Corporations can be usefully described as 'profit-maximizers', but capitalism itself doesn't have a coherent behavior - you can't describe it as any kind of AI.
Capitalism is a paperclip maximizer
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Re: Capitalism is a paperclip maximizer
#12Wait, what? Capitalism maximizes "giving people what they want". This is much closer to the benevolent AI models than to paperclip maxizers.
While that may be true in some sense there is a very important caveat. Capitalism maximizes giving people they want in proportion to the capital they have.
The fact that the distribution is skewed by capital ownership and that agents other than people can own capital creates a powerful distortion and an entirely different systematic effect.
Re: Capitalism is a paperclip maximizer
#13Capital doesn't maximize capital; it maximizes productivity. In absence of controls, capital naturally flows to productivity in order to be maximized by the holders of capital; but only because productivity creates wealth, not the capital itself.
> "only because productivity creates wealth"
Does it? For whom does productivity create wealth for?
Productivity is about getting set results based on the smallest set of resources (time, money, materials, etc...). It does not include anything about wealth, nor where that wealth is distributed to, or whether resources could have generated more wealth used in a different way. It's actually possible for increased productivity to decrease wealth.
Re: Capitalism is a paperclip maximizer
#14Capital is not what most people conceive of it to be. Capital is commonly (and correctly) viewed as a "store of wealth", or as "the crystallisation of labour-time" - but capital comes in different flavours, and when you deal with capital in the form of goods which provide an incremental benefit to the user, what you have is indeed capital, but when you deal with money... it's up to you whether it's capital or not. Of…
>capitalism is a system which currently optimises for money.
If that were the case then cash reserves would be where the bulk of people poured their resources. In fact the majority of non-debt "capital" is held in real-estate and some combination of financial instruments (CD, bonds, common stock etc...).
You are confusing how the assets are valued with what is actually being valued. What I think you are saying though is that capitalism is optimizing for having the highest dollar denominated balance sheet - which could be true, but I think that is a function of the people, not the function of open markets or the asset value function of assigning ownership to capital.
Re: Capitalism is a paperclip maximizer
#15Nailed it.
Re: Capitalism is a paperclip maximizer
#16What we really want is a happiness maximizer but no one knows how to make one of those which leverages the innate characteristics of people. Capitalism seems like a pretty good system to pragmatically approximate this happiness maximizer.
Yes, there are negative externalities to capitalism including possibly maximizing short term happiness at the expense of long term. Is there something better?
Framing this in terms of the paperclip maximizer made this idea appear more interesting than it turned out to be.
Re: Capitalism is a paperclip maximizer
#17Corporations can be usefully described as 'profit-maximizers', but capitalism itself doesn't have a coherent behavior - you can't describe it as any kind of AI.
AI is just a subset of intelligence. You absolutely can describe capitalism as an intelligent system since it is primarily made up of units (people) which are intelligent.
If capitalism didn't have a coherent behavior, then how could we ever rely upon it as a primary driver of our economy? It must be coherent and on some level understandable for us to make predictions around it.
Re: Capitalism is a paperclip maximizer
#18Wait, what? Capitalism maximizes "giving people what they want". This is much closer to the benevolent AI models than to paperclip maxizers.
A lot of capitalism involves making people want things that capitalism then supplies to them. I'm not sure that's benevolent.
Re: Capitalism is a paperclip maximizer
#19Wait, what? Capitalism maximizes "giving people what they want". This is much closer to the benevolent AI models than to paperclip maxizers.
That's laughable. Capitalism excels at forcing people to accept what is most profitable.
Re: Capitalism is a paperclip maximizer
#20Wait, what? Capitalism maximizes "giving people what they want". This is much closer to the benevolent AI models than to paperclip maxizers.
> Capitalism maximizes "giving people what they want".
So do drug dealers who get girls hooked on heroin and put them on the streets. Simply because you serve some compulsion or desire that someone has does not make you benevolent, there are such things as high local utility traps.