Why we shouldn't fear our alien overlords: Comparative Advantage | Hacker News Reader

Why we shouldn't fear our alien overlords: Comparative Advantage

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23 pointsamayne23 comments

Of course, there's a great comparative advantage in forcing a lesser being to work for no pay. Also, what about the scenario where we are the resource? Best case: Matrix; more likely: extinction (if they could sustainably cultivate people, they wouldn't have crossed the galaxy to find us)

Comparative Advantage increases prosperity for all when both sides can reinvest and become more efficient and more productive. That's why industrialized China is a better trading partner than a non-industrial China was.

Coerced, uncompensated labor diminishes the upside. That's one of the economic reason why Europe and later the US moved away from slavery. It also decreases your market for your products.

Slavery was economical for the slaveowners [1]. Agriculture wasn't economical relative to industrialization (which is why the economy of the US South sucked), but that was a separate matter.

Slavery was abolished primarily due to the religious beliefs of assorted evangelical Christians (quakers, baptists, methodists), not for economic reasons.

[1] If you ignore the utility function of the slaves, slavery is economically equivalent to robots.

I absolutely agree that changing morality had an effect on the abolishment of slavery.

However the mechanical harvester and other machines made slavery inefficient. While the cotton gin increased the potential yield from cotton (and increased slavery in the South), later machines like the mechanical harvester made mechanical production more efficient than unskilled labor.

Since an industrial robot from 2010 is much more efficient than one from 2000, I'm not sure if we can make a statement that a robot is mechanically equivalent to a slave.

You can only use more whips to increase the productivity of a human being. After a point it's more productive to free him and educate him so he can increase his or her efficiencies.

The only time a machine would make slavery inefficient is when such a machine could do everything a human can do, and with less energy requirements. Slaves were not limited to harvesting cotton. Slaves were meant to provide wealth to their masters in any form which could be had, including both physical (working fields, being maids/nursemaids, cooking, cleaning etc.) and often sexual labor. It's also not a widely known fact that slaves built much of the U.S. capitol. Many Americans would love to have a butler, but can't afford one. Well, you could if the only payment required was feeding them scraps you intended for the trash anyway. Having slaves provided tremendous economic benefit and wealth to slave owners, even if not always measured in dollar terms.

Before you replace a slave with a machine there are other steps. Indentured servants, share croppers, migrant labor. There is a whole ladder of human exploitation. Ultimately, slavery is a less efficient substitute for free skilled labor.

Having a slave is more than just feeding them scraps. You have to be able to contain a slave population and keep them from murdering you. There are real costs to this. At a certain point the costs are outweighed by the benefit of freeing people and letting them create surpluses.

Communist Russia and North Korea were slave societies. They couldn't compete with the free west. When China enable certain economic freedoms and gave up (some, not all) of their slave-state tendencies they experienced the greatest economic boon in history.

Hold on a second. You're suggesting slavery is in the same category as indentured servants, share croppers, and migrant labor for human exploitation? The difference is night and day! If I have to spell it out, in one case you work of your own free will, and in the other you don't and are abused and beaten.

I do agree that in the macro sense it's better economically to free people and educate them, but that is NOT the logical path slave owners in the U.S. were on. And once, after war, slaves did become free they were not made to be educated as whites.

I'd be particularly worried if our lower horns were the resource.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Fry

Very true.

A very rational intelligent species might go out of their way to exterminate other intelligent species. The logic goes something like this: The resources of the galaxy may seem vast, but on a long enough timescale they are finite and will eventually become scarce. On such a long timescale, any other intelligent species has the potential to compete with us for those resources. If we lose that competition, we could be driven to extinction. Best to pre-empt competition now while we have the upper hand

The Greg Bear novels The Forge of God and Anvil of Stars dealt with this scenario.

> If we lose that competition, we could be driven to extinction. Best to pre-empt competition now while we have the upper hand

What's even scarier is that the most rational choice may be to pre-empt even if resource competition is unlikely to ever occur, just because pre-emption on the part of another civilization has a non-zero probability.

Basically it's the Cold War logic except with no diplomacy and with the other side's strategy likely to be guided by a strong post-Singularity AI.

Thinking through these scenarios can be scary as fuck, but since we're all still alive and well, it could be that we are truly alone.

I loved those novels. I think the thing that gets lost is that we usually imagine aliens as only incrementally more advance than us - like comparing an aircraft carrier to a Viking longboat. I think a species capable of interstellar travel is going to have a much greater technological advantage over us. So much so that we won't even look at the same things as resources.

Our biggest ideas like Dyson spheres and space elevators are concepts based on an early 20th century way of looking at things.

What's a civilization that can manipulate matter like energy (i.e. "matter" lasers) on a routine level or has advanced forms of nanotechnology or picotechnology capable of? I have no idea.

If we start noticing stars vanishing because they're tapping them for energy, then I'll worry. Otherwise I don't think our rock is worth much other than entertainment value.

Terrible article. What the hell is a “secular zealot”? And why is proofreading considered something no one has time to do anymore? Hint: Rationale ≠ rational; you’re missing the word “century,” and no one in the world uses this supposed “citation style.”

Secular zealots: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_party

Are you kidding me? Socialism is NOT secularism!

Edit I’m objecting to the article pretending that secular zealotry is a thing like socialist zealotry or religious zealotry. Secularism is never itself a cause for zealotry. And the article even implies those who are passionate about secularism despise individuality. Absurd.

Correct. No one said that it was.

My link was to the communist party which is an avowed secular organization. Unlike a group like the Christian Socialists or the Nazi party.

I used them as an example of secular zealots because that particular movement killed more people than anyone else in the 20th century. And has religion pretty evenly matched for zealots.

Just so you understand where I'm coming from, I'm an atheist (a very secular position).

I mentioned "secular zealots who hate individuality" in fairness of my inclusion of "religious zealots".

Just as not all religious people are zealots, not all secular people are zealots.

As mentioned, I'm an atheist. Which would make me a secularist. So if there was any intentional ding, it was against those secular people (like communists) who devalue individuality and its expression through free choice.

As far as saying secularism is never a cause for zealotry, that's just crazy. The French Revolution was filled with secular zealots...

I think the article intended 'secular zealotry' to mean something more like 'nonreligious zealotry' - the zealots are secular, not that the zealots are zealous about secularism. This is intended to contrast against the religious zealots referred to in the previous sentence.

The article that was posted before was bs. Thanks for coming up with a rebuttal.

Aliens wouldn't invade Earth for resources, because they can get far more, for less effort, by mining the asteroid belt, the Kuiper cloud, the Oort cloud, the gas giant systems etc etc. Schlepping down the Earth gravity well for a tiny fraction of the minerals on a piddly rock is not worth the bother.

"we still have value we can bring to a superior civilization. That value may be in providing services, cheap labor or producing reality television."

... or we may just have really delicious brain stems.

True. My biggest fear is that they make an alien version of the documentary The Cove about what happened to earthlings...

What's the comparative advantage between a human and a hog? The same relation may very well obtain between a superintelligence and a human.

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