some goal it would destroy itself to accomplish - or which, once achieved, it would simply shut itself off just like any other program exiting on a success condition?
The first 3 or 4 chapters of Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect are really good explorations on this theme and I bet it will inspire you to think about AI psychology and motivations in new ways.
(no subject)
Date: 24/10/11 20:55 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 24/10/11 21:05 (UTC)That is the question that lead me down the tangents described in the OP.
I still haven't figured it out.
Is there some goal it would destroy itself to accomplish - or which, once achieved, it would simply shut itself off just like any other program exiting on a success condition?
I actually considered this as a way to disable more "Militant" AI's, give 'em what they want and then zap 'em when they drop into standby mode. ;P
The first 3 or 4 chapters of Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect are really good explorations on this theme and I bet it will inspire you to think about AI psychology and motivations in new ways.
I'll need to look into this.
(no subject)
Date: 24/10/11 20:14 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 24/10/11 20:16 (UTC)So in other words same idea, different source. Great minds think alike. ;P