I’ve been snarky for this entire conversation—I find advocacy of death extremely irritating—but I am not just snarky by any means. The laws of physics as now understood allow no such thing, and even the author of the document to which you refer—a master of wishful thinking—now regards it as obsolete and wrong. And the point still holds—you cannot benefit today the way you could in a post-em world. If you’re prepared to throw away billions of years of life as a precaution against the possibility of billions of years of torture, you should be prepared to throw away decades of life as a precaution against the possibility of decades of torture. If you aren’t prepared to do the latter, you should reconsider the former.
I don’t think you’re a “bad guy”. I do think it’s a shame that you’re burying an important and interesting subject — the kind of goals and capabilities that it would be appropriate to encode in AI — under a mountain of hyperbole.
I’ve been snarky for this entire conversation—I find advocacy of death extremely irritating—but I am not just snarky by any means. The laws of physics as now understood allow no such thing, and even the author of the document to which you refer—a master of wishful thinking—now regards it as obsolete and wrong. And the point still holds—you cannot benefit today the way you could in a post-em world. If you’re prepared to throw away billions of years of life as a precaution against the possibility of billions of years of torture, you should be prepared to throw away decades of life as a precaution against the possibility of decades of torture. If you aren’t prepared to do the latter, you should reconsider the former.
I rather subscribe to how Greg Egan describes what the author is doing: