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This is: The Duplicator: Instant Cloning Would Make the World Economy Explode, published by Holden Karnofsky on the AI Alignment Forum.
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This is the second post in a series explaining my view that we could be in the most important century of all time. Here's the roadmap for this series.
The first piece in this series discusses our unusual era, which could be very close to the transition between an Earth-bound civilization and a stable galaxy-wide one.
Future pieces will discuss how "digital people" - and/or advanced AI - could be key for this transition.
This piece explores a particularly important dynamic that could make either digital people or advanced AI lead to explosive productivity.
I explore the simple question of how the world would change if people could be "copied." I argue that this could lead to unprecedented economic growth and productivity. Later, I will describe how digital people or advanced AI could similarly cause a growth/productivity explosion.
When some people imagine the future, they picture the kind of thing you see in sci-fi films. But these sci-fi futures seem very tame, compared to the future I expect.
In sci-fi, the future is different mostly via:
Shiny buildings, gadgets and holograms.
Robots doing many of the things humans do today.
Advanced medicine.
Souped-up transportation, from hoverboards to flying cars to space travel and teleportation.
But fundamentally, there are the same kinds of people we see today, with the same kinds of personalities, goals, relationships and concerns.
The future I picture is enormously bigger, faster, weirder, and either much much better or much much worse compared to today. It's also potentially a lot sooner than sci-fi futures:[1] I think particular, achievable-seeming technologies could get us there quickly.
Such technologies could include "digital people" or particular forms of advanced AI - each of which I'll discuss in a future piece.
For now, I want to focus on just one aspect of what these sorts of technology would allow: the ability to make instant copies of people (or of entities with similar capabilities). Economic theory - and history - suggest that this ability, alone, could lead to unprecedented (in history or in sci-fi movies) levels of economic growth and productivity. This is via a self-reinforcing feedback loop in which innovation leads to more productivity, which leads to more "copies" of people, who in turn create more innovation and further increase productivity, which in turn ...
In this post, instead of directly discussing digital people or advanced AI, I'm going to keep things relatively simple and discuss a different hypothetical technology: the Duplicator from Calvin & Hobbes, which simply copies people.
How the Duplicator works
The Duplicator is portrayed in this series of comics. Its key feature is making an instant copy of a person: Calvin walks in, and two identical Calvins walk out.
This is importantly different from the usual (and more realistic) version of "cloning," in which a person's clone has the same DNA but has to start off as a baby and take years to become an adult.[2]
To flesh this out a bit, I'll assume that:
The Duplicator allows any person to quickly make a copy of themselves, which starts from the same condition and mental state or from an earlier state (for example, I could make a replica of "Holden as of January 1, 2015").[3] Unlike in many sci-fi films, the copies function normally (they aren't evil or soulless or decaying or anything).
It can be used to make an unlimited number of copies, though each has some noticeable cost of production (they aren't free).[4]
Productivity impacts
It seems that much of today's economy revolves around trying to make the most of "scarce human capital." That is:
Some people are "scarce" or "in demand." Extreme examples include...
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