This is just false. Humans are at the very least privileged in our role as biological bootloaders of AI. The emergence of written culture, industrial technology, and so on, are incredibly special from a historical perspective.
You only set aside occasional low-value fragments for national parks, mostly for your own pleasure and convenience, when it didn’t cost too much?
Earth as a proportion of the solar system’s planetary mass is probably comparable to national parks as a proportion of the Earth’s land, if not lower.
Well, the whole point of national parks is that they’re always going to be unproductive because you can’t do stuff in them.
If you mean in terms of extracting raw resources, maybe (though presumably a bunch of mining/logging etc in national parks could be pretty valuable) but either way it doesn’t matter because the vast majority of economic productivity you could get from them (e.g. by building cities) is banned.
You only set aside occasional low-value fragments for national parks, mostly for your own pleasure and convenience, when it didn’t cost too much?
Earth as a proportion of the solar system’s planetary mass is probably comparable to national parks as a proportion of the Earth’s land, if not lower.
Maybe I’ve misunderstood your point, but if it’s that humanity’s willingness to preserve a fraction of Earth for national parks is a reason for hopefulness that ASI may be willing to preserve an even smaller fraction of the solar system (namely, Earth) for humanity, I think this is addressed here:
it seems like for Our research purposes simulations would be just as good. In fact, far better, because We can optimize the hell out of them, running it on the equivalent of a few square kilometers of solar diameter
“research purposes” involving simulations can be a stand-in for any preference-oriented activity. Unless ASI would have a preference for letting us, in particular, do what we want with some fraction of available resources, no fraction of available resources would be better left in our hands than put to good use.
I also wonder if, compared to some imaginary baseline, modern humans are unusual in the greatness of their intellectual power and understanding and the less impressive magnitude of its development in other ways.
Maybe a lot of our problems flow from being too smart in that sense, but I believe that our best hope is still not to fear our problematic intelligence, but rather to lean into it as a powerful tool for figuring out what to do from here.
If another imaginary species could get along by just instinctively being harmonious, humans might require a persuasive argument. But if you can actually articulate the truth of the even-selfish-superiority of harmony (especially right now), then maybe our species can do the right thing out of understanding rather than instinct.
And maybe that means we’re capable of unusually fast turnarounds as a species. Once we articulate the thing intelligently enough, it’s highly mass-scalable
This is just false. Humans are at the very least privileged in our role as biological bootloaders of AI. The emergence of written culture, industrial technology, and so on, are incredibly special from a historical perspective.
Earth as a proportion of the solar system’s planetary mass is probably comparable to national parks as a proportion of the Earth’s land, if not lower.
Yeah, but not if we weight that land by economic productivity, I think.
Well, the whole point of national parks is that they’re always going to be unproductive because you can’t do stuff in them.
If you mean in terms of extracting raw resources, maybe (though presumably a bunch of mining/logging etc in national parks could be pretty valuable) but either way it doesn’t matter because the vast majority of economic productivity you could get from them (e.g. by building cities) is banned.
Yeah aren’t a load of national parks near large US conurbations and hence the opportunity cost in world terms is significant.
Maybe I’ve misunderstood your point, but if it’s that humanity’s willingness to preserve a fraction of Earth for national parks is a reason for hopefulness that ASI may be willing to preserve an even smaller fraction of the solar system (namely, Earth) for humanity, I think this is addressed here:
“research purposes” involving simulations can be a stand-in for any preference-oriented activity. Unless ASI would have a preference for letting us, in particular, do what we want with some fraction of available resources, no fraction of available resources would be better left in our hands than put to good use.
I also wonder if, compared to some imaginary baseline, modern humans are unusual in the greatness of their intellectual power and understanding and the less impressive magnitude of its development in other ways.
Maybe a lot of our problems flow from being too smart in that sense, but I believe that our best hope is still not to fear our problematic intelligence, but rather to lean into it as a powerful tool for figuring out what to do from here.
If another imaginary species could get along by just instinctively being harmonious, humans might require a persuasive argument. But if you can actually articulate the truth of the even-selfish-superiority of harmony (especially right now), then maybe our species can do the right thing out of understanding rather than instinct.
And maybe that means we’re capable of unusually fast turnarounds as a species. Once we articulate the thing intelligently enough, it’s highly mass-scalable