This clearly isn’t the worst possible future… if our AI mind children inherit only our culture and leave us behind it feels more like a consolation prize
Leaving aside s-risks, this could very easily be the emptiest possible future. Like, even if they ‘inherit our culture’ it could be a “Disneyland with no children” (I happen to think this is more likely than not but with huge uncertainty).
Separately,
We should aim much higher: for defeating death, across all of time, for resurrection and transcendence.
this anti-deathist vibe has always struck me as very impoverished and somewhat uninspiring. The point should be to live, awesomely! which includes alleviating suffering and disease, and perhaps death. But it also ought to include a lot more positive creation and interaction and contemplation and excitement etc.!
Suffering, disease and mortality all have a common primary cause—our current substrate dependence. Transcending to a substrate-independent existence (ex uploading) also enables living more awesomely. Immortality without transcendence would indeed be impoverished in comparison.
Like, even if they ‘inherit our culture’ it could be a “Disneyland with no children”
My point was that even assuming our mind children are fully conscious ‘moral patients’, it’s a consolation prize if the future can not help biological humans.
Leaving aside s-risks, this could very easily be the emptiest possible future. Like, even if they ‘inherit our culture’ it could be a “Disneyland with no children” (I happen to think this is more likely than not but with huge uncertainty).
Separately,
this anti-deathist vibe has always struck me as very impoverished and somewhat uninspiring. The point should be to live, awesomely! which includes alleviating suffering and disease, and perhaps death. But it also ought to include a lot more positive creation and interaction and contemplation and excitement etc.!
Suffering, disease and mortality all have a common primary cause—our current substrate dependence. Transcending to a substrate-independent existence (ex uploading) also enables living more awesomely. Immortality without transcendence would indeed be impoverished in comparison.
My point was that even assuming our mind children are fully conscious ‘moral patients’, it’s a consolation prize if the future can not help biological humans.
It looks like we basically agree on all that, but it pays to be clear (especially because plenty of people seem to disagree).
‘Transcending’ doesn’t imply those nice things though, and those nice things don’t imply transcending. Immortality is similarly mostly orthogonal.