Robocop: a love story

I've been mulling the Hanson/Caplan exchange about identity preservation in the case of brain uploads. As before, I'm worried about the legal implications of writing a living brain into a machine. In the case of major brain trauma, the development of neural disorders, or vegetative states, individuals retain the same legal rights as they had prior to the change. In the case of a perfectly faithful upload, the replica has no legal rights or responsibilities soever.

Also, since the thought experiments appear to be popular in this debate, consider a coma patient. Someone goes into a lingering vegetative state then awakes 20 years later, a whole new set of cells, with no cognitive continuity in the interim. Is this the same individual that fell into the coma? Does the ghost in the shell slumber next to the corpse?

Consider also the enhancement of the upload. Upgrades should be easily available, with vastly enhanced senses, improved memory, and vastly faster cognitive abilities. If you accept that identity can be transferred and you think that the individual is the sum of the parts (memory, feeling, sensation, emotion, etc), will the upload become something more than the original? Man plus? Could I still call my upgraded self me? Is there a fundamental difference between Lasik eye surgery and an enhancement that allows me to see into the x-ray spectrum?

From a practical standpoint, I'd be willing to upload myself for pure vanity. It's likely that my presence in the distant future is not going to be appreciated much by whatever Neo Sapiens is going to be around, but I'm happy being a wallflower in a fantastic future, even if it means being relegated to an old-uploads home, well away from the supercharged post-singularity world of perfect information and infinite wisdom.

Someone should write an AI bill of rights, if this hasn't already been done.

Gobble Gobble

There's a lot to be thankful for in the early 21st Century: penicillin, flush toilets, Kindle, adjustable insoles, myelin sheaths in the neocortex, GPS, the Large Hadron Collider. What I'm thankful for this year is the people in my life. People are, and have always been what really makes life worth living.

I can see the appeal of the line: "L'enfer, c'est les autres", but I'd guess that Sartre didn't bother considering the alternative. Try to imagine for a moment how perfectly unlivable life would be in the absence of others. How much stuff are you able to create from the raw materials around you? How long would it take? Would you survive even a mild winter? We rely on other people for our food, our comfort, our entertainment, our very survival. The alternative to the Zarathustrian nightmare is true wretched misery, starvation, and the most terrifying of all ancient punishments: exile.

So here I am in my cozy apartment in Northern Virginia, surrounded by people on every side and I can't imagine being any more content.

Infants are unable to signal their desire to live, and in the absence of that ability, what is the Functionalist take on infanticide? Also, does criminal law dilute the efficiency of civil law? The latter is a question for the Spivonomist, I think.

Bigger, Longer, and Uncut.

I've been trying to think of ways in which our rule-making process could prevent things like this. Riding major laws on things like troop funding in order to shame those who might vote against it is not only disgusting, but reveals some sort of flaw in our system. My guess is that a majority of the representatives who voted for (or against) the health care bill read the thing, so the main driving force behind the vote was wanting to be identified with health care reform (or a more honest word, befuckupment), or not.

I propose that every bill that is voted upon first be read out loud, in its entirety, and in order to vote on a bill a congressperson must be present for, say, 90% of the reading. So not only do they have to learn how sausage is made, they have to have their eyelids pinned open and watch while each creepy element is put through the grinder.

I would love to watch around the time the budget is passed. "We're spending HOW much on WHAT?"

Perhaps I am wrong in thinking that public officials have shame, but I do know they value their time.

I also have at times thought the idea of a line-item veto would be useful, but I think that it might too often be used as a political weapon more than anything.

Any other ideas?

It's probably overblown anyway

With all the heavyweight academics weighing in on the climate e-mail "scandal" (quotes gleefully lifted from the Mungowitz), I've got my own take on the issue.

The birth pains of science were ugly. Scientific inquiry may not have themselves broken the back of the Church, but even if they kicked 'em while they were down, it's fair to say that the Scientific Method has left an indelible imprint on Western Civ. Most of the time, it's been in the service of the advancement of the species, so academic territorialism at its worst meant nothing so egregious as maintaining the status quo.

Here, we have a different situation. Artificial consensus implies massive costs on future generations. Turf wars spell untold trouble.

So should we be surprised? Probably not. Should we be worried? I think so.

Also, are politicians competition for entertainers? Is that why actors feel they have to weigh in on public policy?

Also also, big-ass laughs at KPC hoisting DeLong by a (not necessarily his own) petard.

Endangered Species

"I don't give a damn about endangered species." -Walter Williams

I don't either, but I have a suggestion for those who do...Start eating them. Well, not quite. If private ownership of endangered species is no longer prohibited, and people figure out that animals like the spotted owl are pretty tasty, there will be an incentive for people to farm them and keep the species alive. Does anyone expect cows or chickens to go extinct?

I find it interesting that environmentalists seem more concerned with the survival of currently living plants and animals rather than increasing their population.

Smile, a-hole

As far back as I can remember, I've been accused of being dour. I could be living a comfortable retirement in Spain were it not for the fact that no one was obliged to give me a nickel every time they told me to plaster a goofy grin across my sour puss. I used to just hate these comments because I (probably rightfully) resented the implicit (explicit, even?) paternalism in the sentiment. "Who are you to tell me to smile, jerkwad?", I'd think to myself, seldom voicing my ire due to the undeniable awkwardness in telling a cheerier-than-thou person to kindly STFU. Later, I began to bristle at the untoward monotony of hearing the same crap over and over again. Yes, jerkface, I know I'm a miserable cur. Now please zip thy lip and let me stew in my wretchedness in blessed peace.

These days, I've been getting the exhortation to grin a lot less often. I'd reckon it's either because I actually do smile more often or that people are less inclined to tell a grown-ass man to grin like an idiot when there's nothing around to smile at. I'd hope it's the former, because I really do like to think I'm happier with the choices I've made. I'm in exactly the place I want to be and I'm surrounded by precisely the sorts of people I want to be surrounded by. Dang, I've just ended two sentences with a preposition in one paragraph. Take that, Mrs. Underwood and fourth grade English. I'm a bit more worried that it might be the latter. In that case, it means that the signal has stopped being "we want to feel more comfortable around you, so please look happy for our sake" to "you're a lost cause, old man [I'm not old; there's only one or two of my professors who might be younger than me] so go ahead and be as gloomy as you want. We'll just make fun of your peculiar grooming habits and your malapropisms".

Robin Hanson today weighs in on the signalling of smiling, and it's funny that he of all people does so. Funny in the genuinely cheerful sort of funny, because Robin is among probably the top five happiest people I've ever met. He's unfailingly engaging and just plain cheerful. It's hard for me to picture what he looks like without a smile on his face. It kind of leads me to wonder about cultural development of signal control. Eastern cultures tend to value signal control much more highly than in the West, but what were the incentives that led to this sort of development? The Jared Diamond story of geography doesn't seem to fit, and there doesn't appear to be much reason to suspect an analog of cultural evolution at play. It has to be a Schelling point, but why select one particular equilibrium on one side of the Gobi and the other on the other?

Honest nonverbal communication is important under the condition that there is no common tongue. If I'm French and I meet a Romanian hunter in the woods, we might expect more honest outcomes if, in the absence of a common language, I were able to accurately read the other guy's intentions. In a homogeneous culture, say, the Imperial Court, I might obtain better breeding rights if I were able to snooker my peers and make them think I'm more temperate than I actually am.

Well, golly Wally. Maybe it is more of a Diamond story than I thought. The same rivers and mountains that made sure Europe would be fragmented linguistically and politically are those that gave rise to honesty in facial expressions and the wide-open plains in Central and Northern Asia that gave rise to vasty empires also spurred the closed face.

So don't tell me to smile. I'm practicing for my trip back in time to visit the Son of Heaven. Now if I could only remember where Rufus left that phone booth.

A Criticism of Coase

It was good timing that the day after we got to hear Coase's "The Problem of Social Cost," and two days after Judge Richard Posner was a guest on Econtalk, Pete Boettke draws attention to James Buchanan and his disbelief in the process of cost-benefit analysis in Law and Economics, especially when it comes to distribution of rights.

Buchanan's argument is made in a great 2005 article called "Cost, Choice and Catallaxy" (I hope the link works; otherwise you can just Google scholar it and it's on Google books). Before I present his argument, here's a nugget to chew on: "To cover costs and to maximize profits are essentially two ways of expressing the same phenomenon." (This is apparently from one of Coase's early articles.)

Buchanan and Coase agree on a whole lot; both think the reduction of transaction costs is valuable and neither believe in a zero-transaction cost world. Their disagreement comes from Coase being an 'objectivist' and Buchanan a 'subjectivist.' To Buchanan: "Coase is... an objectivist in the sense that, to him, 'efficiency' in resource use has an existential reality independent of the market exchange process." Basically, there exists efficiency outside of the subjective actors participating in exchange. On the other hand, Buchanan stipulates that we know trade results in a more efficient allocation of resources because we know that all voluntary trade is mutually beneficial - but we cannot say anything about transactions that do not take place. "Coase is able to place a positive value on the open trading process because it generates efficient results; I am able to place a positive value on the open trading process because only through such a process can we be assured that parties secure mutuality of gain." In the farmer-rancher example, we know that the outcome is efficient with the rancher paying the farmer for his damaged crop only because this transaction takes place. We cannot know how much the farmer values the non-addition of another steer if they don't trade; maybe the farmer would be willing to accept a payment to allow the steer, but he doesn't trust the rancher. This is a case where transaction costs can be lowered. Maybe he values his crop more than the added value of the steer. If the transaction costs cannot be lowered, no court can know if enforcing an agreement with these stipulations would be 'efficient.'

Or, in Buchanan's words "...the subjectivist cannot go beyond these limits [of mutual gains to trade] and discuss the prospective assignment of rights with a view towards minimizing transaction costs, even if possessed of an authority to do so." Or, "agreement remains the only test for efficiency."

There's a lot more in the essay; he doesn't just poke at Coase, he has a section where he posits a possible solution. And, of course, he agrees with Coase that we should kick poor old dead Pigou a few times for good measure. I think the most important aspect of this paper is that by using economic efficiency as a measuring stick for the law we're asking judges to be central planners, using information that they cannot possibly know to design efficient outcomes. We know how that usually turns out.

Thoughts? I came away from class yesterday thinking that cost-benefit analysis was a useful tool for the judiciary (though not to the monstrous level that Posner takes it) but I am now not so sure.