[SEQ RERUN] Dreams of Autarky
Today’s post, Dreams of Autarky was originally published on November 27, 2008. A summary:
Some selections from a Robin Hanson essay on the tendency to assume that people in the future will be substantially autonomous.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we’ll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky’s old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Total Nano Domination, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day’s sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
In all previous cases, when some new powerful entity suddenly began working on a much faster time-scale, it either sped up those around it or slowed down.
In the case of a artificial intelligence, it seems to me far easier for it to speed up the processes around it by copying itself rather than by a near-futile effort to get humans up to speed.
Interdependence and high interconnectedness doesn’t do us any good if we’re not part of it!