Question. Even after the invention of effective contraception, many humans continue to have children. This seems a reasonable approximation of something like “Evolution in humans partially survived.” Is this somewhat analogous to “an [X] percent chance of killing less than a billion people”, and if so, how has this observation changed your estimate of “disassembl[ing] literally everyone”? (i.e. from “roughly 1“ to “I suppose less, but still roughly 1” or from “roughly 1” to “that’s not relevant, still roughly 1”? Or something else.)
(To take a stab at it myself, I expect that, conditional on us not all dying, we should expect to actually fully overcome evolution in a short enough timescale that it would still be a blink in evolutionary time. Essentially this observation is saying something like “We won’t get only an hour to align a dangerous AI before it kills us, we’ll probably get two hours!”, replaced with whatever timescale you expect for fooming.)
(No, I don’t think that works. First, it’s predicated on an assumption of what our future relationship with evolution will be like, which is uncertain. But second, those future states also need to be highly specific to be evolution-less. For example, a future where humans in the Matrix who “build” babies still does evolution, just not through genes (does this count? is this a different thing?[1]), so it may not count. Similarly one where we change humans so contraception is “on” by default, and you have to make a conscious choice to have kids, would not count.)
(Given the footnote I just wrote, I think a better take is something like “Evolution is difficult to kill, in a similar way to how gravity is hard to kill. Humans die easier. The transformation of human evolution pre-contraception to human evolution post-contraception is, if not analogous to a replacement of humanity with an entity that is entirely not human, is at least analogous to creating a future state humans-of-today would not want (that is, human evolutionary course post-contraception is not what evolution pre-contraception would’ve “chosen”). The fact that evolution survived at all is not particularly hope inducing.)
[1] Such a thing is still evolution in the mathematical sense (that a^x > (b+constant)^x after some x iff a>b), but it does seem like, in a sense, biological evolution would no longer “recognize” these humans. Analogous to an AGI replacing all humans with robots that do their jobs more efficiently. Maybe it’s still “society” but still seems like humanity has been removed.
Question. Even after the invention of effective contraception, many humans continue to have children. This seems a reasonable approximation of something like “Evolution in humans partially survived.” Is this somewhat analogous to “an [X] percent chance of killing less than a billion people”, and if so, how has this observation changed your estimate of “disassembl[ing] literally everyone”? (i.e. from “roughly 1“ to “I suppose less, but still roughly 1” or from “roughly 1” to “that’s not relevant, still roughly 1”? Or something else.)
(To take a stab at it myself, I expect that, conditional on us not all dying, we should expect to actually fully overcome evolution in a short enough timescale that it would still be a blink in evolutionary time. Essentially this observation is saying something like “We won’t get only an hour to align a dangerous AI before it kills us, we’ll probably get two hours!”, replaced with whatever timescale you expect for fooming.)
(No, I don’t think that works. First, it’s predicated on an assumption of what our future relationship with evolution will be like, which is uncertain. But second, those future states also need to be highly specific to be evolution-less. For example, a future where humans in the Matrix who “build” babies still does evolution, just not through genes (does this count? is this a different thing?[1]), so it may not count. Similarly one where we change humans so contraception is “on” by default, and you have to make a conscious choice to have kids, would not count.)
(Given the footnote I just wrote, I think a better take is something like “Evolution is difficult to kill, in a similar way to how gravity is hard to kill. Humans die easier. The transformation of human evolution pre-contraception to human evolution post-contraception is, if not analogous to a replacement of humanity with an entity that is entirely not human, is at least analogous to creating a future state humans-of-today would not want (that is, human evolutionary course post-contraception is not what evolution pre-contraception would’ve “chosen”). The fact that evolution survived at all is not particularly hope inducing.)
[1] Such a thing is still evolution in the mathematical sense (that a^x > (b+constant)^x after some x iff a>b), but it does seem like, in a sense, biological evolution would no longer “recognize” these humans. Analogous to an AGI replacing all humans with robots that do their jobs more efficiently. Maybe it’s still “society” but still seems like humanity has been removed.