This is great, I’ve bookmarked it for future reference, thank you for doing the work of distilling all this.
I think Anders Sandberg’s grand futures might fit in under your last subsection. Long quote incoming (apologies in advance, it’s hard to summarize Sandberg):
Rob Wiblin: … What are some futures that you think could plausibly happen that are amazing from various different points of view?
Anders Sandberg: One amazing future is humanity gets its act together. It solves existential risk, develops molecular nanotechnology and atomically precise manufacturing, masters biotechnology, and turns itself sustainable: turns half of the planet into a wilderness preserve that can evolve on its own, keeping to the other half where you have high material standards in a totally sustainable way that can keep on going essentially as long as the biosphere is going. And long before that, of course, people starting to take steps to maintain the biosphere by putting up a solar shield, et cetera. And others, of course, go off — first settling the solar system, then other solar systems, then other galaxies — building this super-civilisation in the nearby part of the universe that can keep together against the expansion of the universe, while others go off to really far corners so you can be totally safe that intelligence and consciousness remains somewhere, and they might even try different social experiments.
That’s one future. That one keeps on going essentially as long as the stars are burning. And at that point, they need to turn to actually taking matter and putting it into the dark black hole accretion disks and extracting the energy and keep on going essentially up until the point where you get proton decay — which might be curtains, but this is something north of 1036 years. That’s a lot of future, most of it long after the stars had burned out. And most of the beings there are going to be utterly dissimilar to us.
But you could imagine another future: In the near future, we develop ways of doing brain emulation and we turn ourselves into a software species. Maybe not everybody; there are going to be stragglers who are going to maintain the biosphere on the Earth and going to be frowning at those crazies that in some sense committed suicide by becoming software. The software people are, of course, just going to be smiling at them, but thinking, “We’ve got the good deal. We got on this infinite space we can define endlessly.”
And quite soon they realise they need more compute, so they turn a few other planets of the solar system into computing centres. But much of a cultural development happens in the virtual space, and if that doesn’t need to expand too much, you might actually end up with a very small and portable humanity. I did a calculation some years ago that if you actually covered a part of the Sahara Desert with solar panels and use quantum dot cellular automaton computing, you could keep mankind in an uploaded form running there indefinitely, with a rather minimal impact on the biosphere. So in that case, maybe the future of humanity is instead going to be a little black square on a continent, and not making much fuss in the outside universe.
I hold that slightly unlikely, because sooner or later somebody’s going to say, “But what about space? What about just exploring that material world I heard so much about from Grandfather when he was talking? ‘In my youth, we were actually embodied.’” So I’m not certain this is a stable future.
The thing that interests me is that I like open-ended futures. I think it’s kind of worrisome if you come up with an idea of a future that is so perfected, but it requires that everybody do the same thing. That is pretty unlikely, given how we are organised as people right now, and systems that force us to do the same thing are terrifyingly dangerous. It might be a useful thing to have a singleton system that somehow keeps us from committing existential risk suicide, but if that impairs our autonomy, we might actually have lost quite a lot of value. It might still be worth it, but you need to think carefully about the tradeoff. And if its values are bad, even if it’s just subtly bad, that might mean that we lose most of the future.
I also think that there might be really weird futures that we can’t think well about. Right now we have certain things that we value and evaluate as important and good: we think about the good life, we think about pleasure, we think about justice. We have a whole set of things that are very dependent on our kind of brains. Those brains didn’t exist a few million years ago. You could make an argument that some higher apes actually have a bit of a primitive sense of justice. They get very annoyed when there is unfair treatment. But as you go back in time, you find simpler and simpler organisms and there is less and less of these moral values. There might still be pleasure and pain. So it might very well be that the fishes swimming around the oceans during the Silurian already had values and disvalues. But go back another few hundred million years and there might not even have been that. There was still life, which might have some intrinsic value, but much less of it.
Where I’m getting at with this is that value might have emerged in a stepwise way: We started with plasma near the Big Bang, and then eventually got systems that might have intrinsic value because of complex life, and then maybe systems that get intrinsic value because they have consciousness and qualia, and maybe another step where we get justice and thinking about moral stuff. Why does this process stop with us? It might very well be that there are more kinds of value waiting in the wings, so to say, if we get brains and systems that can handle them.
That would suggest that maybe in 100 million years we find the next level of value, and that’s actually way more important than the previous ones all taken together. And it might not end with that mysterious whatever value it is: there might be other things that are even more important waiting to be discovered. So this raises this disturbing question that we actually have no clue how the universe ought to be organised to maximise value or doing the right thing, whatever it is, because we might be too early on. We might be like a primordial slime thinking that photosynthesis is the biggest value there is, and totally unaware that there could be things like awareness.
Rob Wiblin: OK, so the first one there was a very big future, where humanity and its descendants go and grab a lot of matter and energy across the universe and survive for a very long time. So there’s the potential at least, with all of that energy, for a lot of beings to exist for a very long time and do all kinds of interesting stuff.
Then there’s the very modest future, where maybe we just try to keep our present population and we try to shrink our footprint as much as possible so that we’re interfering with nature or the rest of the universe as little as possible.
And then there’s this wildcard, which is maybe we discover that there are values that are totally beyond human comprehension, where we go and do something very strange that we don’t even have a name for at the moment.
This is great, I’ve bookmarked it for future reference, thank you for doing the work of distilling all this.
I think Anders Sandberg’s grand futures might fit in under your last subsection. Long quote incoming (apologies in advance, it’s hard to summarize Sandberg):