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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?

#61

Post by mentos »

elevensies wrote: post #57
JaggedNZ wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

For #2: why does your mind need to run in a simulation at 1% rather than just wait in cold storage until the technology allows for it to be run at 100%?

And then, what if I made the argument that because the universe will inevitably repeat itself again, it is technically its own form 'cold storage' that will one day awaken again to simulate you..?

This is how I've found a little peace with death. That given there is an infinite amount of time, why can't it happen again? It's already happened once...

So after I/we die, an unfathomable amount of time will pass in an instant. Our sun will expand and devour the Earth. Eventually the universe will collapse. But after a universe of universes have swirled around each other, being born and dying, one day - when the right conditions are met - we will awake again?

I think it begs a bigger question though. Should this life, should/does humanity deserve to be repeated infinitely? When you add up all of the pain and suffering and weigh it against the beauty, is it worth it? For now I think it is.

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

#62

Post by CydeWeys »

sjg007 wrote: post #59
mburns wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

We can though. Using today's technology we can easily go to Mars and live in underground habitats and be subject to only a moderate increase in health risks from radiation absorbed during the trip. Said health risks would be less than what a decent number of current Earth-bound professions face, and those people don't even get to go to Mars.

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

#63

Post by emblem21 »

I once wrote a book in 2005 about the inevitable fusion of central banking theory, economic psychology, and "good-enough" artificial intelligence. Whole brain emulations weren't required. Instead, mass expansion of mobile devices and the consolidation of civil behavior into those devices (purchasing, voting, socialization, documentation, research, institution interactions, welfare benefits, etc) allows a sufficiently powerful enough AI to read an NSA trunk and be able to create a model of the "animal spirits" of the individual constituents of markets. It couldn't model human behavior accurately, but that wasn't required. Instead, it could create a chaotic chain of events between all actor demands and capabilities via small actions that would result in massive economic policy enforcement.

Instead of invading Iraq, the machine predicts a convoluted path of investment schemes that ultimately bankrupt the dinar, the ruling party, and the entire nation. No bullets fired. No soldiers deployed. To economists, it would look like normal macroeconomic activity.

I never released the book because I realized I was writing a business proposal.

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

#64

Post by elevensies »

mentos wrote: post #61
elevensies wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*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…

For #2: why does your mind need to run in a simulation at 1% rather than just wait in cold storage until the technology allows for it to be run at 100%? And then, what if I made the argument that because the universe will inevitably repeat itself again, it is technically its own form 'cold storage' that will one day awaken again to simulate you..? This is how I've found a little peace with death. That given there is…

I would consider cold storage to be preferable, but running at a low speed might be necessary for self-defence and what essentially amounts to data verification, the ability to rebuild to a certain redundancy level.

In my view if time loops immutably I gain nothing: same program, same input, same result.

I fully expect to die and I think I am ready for it, but I'm going down fighting. In terms of abstract moral questions, ten years of Catholicism cured me of any curiosity I had for that sort of thing.

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

#65

Post by freshhawk »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #54
freshhawk wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"...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…

Really? I think we must have different understandings of the term, it just means that people decide what they want and then act in the way they think will get them that.

Also, I'm not sure how the quoted part relates, that was my facetious description of how Homo Sapiens act, in contrast with Homo Economicus.

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

#66

Post by nitwit005 »

nhaliday wrote: post #24
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,…

> Hanson is not breaking new ground; he's recycling SF as economics. World-building for purposes of entertainment generally has little to do with successful prediction. Hanson has made this point in a few places, eg, http://www.overcomingbias.com/2015/11/science-fiction-is-fan... . I'm not sure if you've read Age of Em but it didn't feel like reading scifi, so much as reading an encyclopedia. RE: the list of "wild id…

> World-building for purposes of entertainment generally has little to do with successful prediction

Do you have any evidence that that's true? A decent number of ideas portrayed in science fiction have come true, so clearly successful prediction is going on.

Ultimately, economist or author are both using imagination and extrapolation. I don't see any particular reason to expect better results from the economist.

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

#67

Post by paulddraper »

mmusson wrote: post #47
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…

I think you are missing the main thrust of the book. He is not trying to convince you that em-based AI is the likely future. He chose the less examined possibility as a starting point, but the main part of the book is to enumerate the predictions that flow from that premise. This is interesting and worth examining even if the premise is wrong. Sometimes examining a familiar topic in unfamiliar terrain yields new insi…

"False premise" is a logical fallacy, not a virtue.

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

#68

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#69

Post by ryuker16 »

yourapostasy wrote: post #56
philipkglass wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Too be fair, labor for those tasks is so cheap to make robots uncompetitive price wise.

The money is in putting that lawyer out of work nor hector, the immigrant strawberry picker

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

#70

Post by nhaliday »

nitwit005 wrote: post #66
nhaliday wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hanson is not breaking new ground; he's recycling SF as economics. World-building for purposes of entertainment generally has little to do with successful prediction. Hanson has made this point in a few places, eg, http://www.overcomingbias.com/2015/11/science-fiction-is-fan... . I'm not sure if you've read Age of Em but it didn't feel like reading scifi, so much as reading an encyclopedia. RE: the list of "wild id…

> World-building for purposes of entertainment generally has little to do with successful prediction Do you have any evidence that that's true? A decent number of ideas portrayed in science fiction have come true, so clearly successful prediction is going on. Ultimately, economist or author are both using imagination and extrapolation. I don't see any particular reason to expect better results from the economist.

Unfortunately no, I don't have good evidence.

It's an instance of a more general intuition that excessive consumption of fiction distorts people's beliefs about the world. For example, at some point I saw a study that showed people who watched more TV tended to overestimate rates of violent crime significantly, but I can't find it now.

Anecdotally many people seem to think that human genetic engineering would create permanent class divisions, and they tend to refer to fiction, eg, Gattaca, when asserting this. But that doesn't really make sense. Any rational nation-state would subsidize it massively for the population once it was cheap enough.

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