Slightly pedantic note but shouldn’t the metaculus gwp question be phrased as the world gwp in our lightcone? We can’t reach most of the universe so unless I’m misunderstanding this would become a question of aliens and stuff that is completely unrelated/out of the control to/of humans.
Also somewhat confused what money even means, when you have complete control of all the matter in the universe. Is the idea trying to translate our levels of production into what they would be valued at today? Do people today value billions of sentient digital minds? Not saying this isn’t useful to think about but just trying to wrap
My head around it.
Good questions. Re the first, from memory I believe I required that the economic activity be causually the result of Earth’s economy today, so that rules out alien economys from consideration.
Re the second, I think it’s complicated and the notion of gross product may break down at some point. I don’t have some very clear answer for you other than that I could think of no better metric to measure the size of the future economy’s output than GWP. (I’m not an economist.)
Robin Hanson’s post “The Limits of Growth” may be useful for understanding how to compare potential future economies of immense size to today’s economy. IIRC he makes comparisons using consumers today having some small probability of achieving something that could be had in the very large future economy. (He’s an economist. In short, I’d ask the economists for help with interpreting what GWP in far-future contexts over me.)
Slightly pedantic note but shouldn’t the metaculus gwp question be phrased as the world gwp in our lightcone? We can’t reach most of the universe so unless I’m misunderstanding this would become a question of aliens and stuff that is completely unrelated/out of the control to/of humans.
Also somewhat confused what money even means, when you have complete control of all the matter in the universe. Is the idea trying to translate our levels of production into what they would be valued at today? Do people today value billions of sentient digital minds? Not saying this isn’t useful to think about but just trying to wrap My head around it.
Good questions. Re the first, from memory I believe I required that the economic activity be causually the result of Earth’s economy today, so that rules out alien economys from consideration.
Re the second, I think it’s complicated and the notion of gross product may break down at some point. I don’t have some very clear answer for you other than that I could think of no better metric to measure the size of the future economy’s output than GWP. (I’m not an economist.)
Robin Hanson’s post “The Limits of Growth” may be useful for understanding how to compare potential future economies of immense size to today’s economy. IIRC he makes comparisons using consumers today having some small probability of achieving something that could be had in the very large future economy. (He’s an economist. In short, I’d ask the economists for help with interpreting what GWP in far-future contexts over me.)