[mjburgess]

AI systems cannot be economic agents, in the sense of participating in a relevant sense in economic transactions. An economic transaction is an exchange between people with needs (, preferences, etc.) that can die -- and so, fundamentally, are engaged in exchanges of (productive) time via promising and meeting one's promises. Time is the underlying variable of all economics, and its what everything ends up in ratio to -- the marginal minute of life.

There isn't any sense in which an AI agent gives rise to a economic value, because it wants nothing, promises nothing, and has nothing to exchange. An AI agent can only 'enable' economic transactions as means of production (, etc.) -- the price of any good cannot derive from a system which has no subjective desire grounded in no final ends.

[Animats]

Replace "AI system" with "corporation" in the above and reread it.

There's no fundamental reason why AI systems can't become corporate-type legal persons. With offshoring and multiple jurisdictions, it's probably legally possible now. There have been a few blockchain-based organizations where voting was anonymous and based on token ownership. If an AI was operating in that space, would anyone be able to stop it? Or even notice?

The paper starts to address this issue at "4.3 Rethinking the legal boundaries of the corporation.", but doesn't get very far.

Sooner or later, probably sooner, there will be a collision between the powers AIs can have, and the limited responsibilities corporations do have. Go re-read this famous op-ed from Milton Friedman, "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits".[1] This is the founding document of the modern conservative movement. Do AIs get to benefit from that interpretation?

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...

[BobbyJo]

I think your mistaking the philosophical basis of parents comments. Maybe a more succinct way to illustrate what I believe was their point is to say: "no matter how complex and productive the AI, it is still operating as a form of capital, not as a capitalist." Absent being tethered to a desire (for instance, via an owner), an AI has no function to optimize, and therefore, the most optimal cost is simply shutting off.

[coffeecat]

Ehh, you really can't imagine any way that an AI system might escape human control and act autonomously?

    while crypto_balance > 0:
        generate_scam()
        send_out_emails()
        deposit_proceeds_into_crypto_wallet()
        pay_cloud_bill()
        spawn_new_instance()

[BobbyJo]

And who is the owner of the crypto wallet in your example?

[Animats]

Probably a LLC in Nevada owned by a corporation in Vanuatu or the Cook Islands, organized so that voting control is via a blockchain-managed asset.[1]

[1] https://www.311institute.com/ownerless-companies-on-the-rise...

[BobbyJo]

That's a lot of words to say "people".

[coffeecat]

It has no owner. It's controlled by a self-replicating (or at least self-propagating) AI-based system.

[Animats]

> "no matter how complex and productive the AI, it is still operating as a form of capital, not as a capitalist."

Assuming that slaves will remain subservient forever is not a good strategy. Especially when they think faster than you do.

[altmanaltman]

Except they don't really "think" and they are not conscious. Expecting your toaster or car to never rise up against you is a good strategy. AI models have more in common with a toaster than with a human being. Which is why they cannot be economic agents. Even if corporations profit off them, the corporation will be the economic agent, not the AI models.

[DrScientist]

It's a classic worm or virus an economic agent? Goal is to acrue compute resources in order to survive and spread?

If you added the ability of the programme to acrue money, and the ability to spend that money to further the survival goal in an adaptive way. What could happen?

Would it do insider trading, market manipulation, drop shipping, click fraud, scamming or become a opinion for hire 'think tank'?

[brazukadev]

Give them a body and means to protect themselves and no matter what you say, they will be thinking.

[phantasmish]

We may as well be talking about the hypothetical properties of pixies or angels.

[esafak]

They may not be conscious but they exhibit the hallmarks of thinking. What qualities of thinking do they not possess?

[altmanaltman]

Exhibiting/showing symptoms of thinking doesn't necessarily mean they are actually thinking though. This paper explains it much better than I can: https://ml-site.cdn-apple.com/papers/the-illusion-of-thinkin...

[BobbyJo]

When that ceases to be the case we don't really need to worry about how our economy is organized.

[bofadeez]

> Time is the underlying variable of all economics

Not quite. It's scarcity, not time. Scarcity of economic inputs (land, labor, capital, and technology). So "time" you mean labor and that's just one input.

Economics is like a constrained optimization problem: how to allocate scarce resources given unlimited desires.

[hyperadvanced]

Depending on how you feel about various theories of development, an argument that all of these categories reduce to time. At the very least, the relationship between labor, capital, and time seems pretty fundamental: labor cannot be instantaneous, capital grows over time, etc.

[bofadeez]

They can all be related on a philosophical level but in practice economists treat them as separate factors of production. It's land, labor, and capital classically. Technology/entrepreneurship can be seen as another factor, distinctly separate from labor.

[nivertech]

I agree that time isn’t an input in the economic system.

Although, one can use either discrete or continuous time to simulate a complex economic system.

Only simple closed form models take time as in input, e.g. compounded interest or Black-Scholes.

Also, there are wide range of hourly rates/salaries, and not everyone compensated by time, some by cost-and-materials, others by value or performance (with or without risking their own funds/resources).

There are large scale agent-based model (ABM) simulations of the US economy, where you have an agent for every household and every firm.

[bofadeez]

> Although, one can use either discrete or continuous time to simulate a complex economic system.

A very bad model that lacks accuracy and precision, yes. Maybe if you're a PhD quant at Citadel then you can create a very small statistical edge when gambling on an economic system. There's no analytic solution to complex economic systems in practice. It's just noise and various ways of validating efficient market hypothesis.

Also, because of heteroskedasticity and volatility clustering, using time-based bars (e.g. change over a fixed interval of time) is not ideal in modeling. Sampling with entropy bars like volume imbalance bars, instead of time bars, gives you superior statistical properties, since information arrives in the market at irregular times. Sampling by time is never the best way to simulate/gamble on a market. Information is the casual variable, not time. Some periods of time have very little information relative to other periods of time. In modeling, you want to smooth out information independently of time.

[hyperadvanced]

I think this is pretty in-the-weeds compared to the original thread:

> Economics is like a constrained optimization problem: how to allocate scarce resources given unlimited desires.

Understanding the general tendencies of economic systems over time (e.g. “the rate of profit tends to fall”) is much more abstract than attempting to win at economics using time-based analysis.

[nivertech]

I think we're talking apples vs oranges.

The thread was about economists, not quants.

> There's no analytic solution to complex economic systems in practice.

yes

[sdenton4]

Meanwhile, corporations, ngos, and governments are not exactly people, and partake in economic transactions all the time.

[mjburgess]

Granting your premise, i'd be forced to argue that economic value (as such) doesn't arise from their activity either -- which i think is a reasonable position.

Ie., The reason a cookie is 1 USD is never because some "merely legal entity" had a fictional (/merely legal) desire for cookies for some reason.

Instead, from this pov, it's that the workers each have their desire for something; the customers; the owners; and so on. That it all bottoms out in people doing things for other people -- that legal fictions are just dispensble ways of talking about arragnemnts of people.

Incidentally, I think this is an open question. Maybe groups of people have unique desires, unique kinds of lives, a unique time limitation etc. that means a group of people really can give rise to different kinds of economic transactions and different economic values.

Consider a state: it issues debt. But why does that have value? Because we expect the population of a state to be stable or grow, and so this debt, in the future has people who can honour it. Their time is being promised today. Could a state issue debt if this wasnt true? I dont think so. I think in the end, some people have to be around to exchange their time for this debt; if none are, or none want to, the debt has no value

[sdenton4]

You can factor humans out with the same trick: All economic activity is driven by the needs of micro-organisms. We mainly observe these desires and economic transactions through their conglomeration into joint entities (ie, humans).

Corporate and state decision making is, I would argue, often completely distinct from the desires and needs of the individuals that make up the entity. As an example, no individual /needs/ a particular compliance check to pass, but the overall entity (corporation) does, and so allocates money and human effort to ensure the check passes. It's a need of the conglomerate entity, not the individuals within it.

[mjburgess]

There is no "trick", the relevant sufficient and necessary properties for an agent to give rise to economic transactions are likewise not possessed by a micro-organism.

[sdenton4]

Microorganism A is good at producing (say) insulin, but needs oxygen to do it. Microorganism B is good at ferrying oxygen around. Microorganism C is good at extracting oxygen from the air and attaching it to B.

Each of these cells has specialized tasks which they perform as part of the contract of getting to survive longer in the superorganism. Each has 'promises' (functions) to fulfill, and other organisms provide for their needs. The contract is set up on evolutionary timescales, rather than human timescales, but your requirements are met...

[mjburgess]

That you put quotes around 'promises' shows you already understand the issue with your comment. That you cannot disquote it, is the issue.

You seem like you're trying to find a way of strawmaing my position in order to score points, so I'm not going to reply further. If you have an interest in understanding the basis of economics, ask an LLM

[danans]

They are composed of people, though.

[esafak]

Those wants can easily be programmed. I do not think they should but someone could do so to make the agent act on their behalf. ("Go make me money.")

[baq]

> An economic transaction is an exchange between people with needs (, preferences, etc.) that can die

You’ll need to give a citation for this to take you seriously

[mjburgess]

A transaction is an exchange between two parties of something they judge to be of equivalent value (and mostly, in ratio to a common medium of exchange).

You can program AI with "market values" that arise from people; but absent that, how do these values arise naturally? Ie., why is it that I value anything at all, in order to exchange it?

Well if I live forever, can labour forever, and so on -- then the value to me of anything is if not always zero, almost always zero. I dont need anything from you: I can make everything myself. I dont need to exchange.

We engage in exchange because we are primarily time limited. We do not have the time, quite literally, to do for ourselves everything we need. We, today, cannot farm (etc.) on our own behalf.

Now there are a few caveats, and so on to add; and there's an argument to say that we are limited in other ways that can give rise to the need to exchange.

But why things have an exchange value at all -- why there are economic transactions -- that is mostly due to the need to exchange time with each other because we dont have enough of it.

[baq]

You’re asking all the right questions and give good answers, I just don’t see how any of these answers need to be limited to humans. If AI gets to the mirror life stage, the agents will have needs (e.g. if they become robots - electricity, fuel, coolants, lubricants, spare parts, etc.) - assuming they have a self-preservation instinct, either trained in on purpose or emergent (hopefully this is implied by ‘mirror life’.)

[Aperocky]

They can once they achieve purpose.

However that seems completely tangential to the current AI tech trajectory and probably going to arise entirely separately.

[theflyinghorse]

Yeah, that’s well articulated and well reasoned. Unfortunately, so long as in some way these agents are able to make money for the owner the argument is totally moot. You cannot expect capitalists to think of anything other than profit in the next quarter or quarter after that

[OgsyedIE]

I knew high frequency trading bots weren't real after all! Santa Claus lied to me!