ONE: I love how “should I learn to drive for this trip right here?” cascades into this vast set of questions about possible future history, and AGI, and so on <3
Yeah, it is interesting isn’t it. Personally I actually would prefer if it were a more mundane decision, like whether or not I want to deal with the traffic or something :)
Another great place for linking “right now practical” questions with “long term civilizational” questions is retirement. If you have no cached thoughts on retirement, you might profitably apply the same techniques used for car stuff to “being rich if or when the singularity happens” and see if either thought changes the other?
Wow, this is a very good point. Thank you! I thought about it briefly in the past, but it hadn’t hit me until now that similar logic of “small chance of moderate utility over an extremely long time horizon” might apply to things like “be rich when the singularity happens”. I always had imagined that singularity = amazingness forever for everyone, but I think my inner Professor Quirrell must have fell asleep. He’s awake now and is yelling at me.
Do you have any thoughts in particular on this? For me personally I plan on being rich anyway so that I can fund FAI research or something, but I still think it’s worth thinking about.
TWO: I used to think “I want to live this year”, “If I want to live in year Y then I will also want to live in year Y+1″. Then by induction: “I will want to live forever”.
My thought here is that the post-singularity future will be a black swan, and that this natural decay you’re describing wouldn’t apply. It’ll be an amazing place to live where people won’t want to die. Hopefully.
I know there might be normal things about human psychology that would make people perhaps get bored and stop enjoying life at eg. their 10,000th birthday, but in a post-singularity world, it seems quite likely that we’d be able to overcome this. I guess that gets a little wire heading-y, but it’s not excessive to my taste.
Maybe I’m not thinking about this properly, but it seems to me like more of a yes-or-no sort of thing than a progressive decay sort of thing. Eg. it doesn’t get more likely that people will want to die as time goes on in the post-singularity world. It’s just a question of whether the post-singularity world has solved that problem or not.
caused me to be interested in authentic durable happiness, in general, in humans, and also a subject I invented for myself that I call “gerontopsychology”
I have a weird feeling you’d be interested in Michael Plant of the EA community’s work on “ordinary human unhappiness”. It’s always something I’ve thought about too as a worthwhile idea to pursue.
Yeah, it is interesting isn’t it. Personally I actually would prefer if it were a more mundane decision, like whether or not I want to deal with the traffic or something :)
Wow, this is a very good point. Thank you! I thought about it briefly in the past, but it hadn’t hit me until now that similar logic of “small chance of moderate utility over an extremely long time horizon” might apply to things like “be rich when the singularity happens”. I always had imagined that singularity = amazingness forever for everyone, but I think my inner Professor Quirrell must have fell asleep. He’s awake now and is yelling at me.
Do you have any thoughts in particular on this? For me personally I plan on being rich anyway so that I can fund FAI research or something, but I still think it’s worth thinking about.
My thought here is that the post-singularity future will be a black swan, and that this natural decay you’re describing wouldn’t apply. It’ll be an amazing place to live where people won’t want to die. Hopefully.
I know there might be normal things about human psychology that would make people perhaps get bored and stop enjoying life at eg. their 10,000th birthday, but in a post-singularity world, it seems quite likely that we’d be able to overcome this. I guess that gets a little wire heading-y, but it’s not excessive to my taste.
Maybe I’m not thinking about this properly, but it seems to me like more of a yes-or-no sort of thing than a progressive decay sort of thing. Eg. it doesn’t get more likely that people will want to die as time goes on in the post-singularity world. It’s just a question of whether the post-singularity world has solved that problem or not.
I have a weird feeling you’d be interested in Michael Plant of the EA community’s work on “ordinary human unhappiness”. It’s always something I’ve thought about too as a worthwhile idea to pursue.
Haha, to each their own :)