With AGI we might have enormous control over our psychology, but on the other hand I suspect meddling with our psychology is one of the riskiest things we can do as a species.
There is no safe default option here. You can’t not meddle with human psychology if you were to extend human lifespan radically. “Default” isn’t even pointing to any place in the territory, never mind the right place.
But even under the vague, undefined, intuitive notion of “making us immortal without meddling with our psychology”, it should be obvious that strong safeguards must be in place in order to prevent our preferences and behaviors from sliding down some irreversible slippery slope. I mean, just how likely is it that you would never encounter a streak of depression that leads to suicide over a billion years, by default?
I think it’s a big mistake to model how our preferences will evolve over cosmic timescales using experience from normal life, culture and society. There are innumerable feedback loops and traps and subtle forces that are completely unnoticeable in a normal lifespan but would drive us into some really weird, terrible corners of states of being that current us wouldn’t approve of upon reflection.
There is no safe default option here. You can’t not meddle with human psychology if you were to extend human lifespan radically. “Default” isn’t even pointing to any place in the territory, never mind the right place.
But even under the vague, undefined, intuitive notion of “making us immortal without meddling with our psychology”, it should be obvious that strong safeguards must be in place in order to prevent our preferences and behaviors from sliding down some irreversible slippery slope. I mean, just how likely is it that you would never encounter a streak of depression that leads to suicide over a billion years, by default?
I think it’s a big mistake to model how our preferences will evolve over cosmic timescales using experience from normal life, culture and society. There are innumerable feedback loops and traps and subtle forces that are completely unnoticeable in a normal lifespan but would drive us into some really weird, terrible corners of states of being that current us wouldn’t approve of upon reflection.