I agree that this is worrisome, but on the other hand, when I imagine a future where I’m memetically trapped into only ever consuming the future AI-generated versions of LessWrong and glowfic and ACX and The Precipice, and only ever attending the future AI-generated versions of LessOnline and Manifest and ratsphere Bay Area House Parties, and my children only ever meeting other children from the local ratsphere homeschooling collective, that’s....not the worst outcome?
Don’t get me wrong, in and of itself it seems like bad news for epistemics, there’s a reason we have tried to avoid going full cult, but almost all futures that I can realistically imagine seem worse than that.
Are you imagining a basically transhumanist future where people have radical longevity and other such boons, but they happen to be trapped within a particular culture (whether that happens to be Christian homeschooling or Bay Area rationalism)? Or could this also be a world where people live lives with a brevity and hazardousness comparable to historic human experience, and in which, in addition, their culture has an unnatural stability maintained by AI working in the background?
I agree that this is worrisome, but on the other hand, when I imagine a future where I’m memetically trapped into only ever consuming the future AI-generated versions of LessWrong and glowfic and ACX and The Precipice, and only ever attending the future AI-generated versions of LessOnline and Manifest and ratsphere Bay Area House Parties, and my children only ever meeting other children from the local ratsphere homeschooling collective, that’s....not the worst outcome?
Don’t get me wrong, in and of itself it seems like bad news for epistemics, there’s a reason we have tried to avoid going full cult, but almost all futures that I can realistically imagine seem worse than that.
Are you imagining a basically transhumanist future where people have radical longevity and other such boons, but they happen to be trapped within a particular culture (whether that happens to be Christian homeschooling or Bay Area rationalism)? Or could this also be a world where people live lives with a brevity and hazardousness comparable to historic human experience, and in which, in addition, their culture has an unnatural stability maintained by AI working in the background?