In footnote 14 you say: “It has also been suggested (Sandberg et al 2016, Ord 2021) that the ultimate physical limits may be set by a civilisation that expands to secure resources but doesn’t use them to create value until much later on, when the energy can be used more efficiently. If so, one could tweak the framework to model this not as a flow of intrinsic value over time, but a flow of new resources which can eventually be used to create value.”
This feels to me that it would really be changing the framework considerably, rather than just a “tweak”.
For example, consider a “speed up” with an endogenous end time. On the original model, this decreases total value (assuming the future is overall good). But if we’re talking about gaining a pot of fixed resources, speeding up progress forever doesn’t change total value.
You may be right that this is more than a ‘tweak’. What I was trying to imply is that the framework is not wildly different. You still have graphs, integrals over time, decomposition into similar variables etc — but they can behave somewhat differently. In this case, the resources approach is tracking what matters (according to the cited papers) faithfully until expansion has ended, but then is indifferent to what happens after that, which is a bit of an oversimplification and could cause problems.
I like your example of speed-up in this context of large-scale interstellar settlement, as it also brings another issue into sharp relief. Whether thinking in terms of my standard framework or the ‘tweaked’ one, you are only going to be able to get a pure speed-up if you increase the travel speed too. So simply increasing the rate of technological (or social) progress won’t constitute a speed-up. This happens because in this future, progress ceases to be the main factor setting the rate at which value accrues.
Flow vs fixed resources
In footnote 14 you say: “It has also been suggested (Sandberg et al 2016, Ord 2021) that the ultimate physical limits may be set by a civilisation that expands to secure resources but doesn’t use them to create value until much later on, when the energy can be used more efficiently. If so, one could tweak the framework to model this not as a flow of intrinsic value over time, but a flow of new resources which can eventually be used to create value.”
This feels to me that it would really be changing the framework considerably, rather than just a “tweak”.
For example, consider a “speed up” with an endogenous end time. On the original model, this decreases total value (assuming the future is overall good). But if we’re talking about gaining a pot of fixed resources, speeding up progress forever doesn’t change total value.
You may be right that this is more than a ‘tweak’. What I was trying to imply is that the framework is not wildly different. You still have graphs, integrals over time, decomposition into similar variables etc — but they can behave somewhat differently. In this case, the resources approach is tracking what matters (according to the cited papers) faithfully until expansion has ended, but then is indifferent to what happens after that, which is a bit of an oversimplification and could cause problems.
I like your example of speed-up in this context of large-scale interstellar settlement, as it also brings another issue into sharp relief. Whether thinking in terms of my standard framework or the ‘tweaked’ one, you are only going to be able to get a pure speed-up if you increase the travel speed too. So simply increasing the rate of technological (or social) progress won’t constitute a speed-up. This happens because in this future, progress ceases to be the main factor setting the rate at which value accrues.