Comment by rogers18445
3 years ago
The reason why regulation is going to fail is simple. AGI is the supreme bet, the Gamble to Resurrection. Faced with death years to decades from now or a chance at amortality. Which would you choose?
Would you be willing to bet on p(doom) whatever it might be when p(amortality | AGI) >>> p(amortality) during your lifetime? I personally am willing to place such a bet, and I would hazard a guess that decision makers don't come to their positions without similar sentiments.
I think this is what our tech overlords are investing all the money for. They're getting older quite quickly and probably feel like immortality is just around the corner if they keep syncing money into AI research and keep taking risks, they will cheat death.
I compare it to the the great pyramids. The pyramids were arguably another technological marvel also built on the back of slaves (just like modern tech now) and probably a lot of great inventions and innovations were made to facilitate their creation. To people of the time, the pyramids must've been absolutely incredible marvels to behold.
But all those Pharo's are dead, just like everyone else. I think the current tech overlords will die like everyone else too.
Nature already has a way for people to live on, it's called having children and dying. It's a great system and no one ever gets bored. However, the ego of some people is so strong and isn't satisfied with this, so on we go pouring money and resources into the search for the holy grail no matter what the risks are to everything else.
To some people death and the end of the universe are equivalent events. Others seek refuge in natural fallacies.
The difference between this moment and all others, is that amorality is actually achievable. If you can get an AGI and drown it in compute, through sheer brute-force the secrets of biology will be unraveled. The task is not to attain amortality immediately, merely gain more life faster than you lose it.
Others seek refuge in natural fallacies.
Are you trying to call having children a natural fallacy?
4 replies →
> Faced with death years to decades from now or a chance at amortality. Which would you choose?
Death, 100%. I know that death doesn’t have any downsides (although dying sometimes has some) and it’s worked for everyone who’s lived so far.
> death doesn’t have any downsides
The fact that most people try to avoid death by any means possible is a good indication it has downsides.
Specifically, the fact that you can no longer go on living is a big downside of death in my mind.
People try to avoid dying every day.
They put on their seatbelts, make sure their food isn’t covered in poop, check their boots for scorpions, take their insulin, etc.
They can’t avoid death. Nobody in the history of humanity has successfully avoided death.
But once death happens nothing matters to them any more. They literally no longer care about the life they’re not going on living.
Dying might be scary or painful but death isn’t.
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Over the pandemic and thereafter my family has had a lot of deaths in it. So, I've been forced to think about it a lot, to sit with others over it, and to just deal with a lot of the mundane parts of it too.
Death is horrible. It makes no sense. When people say they have had a 'loss', they're not kidding. You feel like that person should still be there, but like a kid at Disneyland, they are lost to you and you're searching for them. I'm dealing with a fair few relatives that just are not processing all these losses. Grief is a strange, personal, and unique thing too. It manifests personally and yet stereotypically for every individual.
That said, I think Death is the way.
The reasoning is complex and long. So, I'll try to sum it up for a simple comment, and I'll do that poorly, sorry.
The big reason stem from this article on Wikipedia. I think it's one of the best there is on the whole site:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
Say you were truly immortal. That timeline would be your future, as far as we currently understand physics. You get to spend a lot of time between universes if the last entry is to be believed. In fact, they don't even bother with giving the units. Nanoseconds or gigayears are pretty much the same st those timescales. Our time here on Earth is essentially as brief as the entire non-black-hole era to an immortal like that. Purgatory in the black void is more like what such an immortal would experience.
Or say you get to relive your life when you die. Poof, you're reborn to your folks and have all your memories again somehow. Repeat forever. You're doomed to live and die the same life, like 'Groundhog Day', but for ~80 years long and not just a day. Another purgatory after enough lives, I'd guess. Sisyphean.
Heaven, hell. An afterlife is our best hope. Somewhere we can't possibly understand with our minds right now. A total lack of understanding of the life hereafter is the only path where you retain something of you. Where you can grow and change, time can continue in, I dunno, 7 dimensions. I've not a clue, and I think that's great. If I did, right now I think you'd just end up in a form of purgatory given enough time.
But an endless dreamless night is just fine too. In no other way except an afterlife that I cannot possibly understand do we get to have 'happily ever after'. I think everyone would take that Socratic apology given enough time and I think they'd be right to do so.
I dunno, been sitting on this a while, and it's late for me and, again, sorry that this is a brief and jumbled comment.