I think a similar attitude of pessimism persists today due to lack of legible paradigm shifts in several major fields:
physics: the standard model keeps fending off all challenges
medicine: biology is hard; we face big combinatorial explosions in many of the search spaces
materials science: although there is progress in exotic materials, very few make the transition to being scalably useful to build cool stuff we couldn’t before. Instead we get mostly incremental improvements in specific dimensions. Also a big combinatorial explosion search space.
politics/coordination: Arrow’s impossibility theorem and various game theoretic tools have shown our representational schemes for aggrageting messy preferences to have some unfortunate difficulties
philosophy of science: hasn’t recovered from Kuhn’s critique and the failure of the Vienna circle’s approaches to find a new formalism that improves the actual practice of science.
math: math exists in dialectic with cutting edge applications (despite strenuously objecting to this) and the lack of progress in the others has likely contributed to the stagnant theorem proving regime we find ourselves in
AI: with the death* of GOFAI we are relegated to competing to see who can figure out how to copy existing innovations (biological brains) fastest. This isn’t all that inspiring in the grander scheme of things. Is the best we can imagine an AI to do the thinking for us?
I don’t think doom and gloom inclined metaphysics are all that surprising given this state of affairs. I think it’s worth pushing back hard against this. What if huge innovations are still hanging out in plain sight? What if the penicillin of mental health exists? What if a heuristic as important as natural selection is waiting for the right person to come along to articulate it? What if coordination problems have enormous breakthrough potential such that once people have the right set of simple as-yet undiscovered ideas a level of coordination is possible that is scarcely imaginable at present, in the same way that the global coordination that modern finance make possible would have been unimaginable in a mercantilist world?
Obviously, given that I work with Qualia Research Institute, I think major breakthroughs in consciousness research are one such possibility in this space. I imagine a world in which huge insights into phenomenology (beyond recapitulating Buddhism or just understanding psychedelics) cause it to take its place next to things like the scientific method or rule of law or information theory as a set of heuristics that enable a civilization worth living in. But there is a wide open field for other approaches too.
“If a problem seems hard, the formulation is probably wrong.” -David Chapman
I think big, new syntheses are coming. There is more than one Bitcoin (cryptography, finance, game theory) like thing on the horizon and I don’t think they’ll be exclusively AI related or enabled.
I invite you to imagine that you live in a civilization that has barely scratched the surface, yet promotes pessimism as a coping strategy for those who don’t feel they can contribute to the Main Plotline.
I think a similar attitude of pessimism persists today due to lack of legible paradigm shifts in several major fields:
physics: the standard model keeps fending off all challenges
medicine: biology is hard; we face big combinatorial explosions in many of the search spaces
materials science: although there is progress in exotic materials, very few make the transition to being scalably useful to build cool stuff we couldn’t before. Instead we get mostly incremental improvements in specific dimensions. Also a big combinatorial explosion search space.
politics/coordination: Arrow’s impossibility theorem and various game theoretic tools have shown our representational schemes for aggrageting messy preferences to have some unfortunate difficulties
philosophy of science: hasn’t recovered from Kuhn’s critique and the failure of the Vienna circle’s approaches to find a new formalism that improves the actual practice of science.
math: math exists in dialectic with cutting edge applications (despite strenuously objecting to this) and the lack of progress in the others has likely contributed to the stagnant theorem proving regime we find ourselves in
AI: with the death* of GOFAI we are relegated to competing to see who can figure out how to copy existing innovations (biological brains) fastest. This isn’t all that inspiring in the grander scheme of things. Is the best we can imagine an AI to do the thinking for us?
I don’t think doom and gloom inclined metaphysics are all that surprising given this state of affairs. I think it’s worth pushing back hard against this. What if huge innovations are still hanging out in plain sight? What if the penicillin of mental health exists? What if a heuristic as important as natural selection is waiting for the right person to come along to articulate it? What if coordination problems have enormous breakthrough potential such that once people have the right set of simple as-yet undiscovered ideas a level of coordination is possible that is scarcely imaginable at present, in the same way that the global coordination that modern finance make possible would have been unimaginable in a mercantilist world?
Obviously, given that I work with Qualia Research Institute, I think major breakthroughs in consciousness research are one such possibility in this space. I imagine a world in which huge insights into phenomenology (beyond recapitulating Buddhism or just understanding psychedelics) cause it to take its place next to things like the scientific method or rule of law or information theory as a set of heuristics that enable a civilization worth living in. But there is a wide open field for other approaches too.
“If a problem seems hard, the formulation is probably wrong.” -David Chapman
I think big, new syntheses are coming. There is more than one Bitcoin (cryptography, finance, game theory) like thing on the horizon and I don’t think they’ll be exclusively AI related or enabled.
I invite you to imagine that you live in a civilization that has barely scratched the surface, yet promotes pessimism as a coping strategy for those who don’t feel they can contribute to the Main Plotline.