--Memetics is an entirely new way of understanding minds and agency. It is severely understudied as far as I can tell; the only academic work on the topic that I know of is Blackmore’s The Meme Machine from twenty years ago. This should give us some reason to hope that significant progress can be made quickly.
--Better understanding of memetics might have significant benefits for things other than AI alignment also, such as helping us steer the public discourse around AI risk, helping us be more rational and truth-seeking in general, helping us predict a potential decay of public epistemology, etc.
This has long been my suspicion. Combine meme theory with a multi-agent model of mind and it starts to look like the occult concept of “egregores” is right after all—distributed agents composed of many separate programs running on many separate human minds, coordinating via communication and ritualistic behaviors, control most of the world. Corporations and gods are two obvious examples.
Memetics. Maybe agents are to memes as ships are to seafarers.
--Maybe memes will be prevalent in highly capable minds; at least, maybe some of the first powerful AIs we build will be meme-vessels like we are.
--Memetics is an entirely new way of understanding minds and agency. It is severely understudied as far as I can tell; the only academic work on the topic that I know of is Blackmore’s The Meme Machine from twenty years ago. This should give us some reason to hope that significant progress can be made quickly.
--Better understanding of memetics might have significant benefits for things other than AI alignment also, such as helping us steer the public discourse around AI risk, helping us be more rational and truth-seeking in general, helping us predict a potential decay of public epistemology, etc.
This has long been my suspicion. Combine meme theory with a multi-agent model of mind and it starts to look like the occult concept of “egregores” is right after all—distributed agents composed of many separate programs running on many separate human minds, coordinating via communication and ritualistic behaviors, control most of the world. Corporations and gods are two obvious examples.