MD/PhD student at University of Pittsburgh, interested in computational approaches to modeling cancer and identifying optimal therapies
tyleryasaka
Karma: 4
I’m curious whether you think this epistemic disruption could be analogous at all to the Internet, social media, and smartphones? These technologies were greeted with great optimism not unlike the AI hype we are seeing today, and undoubtedly we all agree that these technologies have been beneficial in many ways. And yet we have seen the rise of vaccine hesitancy, loss of trust in our institutions, and adolescent anxiety that has led to a push to ban smartphone use in schools. I genuinely don’t know if I believe that society as a whole is better for it. I think fundamentally, all of these issues come down to the fact that we are developing systems that we didn’t evolve to live with. Our brains are the same brains that were optimized for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. While superintelligence has theoretical benefits, I completely agree with you that we are not thinking enough about the issue of cognitive and social compatibility with our little ape brains.
I’m new to the lesswrong community, but I’ll share my 2 cents. First, my sense of meaning has always come from an appreciation of beauty in the world. This includes a fascination with the natural world, mathematics, music, sunsets, food, etc. (Occasionally even people!) Second, my life became much more interesting (read: meaningful) when I left silicon valley. I think there is something soul crushing about building over-engineered solutions to first-world problems of dubious relevance to anyone. I quit my job working for a Blockchain startup in 2018 and switched careers—now I’m still coding a lot, but I do it in the context of medicine and cancer biology, and my skillset is now much broader than code. I don’t think this is the only way to increase a sense of meaning, but I think it’s about finding ideas that genuinely excite you, and choosing what is interesting over what is easy (my life sucks in a lot of ways, but it is more meaningful now). I don’t know how much this is helpful or answers your question, but this is what I have found so far.