[Ygg2]

> It would still be in the interests of the rich that everyone else got to use it.

Why though? More users? Economy is already moving to a free-to-pay model. You earn more catering to rich people than the middle class/poor. Look at hardware nVidia is earning more extracting money from the richest people buying 4090 and 4080 than from rest, and that's dwarfed by their AI offerings.

The way I see it, basically you earn money from whales, rich people and you toss breadcrumbs to the rest.

[ben_w]

Why is in the subsequent paragraphs:

> More users, more awareness of limitations and side effects and how to treat them.

> Longer working lives for the labour force, less need for expensive pensions and expensive old age care

[Ygg2]

First, it's easier to do test on undocumented, homeless and rights deprived people than regular citizens.

Second. If you're that far in the future, the labor will be automatized, who's going to rebel? The automatons?

[ben_w]

> First, it's easier to do test on undocumented, homeless and rights deprived people than regular citizens.

Not if you want to do long term analysis, and rule out confounding variables like the impact of sleeping rough.

Though even if you did, that would still be a demonstration that it won't just be for the rich. Weird demo, suboptimal science, but nevertheless you've now got homeless people stuffed with anti-aging drugs.

> Second. If you're that far in the future, the labor will be automatized, who's going to rebel? The automatons?

It might be automated, but then there's no longer a meaningful distinction between rich and poor. A genuinely fully automated economy, all it takes is one person with a von Neumann replicator to decide everyone should have one, followed by log_2(population)*replication_period, before everyone has them. The former is 33, so even if they take a year starting from bashing rocks with pickaxes, this would still be less than half the current human life expectancy.

A better question is who would want to rebel?

[Ygg2]

> Weird demo, suboptimal science, but nevertheless you've now got homeless people stuffed with anti-aging drugs.

Anti-aging drug. Not anti death drug. We don't keep more lab rats than we need. Not to mention lab rats aren't known for their quality of life. You aren't going to wait thousand years. You'll find a way to induce aging. Then run a battery of tests.

> It might be automated, but then there's no longer a meaningful distinction between rich and poor. A genuinely fully automated economy, all it takes is one person with a von Neumann replicator to decide everyone should have one

Yeah, no. First that is not necessary for full automation. Second. It's a replicator, not a magic entropy defying system. Energy for it has to come from somewhere and they aren't free.

[ben_w]

> Anti-aging drug. Not anti death drug. We don't keep more lab rats than we need. Not to mention lab rats aren't known for their quality of life. You aren't going to wait thousand years. You'll find a way to induce aging. Then run a battery of tests.

We've already got literal lab-rats, if that's what someone is planning to do. Human trials are pretty pointless if you don't do them realistically. (Not that this means nobody will do them, the Tuskegee study happened, but it was also low-value in addition to being unethical).

> Yeah, no. First that is not necessary for full automation.

It's a sub-set of what's necessary for full automation, as full automation requires anything that a human can do, and we can already do "build robot".

If machines cannot make robots, people will be paid to make robots, and then it won't be fully automated.

> Second. It's a replicator, not a magic entropy defying system. Energy for it has to come from somewhere and they aren't free.

Entropy doesn't need to be defied, magic is un-called-for. We are an existence proof of this.

Giant fusion reactor in the sky that will, if left to its own devices, probably give us gradually increasing power for about five times longer than our atmosphere will last. And it's only "probably" because there's a reasonable chance Earth gets ejected from the solar system over that time scale.

And before you say it PV is also a thing that we can do and thus a thing that must be fully automatable in any economy deserving of the description "fully automated".

But it doesn't need to last that long; if such a thing takes a year to make a copy of itself, then even limited to the surface of the Earth it would be able to make the last doubling, 4 billion units, if the construction had an energy budget of 247.7 GWh: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28%286000km%29%5E2*pi*...

28.276 megawatts on average for a year is considerably more than we use to reach adulthood, even in countries with high per-capita usage. Biologically speaking, it's about 15700 times the energy consumption we need to reach adulthood (and the disparity is even more severe for, say, a dog which reproduces significantly younger than a human), and we get that energy and those materials by eating plants or animals that ate plants, which is also a clearly sufficient source of both materials and energy that this planet can provide without violating entropy or being magic.

[Ygg2]

> We've already got literal lab-rats, if that's what someone is planning to do. Human trials are pretty pointless if you don't do them realistically.

Yeah, and there is a gulf between works in mice and works in humans, as anyone reading science journals will tell you. Now, a human model. That's much closer to the real deal.

> It's a sub-set of what's necessary for full automation.

Not really. You are going for a holistic approach when a piecemeal bootstrap is much more likely.

It's a very theoretical solution to a problem that can be solved in a much messier but available way. E.g. Warp drive vs Nuclear power generation ships.

> Giant fusion reactor in the sky that will, if left to its own devices, probably give us gradually increasing power for about five times longer than our atmosphere will last.

You mean the sun? Sure, but that's an extremely unstable source of power that will have us relocate Earth(lings) first, if we want to continue to "use it".

> Entropy doesn't need to be defied, magic is un-called-for. We are an existence proof of this.

Magic is an apt comparison because it's an arcane, theoretical construct that has little to do with reality. Looking at the Wikipedia entry, it's an overkill for trivial purposes, by the time you construct a few, let alone, give everyone a copy, you'd probably exhaust Earth and nearby resources.