David Duvenaud

But the idea is that eventually we do hit some sort of like Malthusian-ish limit and we have to actually start competing with the machines for some basic resource.

Of course, along the way, I think there might be like on a faster scale, this sort of like Malthusian competition for political power might be lost by humans.

But like, let's just not worry about that for now.

Yeah, exactly.

So the scenario I have in mind is that I have my maybe like one acre of land or my like big luxury apartment with me and my family.

And, you know, we've made our peace with kind of opting out of the economy, but we have our like little sort of commune or whatever that we're happy to live in, in like unimaginable luxury and wealth in some senses.

And the government or the rest of the economy or something starts to view this as sort of like criminally decadent, that this small group of like humans, like maybe 10 or 100, are using this entire acre of land and like this amount of energy and sunshine to keep like this sort of these small brains working for no particular benefit but their own.

when the same resources could be used to simulate maybe like millions of much more sympathetic sort of morally superior on whatever axis like virtual beings.

And so it'll start to be seen as this like selfish, as you say, like high opportunity costs, sort of irresponsible use of resources to keep like some sort of like legacy human around.

Yeah.

So first of all, I want to say this isn't exactly exotic.

So maybe when we think about land taxes today, often people say land taxes are good or property taxes are good because they force, for instance, like old people who have like bigger houses than they need because their family has moved out to move into smaller houses to make room for new human families.

So this dynamic of...

like take the old people's stuff because they don't need it, then we can we can house like more productive, sort of more maybe more deserving people to use the same resources is something that we already do today.

And so they're just like having property taxes or land taxes is one way that we end up losing our wealth and being forced to like upload or something.

The second question though of like, why haven't we been grandfathered in and made some deal?

It's like, well, who are we making this deal with?

So if there is some sort of like global entity that can make promises on behalf of everybody,

then maybe this is plausible.

It's kind of like if you're, I don't know, like a monkey living in a jungle next to a city, you're kind of worried the city's growing.