Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is This Economist Too Far Ahead of His Time?

chronicle.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 121 posts

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

#31

Post by barry-cotter »

carsongross wrote: post #11

He's not an economist, he's a futurist, and not a particularly interesting one. For an actual economist ahead of his time, I recommend Steve Keen.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/09/on-futurism.html

When the media reports on the future, reporters pretty much only ever quote these sort of futurists, who have hijacked the future to support their side of certain current disputes. Truth be told, folks who analyze the future but don’t frame their predictions or advice in terms of standard ideological categories are largely ignored, because few folks actually care much about the future except as a place to tell morality tales about who today is naughty vs. nice.

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

#32

Post by reflexive »

> You are beautiful, intelligent, and charismatic, as are your friends, co-workers, lovers.

Aren't all of these qualities measured relative to our neighbors? I.e., each of us is a genius compared to our ape forebearers, but if everyone around you is beautiful, intelligent, and charming, then no one is.

> You feel no hunger, no cold, no heat, no pain.

Again, isn't discomfort relative to what one is prepared for? Under such circumstances, wouldn't the slightest dip or peak in subjective well-being feel like a life-altering crisis?

"Connoisseur" is relevant https://xkcd.com/915/

Am I missing something, or is this just another economist who understands nothing about human desire?

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

#34

Post by oldmanjay »

reflexive wrote: post #32

> You are beautiful, intelligent, and charismatic, as are your friends, co-workers, lovers. Aren't all of these qualities measured relative to our neighbors? I.e., each of us is a genius compared to our ape forebearers, but if everyone around you is beautiful, intelligent, and charming, then no one is. > You feel no hunger, no cold, no heat, no pain. Again, isn't discomfort relative to what one is prepared for? Under…

You can make a case that charisma only matters in contrast to its lack, and perhaps beauty is the same although I'm not as certain, but intelligence has an intrinsic value that ought to be evident by the fact that we built a technological civilization with it.

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

#35

Post by aab0 »

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.

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

#37

Post by philipkglass »

abecedarius wrote: post #30
philipkglass wrote: post #20

The book’s premise is that in about a century, it will be possible to scan human brains at "fine enough spatial and chemical resolution," and to combine that with good-enough models of signal-processing functions of brain cells, "to create a cell-by-cell dynamically executable model of the full brain in artificial hardware, a model whose signal input-output behavior is usefully close to that of the original brain." L…

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 interesting to me. The models are improving and better results are also possible due to the increase in computing power since 2006. But the progress appears slow compared with AI/ML research over the same period.

Any time covalent bonds are made or broken, quantum effects are at work. Eliminate all the chemistry that involves forming or breaking bonds and you're throwing away most of the chemistry in a living organism. Getting quantum effects right with ad hoc modifications to molecular dynamics models based on classical physics is very difficult; there's a lot of risk of overfitting to what's easy to observe. Full quantum calculations have terrible scaling properties -- O(N^7) for CCSD(T), the most popular high accuracy approximation of QM, where N is proportional to the number of electrons in the system. Even the best, slowest quantum methods (CCSD(T) and even more exotic methods) still have many cases where they fail to reliably reproduce experimental results.

It's possible that you don't need to simulate anything down to the molecular level to reproduce all the biologically interesting features of cells. I don't want to rule it out completely. But the enormous financial incentives to simulate biology in silico (for e.g. accelerating pharmaceutical development), the large research investments made so far, and the limited progress to date tend to make me think that all those tiny and extremely computationally expensive details at the molecular level are biologically relevant.

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

#38

Post by reflexive »

oldmanjay wrote: post #34
reflexive wrote: post #32

> You are beautiful, intelligent, and charismatic, as are your friends, co-workers, lovers. Aren't all of these qualities measured relative to our neighbors? I.e., each of us is a genius compared to our ape forebearers, but if everyone around you is beautiful, intelligent, and charming, then no one is. > You feel no hunger, no cold, no heat, no pain. Again, isn't discomfort relative to what one is prepared for? Under…

You can make a case that charisma only matters in contrast to its lack, and perhaps beauty is the same although I'm not as certain, but intelligence has an intrinsic value that ought to be evident by the fact that we built a technological civilization with it.

That's a good point, I'll just say that no one will perceive themselves or their friends as intelligent, except relative to their competitors.

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

#39

Post by narrator »

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 has been my main objection to brain inside of a computer thinking. If we could simulate the universe inside of a computer we could do all kinds of neat things, such as drug development in a computer, but it isn't algorithmically possible. The Kurzweillians are just assuming that we'll wave the magic wand and have efficient algorithms for everything such that computer simulation of reality will be trivial. If you have an exponential complexity algorithm that is in the middle of your problem like protein folding for example it will NEVER be practical to simulate in a computer on any non-trivial problem.

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

#40

Post by woodchuck64 »

philipkglass wrote: post #20

The book’s premise is that in about a century, it will be possible to scan human brains at "fine enough spatial and chemical resolution," and to combine that with good-enough models of signal-processing functions of brain cells, "to create a cell-by-cell dynamically executable model of the full brain in artificial hardware, a model whose signal input-output behavior is usefully close to that of the original brain." L…

> On top of the sheer audacious difficulty of creating whole brain emulations, there's the problem of competing with boring old "narrow" AI. Surely an economist of all people should recognize the feedback loop that makes narrow AI profitable first, which attracts more investment, which unlocks more capabilities without biological emulation... how many of today's jobs are going to be left un-done by narrow AI a century from now, even if whole brain emulations are finally practical then?

This is a curious blind spot. With deep learning algorithms making easy work of master Go players, there has to be enormous untapped potential in GPGPU silicon for AI.

Post reply on HN