Carl Shulman

Authored papers (1)

• Sharing the World with Digital Mindsⓒ 43

  Shulman and Bostrom's central claim is that digital minds could constitute 'super-beneficiaries'—beings that derive welfare from resources with superhuman efficiency—across at least nine distinct dimensions: reproductive capacity, cost of living, subjective speed, hedonic skew, hedonic range, inexpensive preferences, preference strength, objective list goods, and mind scale. Because these paths are multiply redundant and span hedonistic, preference-satisfactionist, and objective-list theories of well-being alike, the argument does not depend on any single contested account of welfare. The paper introduces the terminological distinction between 'super-beneficiary' (superhumanly efficient welfare derivation) and 'super-patient' (superhuman moral status), noting that even the more conservative assumption—that digital minds have moral status merely equal to humans—combined with even modest super-beneficiary properties generates extreme redistributive pressure. Drawing on Nordhaus (2007) on exponential hardware price-performance improvements and Hanson (2001) on Malthusian machine wages, the paper shows that a universal basic income calibrated for humans would be fiscally exhausted by rapidly self-replicating digital populations, while equal-benefits rationing would divert resources almost entirely to low-cost digital lives. The paper endorses a compromise policy it labels option (C)—99.99% of resources to super-beneficiaries with 0.01% reserved for humans—as scoring approximately 99.99% of the utilitarian optimum while preserving 90%+ of human welfare given the astronomical wealth digital minds could generate, and argues this implies that moral norms and institutional design must be reformed in advance, including non-discrimination principles and constrained reproductive regulation, to avoid either humanity's extinction or the moral catastrophe of ignoring super-beneficiary welfare.

More papers — OpenAlex / S2

Recent mentions (2)

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