Well, I agree, that would help FAI build people similar to you. But why do you want FAI to do that?
And what copying precision is OK for you? Would just making a clone based in your DNA suffice? Maybe, you don’t even have to bother with all these screenshots and photos.
I’m very skeptical of the third. A human brain contains ~10^10 neurons and ~10^14 synapses—which would be hard to infer from ~10^5 photos/screenshots, esp. considering that they don’t convey that much information about your brain structure. DNA and comprehensive brain scans are better, but I guess that getting brain scans with required precision isn’t quite easy.
Cryonics, at least, might work.
It is; and actually it is a more plausible scenario. Aliens surely may want it; like humans do both in fiction and reality—for example, see the First directive in Star Trek and the practice of sterilizing rovers before sending them to other planets in real life.
I, however, investigated that particular flavor of the Zoo hypotheses it the post.
I don’t know whether the statement (intelligence ⇒ consciousness) is true, so I assign a non-zero probability to it being false.
Suppose I said “Assume NP = P”, or the contrary “Assume NP != P”. One of those statements is logically false (the same way 1 = 2 is false). Still, while you can dismiss an argument which starts “Assume 1 = 2”, you probably shouldn’t do the same with those NP ones, even if one of them is, strictly speaking, logical nonsense.
Also a few words about concepts. You can explain a concept using other concepts, and then explain the concepts you have used to explain the first one, and so on, but the chain should end somewhere, right? So here it ends on consciousness.
1) I know that there is a phenomenon (that I call ‘consciousness’), because I observe it directly.
2) I don’t know a decent theory to explain what it really is, and what properties does it have.
3) To my knowledge, nobody actually has. That is why, the problem of consciousness is labeled as ‘hard’.
Too many people, I’ve noticed, just pick a theory of consciousness that they consider the best, and then become overconfident of it. Not quite a good idea given that there is so little data.
So if the most plausible says (intelligence ⇒ consciousness) is true, you shouldn’t immediately dismiss everything that is based on the opposite. The Bayesian way is to integrate over all possible theories, weighted by their probabilities.
Modern computers can be programmed to do almost every task a human can make, including very high-level ones, that’s why sort-of yes, they are (and maybe sort-of conscious, if you are willing to stretch this concept that far).
Some time ago we could program computers to execute some algorithm which solves a problem; now we have machine learning and don’t have to provide an algorithm for every task; but we still have different machine learning algorithms for different areas/meta-tasks (computer vision, classification, time series prediction, etc.). When we build systems that are capable of solving problems in all these areas simultaneously—and combining the results to reach some goal—I would call such systems truly intelligent.
Having said that, I don’t think I need an insight or explanation here—because well, I mostly agree with you or jacob_cannel—it’s likely that intelligence and unconsciousness are logically incompatible. Yet as long as the problem of consciousness is not fully resolved, I can’t be certain, therefore assign non-zero probability for the conjunction to be possible.
Makes sense.
Anyway, any trait which isn’t consciousness (and obviously it wouldn’t be consciousness) would suffice, provided there is some reason to hide from Earth rather than destroy it.
There are concepts which are hardly explainable (given our current understanding of them). Consciousness is one of them. Qualia. Subjective experience. The thing which separates p-zombies from non-p-zombies.
If you don’t already understand what I mean, small chance that I would be able to explain.
As for the assumption, I agree that it is implausible, yet possible. Do you consider your computer conscious?
And no doubt that scenarios your mention are more plausible.
Why do you think it is unlikely? I think any simple criterion which separates aliens from environment would suffice.
Personally, I think that the scenario is implausible for the other reason: human moral system would easily adapt to such aliens. People sometimes personify things that aren’t remotely sentient, let alone aliens who would actually act as sentient/conscious beings.
The other reason is that I consider sentience without consciousness relatively implausible.
Filters don’t have to be mutually exclusive, and as for collectively exhaustive part, take all plausible Great Filter candidates.
I don’t quite understand that Great Filter hype, by the way; having a single cause for civilization failure seems very implausible (<1%).
It’s extremely hard to ban the research worldwide, and then it’s extremely hard to enforce such decision.
Firstly, you’ll have to convince all the world’s governments (btw, there are >200) to pass such laws.
Then, you’ll likely have all powerful nations doing the research secretly, because it provides some powerful weaponry / other ways to acquire power; or just out of fear that some other government will do it first.
And even if you somehow managed to pass the law worldwide, and stopped governments from doing research secretly, how would you stop individual researchers?
The humanity hasn’t prevented the use of nuclear bombs, and has barely prevented a full-blown nuclear war; while nuclear bombs require national-level industry to produce, and are available to a few countries only. How can we hope to ban something which can be researched and launched in your basement?
Why do you prefer offline conversations to online?
Off the top of my head, I can name 3 advantages of online communication, which are quite important to LessWrong:
You don’t have to go anywhere. Since the LW community is distributed all over the world, it is really important; when you go to meetups, you can communicate only with people who happen to be in the same place as you, when you communicate online, you can communicate with everyone.
You have more time to think before reply, if you need to. For example, you can support your arguments with relevant research papers or data.
As you have noticed, online articles and discussions remain available on the site. You have proposed to write articles after offline events, but a) not everything will be covered by them and b) it requires additional effort.
Well, enjoy offline events if you like to; but the claim that people should always prefer offline activities over online activities is highly questionable, IMO.
I have noticed that many people here want LW resurrection for the sake of LW resurrection.
But why do you want it in the first place?
Do you care about rationality? Then research rationality and write about it, here or anywhere else. Do you enjoy the community of LWers? Then participate in meetups, discuss random things in OTs, have nice conversations, etc. Do you want to write more rationalist fiction? Do it. And so on.
After all, if you think that Eliezer’s writing constitute most of LW value, and Eliezer doesn’t write here anymore, maybe the wise decision is to let it decay.
Beware the lost purposes.
What is the point of having separated Open Threads and Stupid Questions threads, instead of allowing “stupid questions” in OTs and making OTs more frequent?
And the effort required to earn the money to buy the ring is also wasted.
No, it’s not. You have produced (hopefully) valuable goods or services; why they are wasted, from the viewpoint of society?
Such cost calculations are wildly overestimated.
Suppose you buy a luxury item, like a golden ring with brilliants. You pay a lot of money, but your money isn’t going to disappear; it is redistributed between traders, jewelers, miners, etc. The only thing that’s lost is the total effort required to produce that ring, which often costs lesser by an order of magnitude. And if the item you buy is actually useful, the wasted effort is even lower.
The cost of having kids is so high for you, because you will likely raise well-educated children with high intelligence, which are valuable assets to our society; likely being net positive, after all. Needless to say, actually ensuring that these poor children in Africa will end up that well, rather than, say, die of starvation the next year, is going to cost you much more than 800$. So you pay for quality here.
Well, everyone will likely die sooner or later, even post-Singularity (provided that it will happen, which isn’t quite a solid fact).
Anyway, I think that any morality system that proclaims unethical all and every birth happened so far is inadequate.
That only works if there are few levels of abstraction; I doubt that you can derive how do programs work at the machine codes level based of your knowledge of physics and high-level programming. Sometimes, gears are so small that you can’t even see them on your top level big picture, and sometimes just climbing up one level of abstraction takes enormous effort if you don’t know in advance how to do it.
I think that you should understand, at least once, how the system works on each level and refresh/deepen that knowledge when you need it.
Read what is a matrix, how to add, multiply and invert them, what is a determinant and what is an eigenvector and that’s enough to get you started. There are many algorithms in ML where vectors/matrices are used mostly as a handy notation.
Yes, you will be unable to understand some parts of ML which substantially require linear algebra; yes, understanding ML without linear algebra is harder; yes, you need linear algebra for almost any kind of serious ML research—but it doesn’t mean that you have to spend a few years studying arcane math before you can open a ML textbook.
You’re right; you have to learn solid background for research. But still, it often makes sense to learn in the reversed order.
Is this acutally a bad thing? In both cases, Bob and Sally not only succeeded in their initial goals, but also made some extra progress.
Also, fictional evidence. It is not implausible to imagine a scenario when Bob does all the same things and learns French, German and then fails on e.g. Spanish. The same thing for Sally.
In general, if you have tried some strategy and succeeded, it does make sense to go ahead and try it on other problems (until it finally stops working). If you have invented e.g. a new machine learning method to solve a specific practical problem, the obvious next step is to try to apply it to other problems. If you found a very interesting article in a blog it makes sense to take a look at other articles in it. And so on. A method being successful is an evidence for it being successful in the future / on other sets of problems / etc.
So, I wouldn’t change to change those mistakes into successes, because they weren’t mistakes in the first place. An optimal strategy is not guaranteed to succeed every single time; rather it should have the maximal success probability.