So the real threat to humanity are the machines that humanity will become. (Is in the process of becoming.)
stcredzero
Karma: 601
There are massive intractable problems with human society on earth at the moment which lack easy solutions (poverty, aids, overpopulation, climate change, social order).
Poverty—has always been with us. Many, many people are better off. AIDS—We will solve this. Overpopulation—Population will stabilize at 10 billion. See 2nd link. Climate change—see below. Social order—so long as we don’t extinguish ourselves, this will work itself out.
http://www.gapminder.org/videos/hans-rosling-ted-2006-debunking-myths-about-the-third-world/
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth.html
We might be stuck in the solar system for the next century, but we’re certainly not stuck on Earth.
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/03/elon-musk-says-ticket-to-mars-will-cost-500000/
For the longer term, it is hugely beyond our technological abilities
We could start colonizing Mars using nuclear rockets in 20 years, if we wanted to. Heck, if we wanted to badly enough, we could start it in 20 years with chemical rockets.
whatever determines our survival as a species for the nex millennium will be decided on earth. And we are struggling with that right now.
Certain things will be decided in the next century. We could colonize Mars with agriculture but without terraforming well inside that. When it comes to an issue like “species survival” I think the expense and redundancy are justified. Whether or not western civilization decides to colonize Mars will be one of those deciding factors. The colonization of Mars would be a turning point in human history as significant as the european colonization of North America, with political and economic consequences as large and as far-ranging. Perhaps it would be better if western civilization did not choose to colonize Mars. I’m fairly certain Chinese civilization will do so, and having both powers vying for new territory could well result in war.
How about large stations with artificial gravity and zero-G? We were launching 747 sized hulls 97% of the way into orbit, only to dispose of them about once or twice a year for many, many years. (Shuttle main tank.) Large trampoline-sided spaces would result in really cool new sports and forms of art.
The problem with this (and related theories) is that the soul believers believe that the soul itself can live and think without the body. Much of thinking is mediated by language. I don’t think a believer in soul would accept that their soul after death will be incapable of thought until God provides it a substitute pineal gland.
Actually, the concept of soul without language makes more sense on its own and fits more religious traditions (especially if you abandon literal translations) than souls that have language.
So, a little background- I’ve just come out as an atheist to my dad, a Christian pastor, who’s convinced he can “fix” my thinking and is bombarding me with a number of flimsy arguments that I’m having trouble articulating a response to
Being articulate has nothing to do with the truth. If your dad isn’t willing to explore where he’s wrong, then you shouldn’t be talking about your world views with him. If you can’t establish your world view without him, then you’re not ready to establish it at all.
I’d advise not worrying about “the big questions” so much as what kind of person you are in the relationships that mean the most to you. I suggest creating value in the world. What kind of person you are “in the small” is actually more complex and more rewarding to explore.
You’re assuming that there’s always an answer for the more intelligent actor. Only happens that way in the movies. Sometimes you get the bear, and sometimes the bear gets you.
Sometimes one can pin their hopes on the laws of physics in the face of a more intelligent foe.
There’s lots of scope for great adventure stories in dystopian futures.
The approx 2% figure is interesting to me. This seems to be about the right frequency to be related to the small minority of jerks who will haze strangers for sexist and/or racist motivations.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3736037
This might be related to the differences in the perception of the prevalence of racism between minorities and mainstream members of society. If one stands out in a crowd, then one can be more easily “marked” by individuals seeking to victimize someone vulnerable. This is something that I seem to have observed over the years, though I have not taken the time to gather hard data.
Basically, if one has a noticeable and salient difference, one will tend to attract more than one’s share of attention from “jerks.” Though such events are uncommon, they will happen often enough that the possibility always lurks in the back of one’s mind. This results in a noticeable cognitive difference between minorities and mainstream persons.
It’s easy to imagine specific scenarios, especially when generalizing from fictional evidence. In fact we don’t have evidence sufficient to even raise any scenario as concrete as yours to the level of awareness. … I could as easily reply that AI that wanted to kill fleeing humans could do so by powerful enough directed lasers, which will overtake any STL ship. But this is a contrived scenario. There really is no reason to discuss it specifically.
A summary of your points is that: while conceivable, there’s no reason to think it’s at all likely. Ok. How about, “Because it’s fun to think about?”
Actually, lasers might not be practical against maneuverable targets because of the diffraction limit and the lightspeed limit. In order to focus a laser at very great distances, one would need very large lenses. (Perhaps planet sized, depending on distance and frequency.) Targets could respond by moving out of the beam, and the lightspeed limit would preclude immediate retargeting. Compensating for this by making the beam wider would be very expensive.
To write a culture that isn’t just like your own culture, you have to be able to see your own culture as a special case—not as a norm which all other cultures must take as their point of departure.
Most North Americans that fall into the rather arbitrary “white” category do not see their culture as a special case. “White” North Americans tend to see themselves as the “plain vanilla” universal human. Everyone else is a “flavor.” In truth, vanilla is also a flavor, of course.
How do I know this? Because I’m of Korean extraction, and I’ve been playing Irish Traditional music for the past 23 years. For some reason, the fact that I play such music is more notable than “white” people of Hungarian, German, English, Polish, and French extraction that I’ve met—but only in the cases where such persons do not have “funny” accents. In this context, a “funny” accent that isn’t from the British isles is just as good as different skin tone and facial features.
There’s more to this I could say. I’ve also been walking around as a well educated middle class native-born member of this culture, while wearing different facial features. I grew up in isolation from my “own” ethnic community. In this, I have a certain advantage concerning awareness of my own culture. (And even so, I became aware of how unaware I usually am of it when travelling abroad.)
If within our own lifetime we undergo such alien thought changes, alien thoughts in actual aliens will be alien indeed.
Indeed. However, I am beginning to think that by emphasizing the magnitude of the alienness of alien thought, we are intending to avoid complacency but we are also creating another kind of “woo.”
Reason: Cockroaches and the behavior of humans. We can and do kill individuals and specific groups of individuals. We can’t kill all of them, however. If humans can get into space, the lightspeed barrier might let far-flung tribes of “human fundamentalists,” to borrow a term from Charles Stross, to survive, though individuals would often be killed and would never stand a chance in a direct conflict with a super AI.
What if the AI are advanced over us as we are over cockroaches, and the superintelligent AI find us just as annoying, disgusting, and hard to kill?
I wonder if a DDR version of Dual-N-Back could be devised?
Sounds silly, and it’s not very hip, but Fly Lady has worked very well for my girlfriend. Basically, they send you messages giving you mostly short (like 3 minute) tidying and cleaning missions. Your place gets messy a minute at a time, so they keep you cleaning for short intervals to counteract that.
When my girlfriend is participating, the difference is dramatic, and it stays that way for weeks at a time.
Which god? If by “God” you mean “something essentially perfect and infallible,” then yes.
That one. Big man in sky invented by shepherds does’t interest me much. Just because I’m a better optimizer of resources in certain contexts than an amoeba doesn’t make me perfect and infallible. Just because X is orders of magnitude a better optimizer than Y doesn’t make X perfect and infallible. Just because X can rapidly optimize itself doesn’t make it infallible either. Yet when people talk about the post-singularity super-optimizers, they seem to be talking about some sort of Sci-Fi God.
In a practical sense, I think this means you want to put yourself in situations where success is the default, expected result.
This is a little like “burning the boats.”
http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/06/andreessen-media-burn-boats/
Isn’t it almost certain that super-optimizing AI will result in unintended consequences? I think it’s almost certain that super-optimizing AI will have to deal with their own unintended consequences. Isn’t the expectation of encountering intelligence so advanced, that it’s perfect and infallible essentially the expectation of encountering God?
In his Mars Direct talks, Robert Zubrin cited the shoestring budget Amundsen expedition through the Northwest Passage in comparison to around 30 contemporary government funded expeditions with state of the art steam frigates and huge logistics trains. The Amundsen expedition traveled in a cheap little sealing boat and fed themselves largely through rifles and ammunition they brought with them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Mm34Muv6Lsg#t=102s