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Is This Economist Too Far Ahead of His Time?

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Re: Is This Economist Too Far Ahead of His Time?

#51

Post by JaggedNZ »

elevensies wrote: post #10
mentos wrote: post #3

Anyone that hasn't yet, check out Black Mirror on Netflix. It has a lot of ideas in it that I am surprised to see in a show in 2016. I love Elon Musk but I think he is solving the wrong problem when it comes to making human beings a space faring species. The fragility of human flesh is the barrier to colonizing space. You can try to solve this problem by wrapping it in a contained atmosphere or wait a thousand years…

I think brain-upload is probably the only way to do interstellar travel, even if you synthesize a new body on the other side. For someone alive today, if you want to do interstellar or non-colonization space travel, going after immorality is the best option IMO. I don't think that earth-preservation is a worthwhile quest on a personal level. There are dozens of people who could destroy the whole planet since the inve…

> going after immorality is the best option IMO

Now there is an ironic typo/autocorrect, I think the word you where looking for is immortality, unless of course you are making a scathing criticism that the pursuit of self preservation for the purpose of interstellar travel is against the laws of morality.

Thanks for a chuckle.

I do think though that emulation of "specialized" hardware with generic hardware is a complex problem space. While it's now possible to recreate classic gaming systems with fpga's for example, some cases we are able to only offer an approximation. The computing power of the host exceeds the power of the emulated CPU by several orders of magnitude. My thinking is to emulate wetware with hardware will require hardware several orders of magnitude more powerful than wetware and I suspect the wetware is already close the physical limitation of the universe for several key problem spaces.

Re: Is This Economist Too Far Ahead of His Time?

#52

Post by Animats »

aab0 wrote: post #35
Animats wrote: post #6

Living in VR, and the implications thereof, have been written about in SF for decades. The earliest work is "Simulacron 3", from 1964. It's been done to death in anime. "Sword Art Online" is probably the best known stuck-in-VR anime, but "Log Horizon" deals with the philosophical aspects in more depth. Hanson is not breaking new ground; he's recycling SF as economics. Read Hanson's list of "wild ideas".[1] "By 2100,…

> (He's at George Mason University, which is a right-wing think tank, and has to say stuff like that to get tenure.) Hanson was an extreme libertarian long before he got tenure or joined GMU, or even before he invented prediction markets.

I know. I think I met him when Xanadu was being developed. (Xanadu was a pre-WWW technology for storing and distributing hypertext documents. Everything is pay per view in Xanadu. The Xanadu crowd were mostly fanatical libertarians. Everything is a market, with micropayments for everything.)

Re: Is This Economist Too Far Ahead of His Time?

#53

Post by philipkglass »

cynicalBit wrote: post #5

If people can be convinced that their simulated virtual self is actually them, overpopulation will be solved by mass suicide. Sorry if that's too dark for you guys, it just has to be said. All these "live inside a computer people" are just a modern Jim Jones cult.

A self-backup from pattern data isn't any good for soothing one's metaphysical fears, unless (like most of the people on Star Trek) you don't think that the disintegration of all the molecules in one's body is the disintegration of oneself. A backup self is perfectly adequate if you want certain things to be taken care of despite one's death.

I believe that if I die I'm dead, backup or no, but I'd like to have a backup anyway so it could continue to pursue the research I found interesting while alive and could continue to take care of my family just as I would. The dead-me won't care either way but present-me would like to make contingency plans for the future.

Re: Is This Economist Too Far Ahead of His Time?

#54

Post by eli_gottlieb »

freshhawk wrote: post #46
Paul_S wrote: post #25

The Age of Em can be read in two ways. One is to treat it like an RPG setting book. An imaginative world with highly detailed descriptions, complete with cool potential plots for your campaign. The second way to read it is as a book trying to predict the future in much the same way as The Flintstones is recording history. Everything is strange yet it's all mimicking the current world with superficial differences. The…

"...economists often predict the future correctly but the irrational..." This is the Overcoming Bias/Less Wrong community worldview basically, and I find your RPG setting reading works well for understanding them as well. From now on I'll think of them as writers who are predicting the future of an alternate universe where humans think fundamentally differently than in our reality. It's a hell of a lot of fun, if you…

>If you accept that a chaotic soup of memes can, at any time, combine to form an idea that becomes a popular ideology that prompts a bunch of clever apes to act anywhere from irrational to completely insane for arbitrary amounts of time ... well that's impossible to model in any meaningful way.

I think it's pretty silly to accept homo economicus as an actual definition of rational behavior, since nobody really wants to live like such a creature.

Re: Is This Economist Too Far Ahead of His Time?

#55

Post by rafaelvasco »

You can't hope to "scan" a human brain and make a virtual clone of a human being or any being, because life and conscience is much more than a brain. So that future he describes , at last functioning the way he thinks is impossible. Until we understand 100% of what we're made of, no one can even think of anything like this.

Re: Is This Economist Too Far Ahead of His Time?

#56

Post by yourapostasy »

philipkglass wrote: post #37
abecedarius wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are others who think it an important possibility: http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/brain-emulation-r...

I was involved with a research effort to predict certain cell biology features via molecular dynamics simulations between 2003 and 2006. It's what I wrote my thesis on. After school was done and my research group's grant ran out I started writing software for a living instead of looking for another research position. I still keep up with molecular and biological simulation research efforts because it's intrinsically…

This brings to my mind an interesting line of thought that I ran across via Peter Watts writing about it in Blindsight [1]. In that link, page down to the "Sentience/Intelligence" header, and read that section for a concise introduction to this line of thought: sentience is separate from intelligence. Looking at what computer science research and industry has accomplished thus far, I'm very open-minded about the idea that sentience (feeling and perceiving) is a separate, older, deeper layer of brain processing from sapience (reasoning and intelligence).

I suspect at a layman's comprehension level that sapience is mostly what we are reproducing in research and industry today, and not sentience, because sentience is far more difficult to plumb. Your explanation of the challenges in quantum methods of simulation and the uncertainty on whether it is even necessary seems to bring up this line of questioning to me. This has interesting ramifications. Like we can build OCR and even put out of work lots of formerly middle-class attorneys who made their living in trial discovery phases. But we have yet to create a second Industrial Revolution with general purpose humanoid-form robots that everyone can own that can clean houses, mow lawns, fold clothes, make beds, wash and chop vegetables, pick strawberries, etc., all supposedly "simple" tasks.

http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm#Notes

Re: Is This Economist Too Far Ahead of His Time?

#57

Post by elevensies »

JaggedNZ wrote: post #51
elevensies wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think brain-upload is probably the only way to do interstellar travel, even if you synthesize a new body on the other side. For someone alive today, if you want to do interstellar or non-colonization space travel, going after immorality is the best option IMO. I don't think that earth-preservation is a worthwhile quest on a personal level. There are dozens of people who could destroy the whole planet since the inve…

> going after immorality is the best option IMO Now there is an ironic typo/autocorrect, I think the word you where looking for is immortality, unless of course you are making a scathing criticism that the pursuit of self preservation for the purpose of interstellar travel is against the laws of morality. Thanks for a chuckle. I do think though that emulation of "specialized" hardware with generic hardware is a compl…

*immortality (oops :S)

Sure, I don't necessarily disagree with anything you're saying, and given all that, I still think it is the best chance.

#1: in the short term, the quantity of hardware doesn't matter. If you needed a full data center costing $10M per year, it would still be worth it for some people. The idea is to get into a host that is replaceable, and then you can work on making it smaller.

#2: in the short term, you don't need to run in real time. If you are just trying to survive until better tech comes along, running at 1% means the equivalent of 3.65 days per year: maybe enough to survive until hardware improves. Taking this to an extreme, 100 people could pool resources for protection and tech improvement while staying in deep storage and only running their minds very seldom.

Given the above two points, all that really matters to me is that I can find a way to upload my mind into binary data which I know can be simulated faithfully. All I need is upload, storage, and a recovery plan. If the recovery plan looks like it will take 1000 years, fine, I still prefer it to nothing. If I think there is a 1% chance of success over the next 1000 years for immortality, I believe I will do it.

#3: we know for a fact that the functionality of the brain/body is achievable in the space/power envelope of the brain/body. I could easily tolerate a 100x space and power increase. The human body is approximate 100 watts and 100 litres. So 100x is 10,000 watts and 10 cubic meters: 13 horsepower and the size of a compact car -- fine by me. I think I could survive immobile and incorporeal for 100 years with a good library, if, for example, I had to be anchored to the seabed somewhere and run off geothermal energy. The more you expand your lifespan, the more options open up. If you can run yourself at very slow speeds an immense amount of options open up.

Re: Is This Economist Too Far Ahead of His Time?

#58

Post by singold »

Paul_S wrote: post #25

The Age of Em can be read in two ways. One is to treat it like an RPG setting book. An imaginative world with highly detailed descriptions, complete with cool potential plots for your campaign. The second way to read it is as a book trying to predict the future in much the same way as The Flintstones is recording history. Everything is strange yet it's all mimicking the current world with superficial differences. The…

There is this comedian on the radio were I live that says that economics is the science of explaining today why yesterday's predictions were wrong :P

I can't believe that he says that his errors are our fault...

Re: Is This Economist Too Far Ahead of His Time?

#59

Post by sjg007 »

mburns wrote: post #9
mentos wrote: post #3

Anyone that hasn't yet, check out Black Mirror on Netflix. It has a lot of ideas in it that I am surprised to see in a show in 2016. I love Elon Musk but I think he is solving the wrong problem when it comes to making human beings a space faring species. The fragility of human flesh is the barrier to colonizing space. You can try to solve this problem by wrapping it in a contained atmosphere or wait a thousand years…

>or wait a thousand years and send humans to Mars in a different kind of space ship. Pardon the pun, but why on Earth should we wait 1000 years (or whatever it actually takes) for something when we don't have to? Our fragile human flesh in a contained atmosphere works well enough and we're roughly capable of doing it now, give or take a couple decades. Then we have 900+ years to improve the containers we use to maint…

Basically we can't survive space radiation... Even going to Mars.

Re: Is This Economist Too Far Ahead of His Time?

#60

Post by IndianAstronaut »

philipkglass wrote: post #37
abecedarius wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are others who think it an important possibility: http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/brain-emulation-r...

I was involved with a research effort to predict certain cell biology features via molecular dynamics simulations between 2003 and 2006. It's what I wrote my thesis on. After school was done and my research group's grant ran out I started writing software for a living instead of looking for another research position. I still keep up with molecular and biological simulation research efforts because it's intrinsically…

I briefly worked on a molecular dynamics project which was for small RNA fragments with atoms numbering in the hundreds. It needed quantum effects simulations to understand two states of the molecule, which could not be explained otherwise. It also required clusters of computers to finish. Modeling proteins is an entire different game. Especially considering the infinite possibilities of proteins and the billions of different proteins that exist in the wild.
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