Don’t read this until you’ve listened to chapter 9. Here be spoilers.

We’ve been inundated with people talking about AI, arguing about whether or not we can call it artificial general intelligence yet. In 1980, just before the IBM PC was released, a guy named John Searle published Chinese Room Argument. The gist is that you have a guy in a room with a book full of rules, and people pass paper with Chinese writing under the door. He doesn’t speak or read Chinese, but he can look through the rules and figure out which Chinese characters to pass back as a response. Today, this is vaguely analogous to ChatGPT.

Does he understand Chinese? Does the rule book? Is the rule book better categorized as a comprehension? Don’t try to answer this here. It’s a thought experiment, posed entirely for the purpose of bringing up questions for people to discuss.

Some people, when asked what they think about it, will respond, “That’s a stupid idea.” I think that this is a cognitive dissonance reaction, but can’t tell because that kind of person bristles at the thought of self-analysis.

The life-year as a monetary unit is one of those thought experiments. The premise is that you calculate what it costs to keep a human alive for a year, and then peg your monetary unit to that value. This gives you a dollar that is 100% inflation-proof, but the important part is where you realize that you can start thinking of how much things cost in terms of how much life is consumed in order to create them.

The first issue that comes up is “how do you adjust for quality of living between different cities.” We currently have that problem in the US, when remote workers in Hickory, NC take remote jobs posted in Los Angeles. They deal with this in one of two ways. Either they adjust the pay scale for where you’re living (very unpopular), or it pours money into the underprivileged areas, equalizing the cost of living between geographical areas (also unpopular).

It further complicates matters when the underprivileged areas that you’re improving the quality of living for are in India or Mauritius. The idea of raising the quality of life for people in other countries is like poking a hornet’s nest. This is the kind of conversation that you can’t have in polite society because people don’t want to admit why they are opposed to it. It gets even worse when you ask if the same factors apply to Hickory, NC.

I had to think a lot about how a life-year converts to US dollars. I started with a living wage, but that’s adjusted based on how many people you are supporting and the city you’re living in. Given the variation between regions and the reality that each working person supports around 1.65 lives, I decided to run with US$40,000 for the year 2020. That’s a nice, round number that describes roughly what it takes to feed, clothe, house, keep healthy, and transport 1.65 people.

The thing that most appeals to me about the l-y is that, when you start thinking in those terms, it gives perspective to the cost/value of what we pay for things. Converting a life-year to US standards, you have to start with a living wage. A typical new sedan costs one to two life-years and is paid for across five years, creating a .2 life-year per year (LYy) drain on a person’s resources. The median 30 year mortgage generates a .86 LYy drain.

Things get even more entertaining when you talk about big items. The current US federal budget is $6.2 trillion. When numbers get that big, it can be hard to think in those terms, but it we can think about it spending .46 LY per person. The world’s biggest toy, Jeff Bezos’s yacht, reportedly cost only 12,500 LY. Imagine one person working on a boat for twelve thousand years. Noah would be proud, having only lived to 950.

I could go on, but this is a thought experiment. It wouldn’t be a very good thought experiment if I could describe all of the facets in a blog post.