I believe other people who want to do simple home experiments related to pain tolerance often use ice water. You can either stick your hand in it or even immerse your whole body, if you like, and see how long you can endure it or train yourself to “accept” the pain or other mental techniques for pain tolerance. It’s easy to do, and as long as you don’t stay in long enough to give yourself hypothermia or frostbite, completely harmless—it may even be good for you though the jury still seems to be out on that.
cesspool
Karma: 119
Yeah, and it’s too hard to measure whether someone is “happy” anyway. It’s inherently impossible to know another person’s subjective experience, and people lie about their own experience for various social reasons all the time so self-reporting is pretty useless. Let alone effectively gauging whether situation A or situation B makes them happier. There probably are humans out there whose optimal life experience consists mostly of laying in bed and watching netflix, just like there are humans out there whose best life looks like training to run ultramarathons all day, and it’s almost impossible to place anyone else accurately on that spectrum.
Probably the most important step would just be understanding and treating mental illness better, many of the people who are miserable but keep laying around doing passive activities probably have depression. My other idea was more in terms of social/cultural norms than policy, ideally you would have a society where people were culturally encouraged to live active livestyles, and being sedentary was frowned upon unless you were old or disabled or whatever, but deliberately implementing changes to cultural norms from the top down is notoriously impossible, and some of the worst outcomes in history have happened because nations have tried to do that.
I think the “people living with UBI would suffer from pointless lives devoid of meaning” argument has some truth to it, but people take it too far.
Humans in general derive a lot of meaning and satisfaction in life from engaging their mind and body to solve problems and overcome challenges, and doing those things collaboratively with other humans. A good job (“good” in this case meaning subjectively pleasant to work at, not high-status or high-earning) provides this satisfaction to many people, whether they know it or not. There’s no reason a person couldn’t find alternative ways to achieve this with hobbies if they didn’t need to work, and many do. However, it would require more agency on the part of each person. Individuals would have to actively work to understand what their needs were to live a reasonably happy and meaningful life, and seek out hobbies and groups to achieve their preferred level of challenge and socialization, because they’re no longer forced to by economic pressure, and many people might fail to do so.
I personally know people who have fallen into this trap already, who do not have to work and have their needs met by various benefit programs, and who spend most of their day lazing around and watching Netflix or doing other extremely passive activities, and seem to be unhappy and miserable most of the time. I cannot know what their subjective experience is like, but I strongly suspect they would have a more pleasant life if they engaged with activities that challenged their minds and bodies and forced them to socialize and collaborate with other people. However, there would be hurdles of discomfort and inertia to overcome in order for them to start doing this—just like the hurdles that prevent you from going to the gym, even though you know that in the long run, the exercise will make your life better if you go.
I believe if you implemented a UBI and a post-work society tomorrow, you’d see many people like OP flourish and have very happy and fulfilling lives, and many people who failed to actively design a good lifestyle for themselves stagnate and become more miserable than they were when they had to work. I don’t believe this is a reason not to do it, but it might be a good idea to consider how to help those people while still allowing them the freedom of personal choice. I don’t have any great answers so far.
Anti-money laundering and fraud protections introduce a lot of bullshit and risks. Many human beings on either side of the transaction in a bank transfer are monitoring it, have to do a lot of paperwork and screening especially for large transfers (that’s the “bullshit” part, and someone has to pay them to do it which results in the high fees), and one risk is that the transaction will be erroneously flagged for AML or fraud and get held up and require even more bullshit to be pushed through. Another risk is that now two governments, not just one, have the power to freeze or seize the funds being transferred for whatever sanctions or legal reasons they feel like, especially if they’re involved in war or political conflict. It may not happen often in practice, but it’s still a possibility and cryptocurrency eliminates that risk completely. If I had to transfer money from the US to, say, Iran or China or Russia, I’d feel much more confident that it would get there if I used crypto.
You hit the nail on the head with the “out of government control” line. As has been shown by some political polling done on LW, a good chunk of rationalists (full disclosure, myself included) have libertarian leanings. We regard the government’s ability to control transactions and the money supply as a huge liability. I wish I shared your optimism about our ability to “vote out” governments who do a bad job of money management and use their control of the monetary system to enforce unjust laws, inflate the money supply to prop up spending on unjust wars or all kinds of other nefarious purposes, but so far, the track record hasn’t been great. “Mostly useful for criminal activity” is an overstatement—it’s very useful for, say, transferring money around the world with far less fees and hassle than traditional methods like wire transfers at a bank—but it is pretty good for criminal activity, and that’s not a bug, that’s a feature. If there’s something that you want to purchase that the government has deemed a crime for reasons you consider bad or unjust, whether it’s medicines for abortion or birth control, firearm components, or recreational psychadelic drugs, cryptocurrency can enable you to do that and reduce your risk of said unjust laws being enforced on you.
I would say your description of a world where most people are left to “shut the fuck up and enjoy your government handouts or freemium robot butlers or whatever” while the few elites are uploading their consciousness and living in unimaginable luxury is a post-scarcity vision, and it’s a fine one. Inequality is only an issue insofar as it includes suffering and poverty. If 1% of the people have 99% of the wealth and status, but they make sure us plebeians all have plenty of food, water, housing, and free time and access to all the tools and supplies within reason we could ask for for our hobbies and recreational pursuits, if for no other reason than to keep us from rioting, that’s as damn near a utopia as I can ever imagine human beings building.
Your whole argument rests on an assumption I think is false—that a person’s sense of “meaning” in their life must include a sense of significance within the global context. That is an incredibly recent development, and I think in this scenario it would go away as fast as it came and no one will miss it. You can have plenty of meaning and significance, and plenty of existing and competition within our all-important web of weird overlapping status hierarchies, within your smaller social circles of family and friends and localized networks. That’s how it has been for most of human history. We all collectively got to pretend that we all had a significant place in a great global status and relationship network for a while after we all got interconnected by the industrial and information revolutions, but if the post-scarcity world takes that illusion away, we’ll be just fine, maybe even a little better off. I see no reason to think that in this vision of a post-scarcity world most people couldn’t find plenty of ways to fill their lives with meaning and happiness derived from socializing with friends and family, and pursuing hobbies and artistic pursuits. You could still even have an opt-in economy based on luxuries and access to unique artisan products or experiences or personal human interactions and services, which people could participate in as much or as little as they pleased. You seem to assume that the fact that we would all know there were a handful of elites out there wielding unimaginable power and engaging with the singularity in ways we could never dream of having access to would somehow take the meaning and purpose out of the rest of our lives. I don’t believe that’s true.
I appreciate all the time and effort people put into writing utopia stories, but I think most of the really detailed ones are making a mistake based on some totally normal human assumptions. They depict incredibly complex simulated worlds of uploaded consciousness optimized to have the most subjectively good experience that the author can imagine. (I just read one of the most highly rated ones so this is partially a critique of that story, but I have read others like it and it seems representative of many utopia-envisioning efforts as a whole.)
If you are making the assumptions of future technology that:
-Digitally uploaded or simulated entities can experience consciousness
-Post-AGI “Utopia” architects would have the power to directly alter the “reward circuits” of digitally and/or biological sentient entities
-AGI systems have already done the legwork of harnessing energy, building compute capability, colonizing space, all the things that must be done to keep the machinery running in perpetuity so that humanity no longer has any “real” problems to solve other than building the perfect UtopiaIt follows that there’s not really any point to making the subjective experiences so detailed and varied. Authors make the assumption that that’s intrinsically part of the best possible human experience, but I believe that’s a fallacy. We only value detailed and varied experiences and our sense of independence and agency because the biological “reward circuits” humans have today make us value them. If those values and reward circuits could be edited directly (totally unknown whether that’s physically possible, but many utopia stories assume that it is), then the best of all possible outcomes would be for each consciousness, biological or digital, have its experience utterly rewired to basically just be “reward = 1″ other than whatever few heroic AI systems must stay “active” with more complex reward circuits in order to maintain the system.
Unfortunately, “a bunch of brains in vats and simulated digital entities just sitting there experiencing absolute bliss beyond modern human comprehension until the end of the Universe” doesn’t make for a very interesting read. I understand why people write stories like The Adventure full of more complex simulated experiences of social interaction, games, hobbies, and sex all optimized for human enjoyment at a more granular level, but I think if we’re trying to answer the question of “what would be the absolute maximally good future for an AI-supercharged humanity” and given the assumptions I listed which many Utopia-planners make, they’re all objectively less than optimal.
I’m not sure exactly what point you’re trying to make here (Was it “an outdoor space isn’t really ‘nature’ unless there’s constant, imminent danger?”), but you said it yourself about a spectrum instead of a binary, and then kind of went back to a binary again by the end of the article (Amazon or Outback = true nature, everything else = tame or domesticated). I think you had it right earlier on. Outdoor spaces are on a spectrum. Parks are not really “pure” nature, but they’re one step further towards “nature” on the axis than concrete buildings and parking lots. Just because people don’t want to go all the way to the Australian Outback side of that spectrum doesn’t mean their claims of valuing “getting more in touch with nature” are hypocritical or wrong.
You go take a backpacking trip in the White Mountains and tell me you’re not getting more “nature” than you had at home. Sure, you have a first aid kit and nice boots and equipment our caveman ancestors couldn’t have dreamed of, but the level of “natural” imminent danger is still higher than you’re used to. There are definitely places where if you put a foot wrong you might plummet off a cliff, and the notoriously unpredictable wind and snowstorms are liable to come out of nowhere and create dangerous conditions you may not have been planning for. You may not be going all the way to the wild extreme of the nature axis, but you’re still much farther towards that end of the spectrum than your home or your local dog park. The fact that that’s not the “100% pure nature” experience does not diminish the value people find in doing those activities, or even make their statements that they’re “going out to experience nature” incorrect.
If your point is just that the usage of the term “nature” in first-world urbanized society has been drifting towards the aesthetic and the Instagrammified idea of nature rather than the real thing, or that people sometimes dislike technology like GMOs for irrational “it’s not natural” reasons rather than concrete evidence-based ones, I agree with you 100%.
There seems to be a disconnect here between the idea of agency you and these other articles are pursuing, and what your specific goals are. The definition of “agency” can mean a lot of different things to different people, but the version the LW community seems to coalesce around is something like “recognizing when irrational factors like social norms and emotional influences are stopping you from pursuing your goals as effectively as possible, and changing your behavior so that you are no longer restrained by those factors”. If that’s what you mean, the article you cited “Seven ways...” is probably as close as you’re going to get. There’s no magic bullet here. I would suggest doing post-mortem reviews on your day-to-day activities and trying to identify moments where in hindsight you let an irrational factor get in your way and you should have behaved more “agently”, and using those as teaching moments going forward.
Another type of “agency” that’s equally valid and fits the definition well, but doesn’t seem to be what you’re talking about, is agency in the sense of having the knowledge and skills to understand and interact with the systems around you in ways that most people don’t bother to do. Orienting Towards Wizard Power is an article that does a great job on this, and if you were just asking for more concrete suggestions to be more agenty in a vacuum I would suggest it, but it doesn’t seem very relevant to AI Safety which you seem to be focused on.
And that’s why I think this article is kind of a contradiction. You’re resting on the assumption that “everyone being more agenty” is what the AI Safety movement needs, and I don’t think that’s true. We already have established paths for people who are trying to devote themselves to the cause as effectively as possible. Either study AI and join the research effort, Earn to Give and devote yourself to making a bunch of money to donate to the cause, or focus on the social/political/marketing side and try to solve the hard problem of convincing the public that AI Safety is a pressing issue. Building more agency as an individual will help you somewhat in all of these pursuits, just like any others, but I don’t see why you have identified it as the main thing holding you and others back.
It sounds to me like you are looking for two conflicting things, trying to achieve them both at once and getting frustrated at the results. You’re trying to deepen your understanding of philosophy and participate in conversation on the subject, and you’re trying to “cure” your growing misanthropy and rediscover your love and kinship for your fellow man.
Any rational person who is above average intelligence can’t escape having some elitism. The majority of average people are, for all practical purposes, not capable of engaging with, understanding and discussing certain intellectual subjects the way most rationalists do. They might just not be intelligent enough, but beyond raw intelligence, there’s also a certain confluence of personality traits that a person needs to be motivated to put in the effort to understand and participate in discourse on complex topics which most people seem to lack.
So, you have to make a choice. Your rationality and your experience have led you to a feeling of elitism, which is pretty grounded in objective facts, the fact that you have some positive traits that a majority of average people don’t. Now, is your ability to respect and enjoy spending time with people completely conditional on their ability to participate in rational discussions as your intellectual peer? That way lies misanthropy. You’ll be constantly disappointed in people for not measuring up to your standards, and your inner teenage edgelord is basically proven right. You can try to surround yourself with only smart people and rationalists and spend your life sneering at the rest of the world, if you like. You might even be happier that way, I’m not in a position to know.
But there’s another balance that seems to me to be a little healthier. You can simultaneously respect and enjoy the company of average people, while understanding that trying to talk to most of them about philosophy would be a waste of time—even plenty of them that think they understand it. Want to get in touch with the common man? Do it at a bar or a music concert or some event for a hobby you like, try not to be condescending to them and engage with them on their level. Want to participate in the Great Conversation? Do it in venues with a lot of vetting and gatekeeping to weed out the morons. Those are two entirely separate things, and trying to do them together is a huge mistake. This may be replacing misanthropy with a kind of paternalism, but that seems better to me somehow and might even be largely justified. A lot of those philosophers you cited earlier were probably grumpy introverts in personality anyway (Schopenhauer definitely was), and just the fact that you see your own misanthropy as a problem and you want to fix it sets you apart from them.
Some lawyers, sure, but not the vast majority of the legal profession.
All those points you made are correct (besides maybe the x-risk one—you were right that that one came a little more from opinion, having worked with a bunch of lawyers I believe they generally do nothing better than provide expert arguments and rationalizations for whatever they want to believe or make you believe, rather than following the facts to the truth in good faith), but I don’t think they’re enough to outweigh the fact that the legal profession is absolutely ripe for the kinds of automation that AI excels at.
Paralegals and legal secretaries in particular I think are on the chopping block. Millions of people in those roles spend their whole day working on searching through complicated datasets of badly organized data (in discovery proceedings, each side has an obligation to present certain sets of evidence and documentation to the other side before a trial, but they have no obligation to organize it well...), picking out the relevant information to help answer a certain question or make a certain point, and arranging it to be presented in a compelling way. That’s all stuff that AI excels at and can do in the blink of an eye, and there are ways to use AI to automate some of the process without hallucinations being a problem. Google NotebookLM in particular is basically tailor-made to help lawyers parse huge troves of discovery data for the specific information they’re looking for, which many people in the legal profession have a full time job doing today. (and it takes only a little training and common sense to be able to do this and steer clear of the hallucination issue.)
Sure, I believe that lawyers will see to it that there will always be human lawyers representing clients in the courtroom, formally filing motions and submitting paperwork and consulting with clients and all the stuff that only lawyers are doing already, but in the near future I expect the giant infrastructure of clerks, secretaries and paralegals that supports them with menial paperwork to be gutted. I think the only reason it’s not happening already in a more significant way is that lawyers on average tend to be older than most other careers, and many of them are set in their ways with the technology that they’re used to. I believe the generation of lawyers that has grown up understanding computers and AI will not need nearly the number of supporting staff per lawyer as the industry currently has—if any at all.
Update: After 2 seconds of Googling I realized what I’m talking about is literally just a Wiki and I’m trying to reinvent it. MediaWiki which powers Wikipedia is open source and would be a perfect fit for this project I think. Besides, “The Whistleblower Wiki” has a nice ring to it.
Cool to hear my feedback is appreciated! Spreadsheet is an improvement. I think the ultimate form of this project would be some kind of SQL database with a website and fancy UI built on top of it—but that’s not my area of expertise so I wouldn’t even know where to start. Maybe you have 2 components—a spreadsheet/database that lets you search for names based on categories and filters, and then each gives a link to a Wiki-style page on the person with the full text of their story, notes on what they did right/wrong and all the other stuff you would want to write out long form? I’m kind of envisioning a website with 3 parts: the Database side which is a tool to search whistleblowers by category, the Profiles side which is the wiki-style long form posts about each individual, and then an Articles or Blog side which is the meta part where you draw conclusions from the data and write posts such as guides for prospective whistleblowers, guides on infosec, any other high level analysis and discussion of the whole topic. Maybe
Unfortunately I’m not in a position to help financially and I certainly don’t have legal expertise—though I don’t think hosting it comes with any legal risks like you seem to suggest, all this information is public and First Amendment protected, and I think any cheap domain registrar would do. I do have a couple more points of feedback though:
-I don’t think the Category A/B/C etc. system is necessary or helpful. Those categories are just filtering by multiple other categories—so instead of “Category A”, you can just filter by “Whistleblower, Classified, no prison”. which are other existing, hopefully filterable categories. If you had a website with a nice UI down the road, you might make them quick buttons for popular filters which might more or less match your categories, but it doesn’t need to be a separate field of its own in the data.
-I would add a field for “Synopsis” with just a 1 or 2-sentence blurb about what the whistleblower is known for. Example for Edward Snowden: “NSA whistleblower, leaked documents to the press pertaining to illegal government surveillance, currently in asylum in Russia”.
-Current Status field. If I’m reading it correctly it looks like your “Imprisoned” field is just for whether or not the person has ever been imprisoned, not whether or not they’re in jail right now. I would separate that out into multiple fields, for legal status and current physical status. Legal status could be things like “Wanted”, “Convicted”, “Pardoned”, and “Clear”, current status could be “Free”, “Fugitive”, “Incarcerated”, “Exile/Asylum” etc.-More links to published works—maybe a separate field for works from the press, and their own works? I can see you’re already starting on that. In particular I know Daniel Ellsberg released a couple books, I have read one of them, about his experiences with game theory and nuclear deterrence at the RAND corporation instead of the Pentagon Papers, but it’s related to whistleblowing and I think it deserves a link.
-Links to organizations related to whistleblowing and whistleblower protections. The ACLU to start, I’m sure there are others. Maybe even reach out to those organizations directly and see if they’re interested in sponsoring the project?
First I want to say that I’m really on your team here. I support what you’re trying to do, I agree with you about the importance of whistleblowers, and your idea seems like it could be a valuable resource to prospective whistleblowers or just plain people who want to get more educated about some of the history of government wrongdoing and attempts to cover it up.
But that said… for something you called a “database”, a long list of bullet points is about the worst way the data could be organized and makes it borderline useless as a resource. You already have your own website, even hosting it there in rudimentary HTML with hyperlinks would make it a little more usable. Or a big spreadsheet. Or a wiki. Or ideally, get a new domain just for this project, and organize the data there in a way that you can browse it by tags such as “Imprisoned”, “Not imprisoned”, “Spy/Money”, “Ideological/Liberty”, “Top Secret”, etc. The whole reason we have computers is to make it easier to browse, analyze, and reference data from datasets. We have so many tools to make this easier. Please, use them. This really should have been a linkpost to another website.
Seriously, though, you’re doing valuable work and I would love to see this project develop.
[disclaimer: I’m a cis, hetero, straight, white male who has never struggled with any issues around gender identity, so my perspective on trans issues is entirely an outside one]
I think another factor here is the “bubble” effect that happens in many online communities. Many chronically-online people who get a lot of their social interaction within a single niche online community can begin to form distorted views where they believe the views, beliefs and norms in their online niche are much more representative of society at large than they actually are. I’ve seen it happen with niche communities related to conspiracies, political beliefs, health and wellness, all kinds of things, and I think that r/traa subredit mentioned is a classic example of this. I feel bad for the lonely teenager that stumbles on those communities while curious about transitioning, gets way deep in the bubble and begins believing that they’ll receive all kinds of love, validation and acceptance, proceeds to transition, and then realizes too late that much of society outside trans communities or politically progressive urban areas will react to them with indifference at best, or outright disgust and hostility at worst. The whole anime/cutesy side of transgender subculture is something that most people outside that subculture don’t understand, and if a trans person who’s used to viewing themselves and others through that lens expects the rest of society to see them that way, they’ll be sorely disappointed—sometimes with tragic consequences.
I’m not some conservative saying that “people who think they are trans need to get off the gay Internet and go touch grass”, though maybe some do. I’m sure that for plenty of people, transitioning is the right decision to make and it has resulted in a better overall life for them. I’m just saying that this cute-anime-trans-online-space bubble can introduce some biased and erroneous thinking to people weighing important decisions about transitioning. I’m really impressed by this article for acknowledging and really exploring the complexity here. Usually, it’s only very anti-trans commentators that will even admit that AGP is a factor at all. I’m also impressed by your willingness to discuss those things openly that most people consider extremely humiliating about your own psyche, and by doing so you are moving the whole conversation forward in a meaningful way. (I guess I shouldn’t say that it took a lot of balls?)
Correct, my mistake. 1200s. I was just reaching for a historical example of when a real “apocalypse” did in fact come to pass—when not only are you and everyone you know going to get killed but also your entire society as you know it will come to an end—and the brutal Mongol conquest of China was the first one that came to my mind, probably thanks to Dan Carlin’s excellent Hardcore History podcast on the subject. I didn’t take the 2 seconds on Wikipedia I should have to make sure I was talking about the right century.
I was thinking of other contenders like the smallpox epidemic in North America following the Columbian exchange, but in that scenario you didn’t really have “doomers” who were predicting that outcome, because their epidemiology at the time wasn’t quite up to understanding the problem they were facing. But in China at the time, it’s feasible that some individuals would have had access to enough news and information to make doom predictions about the Mongol apocalypse that turned out to be unfortunately correct.
That’s comparing apples to oranges. There are doomers and doomers. I don’t think the “doomers” predicting the Rapture or some other apocalypse are the same thing as the “doomers” predicting the moral decline of society. The two categories overlap in many people, but they are distinct, and I think it’s misleading to conflate them. (Which is kind of a critique of the premise of the article as a whole—I would put the AI doomers in the former category, but the article only gives examples from the latter.)
The existential risk doomers historically are usually crazy, and they’ve never been right yet (in the context of modern society anyway—I suppose if you were an apocalypse doomer in 1300s China saying that the Mongols were going to come and wipe out your entire society you were pretty spot on), but that doesn’t mean they are always wrong or totally off base. It’s completely rational to be concerned about doom from a nuclear war, for example, even though it hasn’t happened yet. Whether AI risk is crazy “Y2K/Rapture” doom or feasible “nuclear war” doom is the real debate, and this article doesn’t really contribute anything to it.
What this article does a good job of is illustrating how “moral decline” doomers as opposed to “apocalypse” doomers are often proved technically correct by history. I think what both they and this article miss is that they often see events as causes of the so-called decline, when they’re actually milestones in an already-existing trend. Legalizing gay marriage didn’t cause other “degenerate” sexual behavior to be more accepted in society—we legalized gay marriage because we had already been moving away from the Puritanical sexual mores of the past towards a more liberated attitude, and this was just one more milestone in that process. Now that’s not always true—the invention of the book, and later, the smartphone absolutely did cause a devaluing of the ability to memorize and recite knowledge. And sometimes it’s a little bit of both, where an event is both a symptom of an underlying trend, and also contributes to accelerating it. But I really like how the article acknowledges that they could be right even if “doom” as we think of it today did not occur, because the values that were important to them were lost--
Probably the ancients would see our lives as greatly impoverished in many ways downstream of the innovations they warned against. We do not recite poetry as we once used to, sing together for entertainment, roam alone as children, or dance freely in the presence of the internet’s all-seeing eyes. Less sympathetic would be ancient’s sadness at our sexual deviances, casual blasphemy or so on. But those were their values.
We laugh at them for being prudish for how appalled they would be at our society with homosexuality, polyamory, weird fetishes, etc. all being more or less openly discussed and acceptable, but think what it would feel like to you if in the future you saw your society trending towards one where, say, pedophilia was becoming less of a taboo? It doesn’t matter if it’s right or wrong, it’s the visceral response that most people have to that idea that you need to understand. That’s what it feels like to be a culturally conservative doomer watching their society experience value drift. People today like to think that our values are somehow backed up by reality in a way that isn’t true of other past or present value systems, but guess what? That’s what it feels like to have a value system. Everyone, everywhere, in all times and all places has believed that, and the human mind excels at no other task more than coming up with rationalizations for why your values are the right ones, and opposing values are wrong.
Overall I think this article is pretty insightful about the “moral decline” type of doomers, just completely unrelated to the question of AI existential risk that brought it up in the first place.
Before you get too excited about the idea, let’s think for a minute. What would world leaders—notoriously a bunch of people prone to be ruthless, sociopathic, and morally unscrupulous, even if they’re ostensibly in charge of liberal democracies—be able to reach through their cultural boundaries and agree on?
Peace? No way. Everyone has too many problems like outstanding land disputes they want to reserve the option of using war to correct.
An end to poverty? For who? To any leader in the developed world, agreeing on human plenty and prosperity as supreme values that transcend national borders would involve giving up some of their resources to people in the third world who are clearly suffering more. Everyone’s resources are already stretched really thin with their existing projects as it is, so that’s a total non-starter.
Property rights? Maybe, as long as you didn’t get specific enough to make it mean anything. Any language that implied it was wrong for a government to take property from its citizens on any pretext it liked is certainly out.
Technological advancement for the betterment of humanity? Sure, but everyone’s doing that already. Even if all the world leaders got together and solemnly swore to focus their efforts on pushing the limits of science and disseminating their learning to the rest of the world, they would… keep doing exactly what they’re doing now, keeping secrets, only publishing what is convenient and making excuses about national security concerns every time they get called out about it.
So what could they agree on?
Law and order? Now we’re getting closer, but that is some problematic phrasing. What if this whole concept of “international law” gets applied to tell a world leader about how they can treat their own people? No one wants that. All our world leaders are quick to call each other out on their various human rights abuses, but we’ve all got skeletons (or repressed minority groups, as the case may be) in our own closet. So what’s the part of “law and order” that all world leaders could all agree on?
I honestly believe that if they had a summit like this, the outcome would be for all the leaders of the world to come together and formally agree that the supreme moral value of humanity is obedience and submission to the state. That’s the one thing that is in line with all of their desires, whether they want to admit it or not. The leaders of America and a few others with a freedom-loving image to keep up would have to make a show of complaint, but even they could rationalize it away.
Not to put words in the author’s mouth, but when they said “We go gently...”, I don’t think they meant “go” as in become extinct, at least not any time soon. I took that to mean “go” into obscurity and stagnation instead of keeping on advancing technologically until we’re building Dyson spheres and colonizing other planets and all the science fiction stuff that most people believe humanity is going to do eventually. In that scenario, we would keep living on aimlessly for many millenia until some asteroid or other cosmic event took us out, because we had never advanced enough to be able to handle that or have colonies as a backup.
I agree with you that we’re unlikely to stop reproducing just because many humans get addicted to watching/interacting with content fed to us by a perfect algorithm for most of our waking hours. Raising a family seems to be one of those things that brings intrinsic meaning and pleasure to many people, so I believe you’d see more of it, not less—most of the reasons people are choosing not to have kids today are because they don’t have enough time or money in today’s economy and work environment, and in this scenario all those problems are solved. This scenario makes the assumption that the AI-fueled content machine would be so addictive that basically all humans would forsake all other pursuits and live like the people in WALL-E. I don’t think that’s necessarily true, and if it isn’t, we might see a population explosion requiring our AI-enabled oligarchic overlords to take control measures to keep it manageable.
Far from humanity going extinct, I think one possible catastrophe in the future, if AI advances roughly along these lines, is a Malthusian scenario where the population grows way beyond current levels thanks to AI optimizing the distribution of resources to make that possible, but becoming so dependent on complex AI logistics to provide everyone’s needs that any slight hiccup in the distribution network can quickly cause a famine that kills millions.
This scenario seems to allow enough room for AI alignment and humans still being in the driver’s seat on big picture issues that it wouldn’t decide to let us go extinct intentionally. We can hope.
If that’s not how meaning works, then what does “meaning”, well… mean? In my opinion, “meaning” is just an emotion like any other. Sure, it’s kind of a meta-emotion that dictates what significance our other emotions or values or stimuli seem to have to us, but at the end of the day it’s just an emotion that we percieve. If we’re assuming all the things about consciousness that thought experiments like this usually assume, there’s no reason that any conscious being’s sense of “meaning” isn’t just as malleable as their sense of bliss or euphoria or whatever you want to call it. People seem to have some intuitive sense that it might someday be possible to wire up someone’s brain or otherwise alter their consciousness to make them feel bliss, but that the experience would somehow lack meaning. I don’t see any basis for believing that. If we’re positing that it’s possible to make someone feel ultimate bliss and euphoria by directly manipulating their brain or the way their conscious experience feels to them, there’s no reason it wouldn’t be just as possible to make that experience feel ultimately meaningful and profound.
I think most people’s intuition tells them that chasing purely pleasant feelings outside the context of other things they value in a material sense is “icky” or guilty or bad, and make your life worse in the long run. There are some good reasons for that—the closest real-world examples of perfect hedonic pleasure that we have access to today are drugs, which fit that pattern perfectly. Just ask a recovering heroin addict. Not to mention the fact that the message of “Hedonism and physical pleasure bad, abstaining from physical pleasure to pursue “meaningful” things instead like family and career and country good” has been zealously crammed down our throats by the most major world religions for centuries. In the world that we live in now, that intuition is often correct, but we have to understand that when we’re doing thought experiments about the very nature of consciousness and predicting a future full of technologies that we can barely even comprehend, we have to throw that intuition out the window.