My take on some of the items on this list:
Lack of Intelligence: Very likely
Slow take-off AI: Very Likely
Self-Supervised Learning AI: Likely
Bounded Intelligence AI: Likely
Far far away AI: Likely
Personal Assistant AI: close to 100% certain.
Oracle AI: Likely
Sandboxed Virtual World AI: likely
The Age of Em: Borderline Certain
Multipolar Cohabition: borderline certain
Neuralink AI: borderline certain
Human Simulation AI: likely
Virtual zoo-keeper AI: likely
Coherent Extrapolated Volition AI: likely
Partly aligned AI: Very likely
Transparent Corrigible AI: Borderline certain.
In total, I think the most probable scenario is a very, very slow take-off, not a Singularity, because AGI would be hampered by Lack of Intelligence, slowed down by countless corrections, sandboxing and ubiquity of LAI. In effect, by the time we have something approaching true AGI, we would long be a culture of cyborgs and LAIs, and the arrival of AGI will be less of a Singularity, but a fuzzy pinnacle of a long, hard, bumpy and mostly uneventful process.
In fact, I would claim that we will never be at a point where we can agree: “yep, AGI is finally achieved.” I rather envision us tinkering with AI, making in painstakingly more powerful and efficient, with tiny incremental steps, until we are content that it is “eh, this Artificial Intelligence is General enough, I guess.”
In my view, the true danger does not come from achieving AGI and it turning on us, but rather achieving stupid, buggy yet powerful LAI, giving it too much access, and having it do something that triggers a global catastrophe by accident, not out of conscious malice.
Its less “Superhuman Intelligence got access to the nuclear codes and decided to wipe us out” but, “Dumb as a brick LAI got access to the nuclear codes and wiped us out due to a simple coding error”.
Going Durden
One problem I see with your insect alien example, which also, in a much greater way, influences human attractiveness, is that there are not just four, or five, or a dozen of physical attractiveness factors, but hundreds of them. And each of these factors influences other factors in different ways, for example:
height on a man is considered attractive
low body fat on a man is considered attractive, but;
a combination of too much height and too little body fat would be unattractive.
My take is there are hundreds, even thousands of traits that fall under “Flawlessness” but they play very weirdly against each other, and thus Appeal is born; a personal subconscious opinion on what sets of traits one likes most.
What is also missing from your analysis, is Beauty-Appeal Vs Sex-Appeal. Some traits trigger our aesthetic appreciation, and some trigger our raw sexual appetite, and not only are these not the same traits, but sometimes opposite ones.
I would define Sex-Appeal as a set of traits, physical and behavioral, that make the person seem:relatively easy to seduce (for me), also known as DTF (down to fuck)
suggesting they would be good at sex
suggesting their body would feel nice to touch
vaguely related to strong Secondary Sexual Characteristics
Meanwhile, Beauty-Appeal are sets of purely aesthetic Flawlessness traits, that do not correspond to the above points at all, but show symmetry, golden ratio, aesthetically striking color palette etc. The make a person a perfect model, someone you would love to take pictures of, paint or draw, rather than get raunchy with.
I would even take it further, many of the Beauty-Appeal traits take away from Sex-Appeal, because some of them are signifiers of innocence, youth, or vaguely stand-offish perfection, that make the person seem like they would not be DTF. We subconsciously disengage from thoughts about having sex with such a person, regardless whether or not these traits truly signify their DTF.
Some examples:
Melodic, high female voice: beautyraspy, low pitched female voice: sexy
Flawless skin: beautyTattoos and “cool” scars: sexy
hairless male chest: beautyhirsute male chest: sexy
perfectly sized medium breasts: beautyoversized breast: sexy
what Im getting at, is that while the evidence for oldest agriculture is from around 12k-10k, this is not the same as saying that your particular ancestors come from a line that used agriculture for solid 10k years straight (unless you are from very specific Anatolian or Iraq genetic lines).
It could easily be the case that your ancestors had been eating grain and dairy for 500 generations, or maybe just 10 generations or less.
One example of what Im talking about is lactose tolerance which allows one to consume dairy. It is a mutation that is only roughly 8k years old, and thats only if you are of Anatolian/Turkish ancestry.
Another would be protein madness, which rarely happens among Sub-Polar people, but affects Europeans who moved North.
Similarly, our genetic predisposition towards certain reactions to gluten, high-protein diet, high fructose diet, even alcohol vary wildly.
In most cases, when we think of “modern” diet and lifestyle, we are basically thinking of the industrialized, grain and dairy Anglo-Saxon diet and a life of small caloric surplus over a relatively modest caloric expenditure. Which affects you different if you indeed are of Anglo-Saxon ancestry, and your ancestors had been eating cheese and bread for at least 6k years, while slowly reducing the amount of labor needed to create it.
Its going to hit you differently if your ancestors were Sub-Polar peoples who subsisted on high-fat/zero carb diet, or came from a tropical jungle where they subsisted on high-sugar fruit, low fat meat and minimum labor to procure it.
How similar is your life to that of a homo sapiens from 12,000 years ago? If you made it more similar, would that help you?
Why pick that arbitrary point in our evolution? My ancestors 12k years ago could have been subsistence farmers who toiled all day but ate a lot of calories. Could be cold climate hunter-gatherers who fasted intermittently between giant feasts, and burned most of these calories to zero, trying to secure a next big kill. Could have been tropical climate hunter-gatherers who did light hunting and gathering 2-3 hours a day, ate small meals, and played lazily all day.
And this only takes into account the ancestors from exactly 12k years ago. What about ancestors from 6k years ago? What about 200 k years ago?
To make matters more complex, different ancestries would call for different lifestyle and diet. Our natural metabolism, lactose tolerance, muscularity, fat % and countless other factors vary wildly between ancestries. A lifestyle/diet fit for a descendant of the Innuit would not be fit for a descenant of the X!hosa and vice-versa.
Human evolution is an ongoing process that takes different populations into wildly different directions, so it is not obvious what is the “natural environment” for each human, unless they are literally living a stone-age life right now, in absolute genetic and technological isolation.
One simple trick that I applied to my apartment lately, is to break with the tradition of “proper” placement of various objects, furniture and doodads, but focus on pure functionality and natural paths that come from human laziness.
Examples:beverage cooler right next to the couch, NOT in the kitchen. After all, I drink beer on a couch, not in front of the sink like a madman. Same goes for the bottle opener, corkscrew etc.
TV set is high up on the wall, almost at ceiling level. Since I watch TV/Netflix reclined on the couch, it makes no sense to place it on “eye level” since my eyes point upward not forward.
wall clock in the bathroom, right over the mirror. Most people who bother having a wall clock keep in in the living room, but that makes little sense. The most likely situation when you need to look at the clock is when you are preparing to leave the house: while getting dressed, brushing teeth etc.
the closet with “in house” sweats, pajamas etc is in the bathroom, right next to the bathtub/shower, so I can dress myself immediately in fresh clothes right after washing, and not streak naked around the house looking for pajama bottoms.
“poop library”. A trick well known to boomer, but largely forgotten, is to have a pile of do-eared, cheap, redundant books on a shelf right next to the toilet, when you need something to read waiting for Number 2, and do not want to spread icky on your phone.
storage poufs. Its basically a storage box with a pillow on top, that you can use both as a chair and to keep stuff in. If you buy poufs the same height as the seat of your couch, they also work as a perfect extension to stretch your legs. Keeps all the clutter you need in my “couch space” at hand.
door shelf. In my case its a flat rectangular bowl that I bolted to the door, and put stuff that I absolutely need to take with me when I leave the house. The shelf must be ON the door, not next to it, on eye level, so that it is impossible to open the door without seeing the contents of the door shelf, and you kinda have to take them with you, or the act of opening the door would spill the contents of the shelf all over the floor.
It is quite possible though that over time there are fewer and fewer BFs. They might be going extinct, even without much human interaction. As for finding bones, if the population is low, and their territory so big, it might take centuries.
I also noticed that there is an inverse cultural relationship between the belief in magic, witchcraft, spirits/fair folk etc and the belief in UFOs. Which makes me think aliens simply fill the Post-Enlightment gap in the legendarium for cultures that want to pretend they are “too reasonable” to believe in magic, but open to a belief in “sci fi” myths; ie: Fair Folk kidnapping folk—nah, Aliens kidnapping folk—yah.
As for Bigfoot: while I don’t believe it exists, I think Its wrong way to think of it as avoiding cameras. The more reasonable explanation is that cameras avoid the places where it could possibly live. Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti, and similar Apemen are almost always reported to live in remote wilderness, and specifically the North of USA, Canada, Russia, China, and of course the Himalayas. It seems like we should be able to spot them, until you realize that the northern wilderness belt that stretches from Alaska to Greenland, and then around Eurasia and back to Alaska is astonishingly big, and almost completely empty of humans. We are talking about a strip of wilderness that has about the same surface area as the Moon, and the possible population of Bigfeet would likely be smaller than the population of chimps in Africa. If every researcher interested in finding Bigfoot went to explore the Big North with all the state of the art equipment they could carry, and they spread evenly to cover maximum area, they would not only not find Bigfoot, but not find each other, due to enormous distances through impassable woodland and mountains.
I would even argue that Bigfoot being more bigfooty; a primitive yet sapient and inteligent hominid, perhabs some late descendant of the gigantopithecus, is more plausible than it being say a sloth, because it seems to make honest attempts to avoid humans. If it was a mere sloth, or an ape oof the same intellectual capacity as a chimp, it would be found far easier.
While existence of Bigoot is extremely unlikely, If it were real, I would rather assume they are a tribal species of essentially very hairy humans who avoid us the same way some Sentinel tribes do.
I would also take issue with the “mundane” part. What does that even mean? Any explanation that is good enough to cover all UFO cases with their myriad of physics-defying feats, is in itself a proof of supertechnology which should also be under the bet.
For example, an explanation that the supposed UFOs are really experimental military aircraft would simply mean that the military possesses technology that is effectively “magic” compared to the civilian aircraft technology. If you witness a flying object that can push Mach 10 effortlessly and takes instant turns without any inertia, does it matter if this is an alien craft or human military craft? It still should belong on the list.
Leftovers of an ancient civilization
Archaeologist here: you’d want to really, really narrow down on what you mean here, otherwise we will clean your pockets pretty easily. Since about 2016, new discoveries of ancient civilizations, predating the most reasonable estimates crop up like mushrooms.
My estimate is that we will have several proofs pushing the the origins of civilization at least 10k years backwards, if not more, in the very near future, likely along the vectors of:
- Gobeli Tepe and other Turkish/Anatolian ruins being significantly older than we thought.
- The Sphinx and some of the Egyptian stuff being significantly older than we thought.
- ruins in Indonesia that have a good chance to be proven older than all of the above.
- Pacific Connection (Australian Aboriginal People and some Sth American tribes being related) being confirmed, thus pushing the colonization of America at least 12k years further back, via boat no less.
- evidence that copper, iron and tin were smelted significantly earlier than we assumed.
In other words; current established estimate is that civilization as we know it is at best around 12k years old, and did not really kick off for real until 6k BCE. But we keep finding evidence that pushes that back at least to 25k BCE. We also keep finding evidence that both neanderthals and denisovians split much earlier than we thought, were much more numerous, and survived longer than assumed, so it is completely possible that there was a proto-civilisation 20k years before Sumer even existed, and that, conceivably, you could have Neanderthal humans witness it (or possibly participate?)
we know that involuntary sexual celibacy is psychologically harmful, and socially disruptive. If porn can damped the effects of involuntary celibacy and sexual frustration (which include, but are not limited to: rape, sexual harassment, social radicalization, and co-relates with acts of terrorism or public shootings etc )then it is almost certainly a net positive.
One strong argument in favor of porn is that almost nobody alive gets as much sex as they actually want; vast majority gets less than they want, minority gets too much, and without some kind of extreme social engineering this cannot be solved.
Porn is the closest thing to a “bandaid solution” to that problem. Sexless or severely undersexed people can achieve an illusion of sex life with porn. Yes, porn is addictive and can an be psychologically harmful, but involuntary celibacy is definitely severely harmful, and we cannot solve it any other way.
The underlying issue here is that the supply of sex, quality of sex, supply of quality partners and the logistics of all the above cannot meet the popular demand. It would require the number of highly libidinous attractive partners to be equal or exceeding the number of adults that desire sex. Until we somehow achieve Sexual Post-Scarcity (how? Sex-bots? VR sex? Massively orgiastic global swinger culture?) then porn is unavoidable.
Good sex with an attractive partner is an extremely scarce resource. In fact, any sex, even crappy one, is scarce, and far, far below popular demand. Porn is a necessary plug. It provides a better form of sexual release than pornless masturbation.
So in that regard, it is obvious that porn is more beneficial than harmful, since the alternative to porn for many is effectively celibacy, which has plenty of harmful psychological and social effects, including violence (sexual and otherwise).
Im confused by this post. It might be that I lack the necessary knowledge or reading apprehension, but the post seems to dance around the actual SELF-improvement (AI improving itself, Theseus Ship Style), and refocuses on improvement iteration (AI creating another AI).
Consider a human example. In the last few years, I learned Rationalist and Mnemonic techniques to self-improve my thinking. I also fathered a child, raised it, and taught it basic rationalist and mnemonic tricks, making it an independent and only vaguely aligned agent potentially more powerful than I am.
The post seems to focus on the latter option.
is if it turns out that advanced narrow-AIs manage to generate more utility than humans know what to do with initially.
I find it not just likely but borderline certain. Ubiquitous, explicitly below-human narrow AI has a tremendous potential that we act blind to, focusing on superhuman AI. Creating superhuman, self-improving AGI, while extremely dangerous, is also an extremely hard problem (in the same realm as dry nanotech or FTL travel). Meanwhile, creating brick-dumb but ubiquitous narrow AI and then mass producing it to saturation is easy. It could be done today, its just a matter of market forces and logistics.
It might very well be the case that once the number of narrow-AI systems, devices and drones passes certain threshold (say, it becomes as ubiquitous, cheap and accessible as cars, but not yes as much as smartphones) we would enter a weaker form of post-scarcity and have no need to create AI gods.
I have a somewhat similar story. I have been struggling with ADHD all my life, and only recently started using anti-ADHD medicines. Unfortunately, these gave me stomach issues and tremendous reflux, which was only tolerable if I took them in small doses...which in turn barely helped with my ADHD.
After testing pretty much every anti-ADHD drug with combination of every anti-reflux drug, I gave up, and tried my aunt’s suggestion of Ashwaghandha. I was beyond skeptical, and only gave it a try to please a concerned relative. I was mentally prepared to anti-placebo it, determined to prove it will not work (I even pre-planned my smug and condescending speech about how I did my best to test it and how obviously it did nothing, being just another woowoo herbalist nonsense with no scientific proof behind it).
It goddamn worked. By itself, ashwaghandha did precisely nothing. By themselves, ADHD medicine did something, but at the cost of me belching acid like an overfed xenomorph. Combined, it resulted in a far, far greater mental focus, and no digestion issues at all. Absurdly, combining ashwghanda with smaller dose of amphetamine salts gave better and stabler mental results than just doubling the amph intake.
AFAIK, there are no studies that conclusively prove ashwaghanda really works. Those that do, suggest it as a sleeping aid of all things. And yet. I talked it out with my psychiatrist, and as far as she knows (and she is likely THE expert on adult ADHD in my country) ashwaghanda should do nothing at all.
It would be fascinating if propensity for limerence was genetically determined, because limerence directly influences our mating/breeding habits. For one, teen pregnancy might very well be a side effect of this.
In that regard, should we assume that the missing component that makes love “romantic” or “limeric” is irrationality?
My instinct is that if someone has a gooey, excessive feeling that the other is Significant it counts as romantic, but if one had a rational, evidence based belief that the other is Significant, it would not be considered romantic enough, even if the feeling of emotional bond would be much more resilient in the second example.
To use a more concrete example:
1. Bill meets Alice and falls madly in love with her. He does irrational, excessively symbolic and juvenile things to impress her. They break up anyway after a turbulent 3 months. Their Love is Romantic.2. Frank meets Jane on a professional dating app, and they see with perfect clarity that their values, ideologies, libidos, tastes and lifestyles are perfectly aligned. They marry and spent 57 years together in an easy bliss, until they die. Their relationship would not be qualified as romantic, even though it generated more happiness and a stronger bond.
Therefore, I would suggest that the important component of romance are: irrationality, excessiveness, emotional risk and playing against bad statistical odds. In other words, drama.
One of the main ways I managed to instill good habits in myself is to both use optimal paths to good habits, and closing optimal paths to sub-optimal habits. The trick is to make a good habit easier than it is annoying, and a bad habit more annoying than it is preferable.
Examples:
Hydration—I simply place a 2l water bottle by the apartment door every evening. It becomes impossible for me to leave the house without picking it up, and once it is in my hand, Im so much more likely to drink from it and take it with me than forget.
Exercise: I bought dumbbells to work out with, but consciously made no place to put them. I just place them on my gaming chair, so it becomes impossible to use the PC without lifting the dumbbells. But the moment they are literally in my hands, it is easier to just pump a few curls than not.
Exercise/commute: I’m trying to unlearn driving everywhere, and bike whenever I can. I just place my car keys in my bike’s frame pouch. This way I cannot leave the house without touching my bike, and once I do, its easier to just hop on it and ride away.
Diet: I always struggled with weight, and the one “simple trick” that actually worked for me was brushing my teeth ASAP after dinner. Since my teeth are already brushed, and it would be annoying to do so again, Im much less likely to snack after dinner. If the urge to snack is really strong, I just use some mouthwash, which not only makes me even more disinclined to soil my super-clean teeth, but no snacks taste good when my mouth is super minty/mentholly.
Waking early: the path to a sub-optimal habit is to hit snooze on the alarm and go back to sleep. Breaking the habit was as easy as placing the alarm clock in the bathroom, so I would have to walk across the entire house to turn it off, and once I do, Im already where I need to be to brush my teeth and shave, so might as well do so.
They reason why these are working is that all those habits are relatively weak, and a small tweak to how annoying would they be, means all the difference. Its basically weaponizing my own laziness/procrastination against itself. The goal is to make myself spend extra energy walking around and looking for things needed for my bad habits, and the things needed for the good habits to be always in my path.