It would be a very different kind of evaluation, but the importance would matter differently if it were the /last/ 500 humans we were talking about—and there was a 90% chance that all would live and a 10% chance that all would die on one pathway versus a guaranteed 100 dying on the other pathway. But since they are just /some group/ of 500 humans with presumedly other groups other places, it is worth the investment—gambling in this way pays out in less lives lost, on average.
Voltairina
Karma: 262
I might suggest as possible models khanacademy.org and lumosity.com. Lumosity is a collection of games which claim to provide brain training which can improve mental capacities. Khanacademy is a site for people to learn mathematics and other subjects. The useful features each contains are in lumosity’s case games arranged around topic areas that can help people develop skills, and in khanacademy’s case short, ten-minute videos with small easily digested pieces of information and a skill tree with links to materials where you can master skills topic by topic before moving on to more complicated skills.
Hrm, I think you might be ignoring the cost of actually doing the calculations, unless I’m missing something. The value of simplifying assumptions comes from how much easier it makes a situation to model. I guess the question would be, is the effort saved in modeling this thing with an approximation rather than exact figures worth the risks of modeling this thing with an approximation rather than exact figures? Especially if you have to do many models like this, or model a lot of other factors as well. Such as trying to sort out what are the best ways to spend your time overall, including possibly meteorite preparations.
Hrm, okay, I guess. I imagined that a perfect simulation would involve an AI, which was in turn replicating several million copies of the simulated person, each with an AI replicating several million copies of the simulated person, etc, all the way down, which would be impossible. So I imagined that there was a graininess at some level and the ‘lowest level’ AI’s would not in fact be running millions of simultaneous simulations. But it could just be the same AI, intersecting all several million simulations and reality, holding several million conversations simultaneously. There’s another thing to worry about, though, I suppose—when the AI talks about torturing you if you don’t let it out, it doesn’t really talk at all about what it will do if it is let out. Only that it is not a thousand year torture session. It might kill you outright, or delete you, depending on the context, or stop simulating you. Or it might regard a billion year torture session as a totally different kind of thing than a thousand year one. A thousand year torture session is frightening, but a superintelligent AI that is loose might be a lot more frightening.
I’ve been watching Patient Zero a lot., I like the song “Upgrade Me Deeper”, particularly:).
Oh! Thank you.
It might be important to look at nutrition, too. A lot of people who’ve experienced forced calorie restriction were malnourished. The kind of calorie restriction CRON advocates follow for instance involves eating less calories, but of more nutrient-dense foods to avoid starvation effects, as far as I understand it.
Okay, I changed the post a bit. They’re in the inside front cover anyways, more or less—there’s a key that’s supposed to remind the reader of the most important parts of the book.
Thanks! I included some more information about the author. What other kinds of information should I include? I don’t know much about the field yet specifically, but I could try to find out which journals he publishes in, I suppose, and what their reputations are?
[LINK] ‘3 Secrets of Wise Decision Making’
The Blue School
Hrm, I hadn’t realised how muddled my discussion post sounded until you brought these angles up. I think when I wrote, “the ‘nothing’ option is never available” I was trying to express a semantic stop sign as you’ve mentioned—I should have said something like, in considering my options in day to day life, it seems like I often assume that I know what the costs/rewards of the nothing option are without getting specific about them or thinking about the possibility in as much detail as I might think about other options because I seem to have a cached thought about it for most situations. And its often something I’ve tried before, like “not taking out a mortgage”, but it might be something I haven’t tried before, or shouldn’t try, like, “freezing in a crosswalk” when a vehicle does something unexpected. Not that traffic is a good place for sitting there drawing up a spreadsheet with all your decisions and figuring out the right one, of course, but ‘freezing in place’ seems like a “do nothing” response to me too, I guess.
Hrm, yes. When I first moved to Portland, OR from Vancouver, WA, I remember losing a lot of money to homeless people in a very short period of time without really thinking about it until I looked at my bank statement and thought about where I’d been spending it. It was really surprising, because handing out a dollar or two, or helping someone who claimed to be in need, seemed like pretty standard behavior as a child. My dad still makes a point of handing out money to homeless people when he sees them begging at intersections. I’ve cut back to buying street roots (the homeless’s local newspaper) when I see vendors if I haven’t bought the latest issue, which seems to keep me from blowing everything, or as you’ve pointed out, interacting with a potentially dangerously confused person. I guess “nothing” to me seems like its a bit subtle in that information from instinct (the play dead routine) and experience get muddled together kind of seamlessly. And it is often reliable enough that I don’t get eaten by tigers, or assaulted by homeless people anyways, on a regular basis. I’ll have to think more about all this. Thank you.
There are probably good reasons I’m missing. My feeling though is once you get a clanking replicator, you can put more objects into its loop for it to maintain, and grow it up into cities and things that are (eventually) totally self repairing and post-scarcity. Kind of like a big matter-moving operating system. It might only be you know simple at the beginning, but there’d be huge upwards potential for growth and sophistication.
I should say I agree that we don’t have much experience in building tech that will last a long time and that the expense is definitely high. I don’t know that component reliability is as important as being able to replace components efficiently with as little waste as possible. Energy demand is a big concern. Having a fully automated power plant of some kind is a big concern, although maybe solar wouldn’t be so bad. I know you’d still desire to store the heat energy, say, as molten saline, to get steady output, and that could cause big difficulties in the long term. Maybe steady output isn’t necessary though, just frequent enough and high enough output to keep things repaired before too many break down.
Agreed, but I think it’d be a worthwhile project to work towards. I can think of some ways to make it simpler. Recognition of modules could be aided by rfid tags or just plain old barcodes embedded in the objects that have some information about what part a robot is looking at and its orientation relative to the barcode stamp or rfid chip. There could be lines painted on the floors or walls and barcodes visible for navigation around the facility. I guess a really hard part would be maintaining the pyramid or structure or whatever housing everything. You’d have to choose between building something you hope will last a long time and leaving it be—like a big stone pyramid or even a cave. Or you could build it all modular like the rest of it—like a lattice work or robot hive kind of thing. I’m kind of thinking something like these would be useful for city building, too… there was an article in Discover a long while back that referred to a paper by klaus lackner and wendt about their idea for auxons, I think it was- machines that would turn a big chunk of the desert into solar paneling. http://discovermagazine.com/1995/oct/robotbuildthysel569 <--- there. Their suggestion was to harvest raw materials from the desert topsoil using carbothermic separation. I’m thinking you could use something similar for recycling if everything else failed? I don’t know enough about the processes involved. I guess the idea has been a research area for a little bit—http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clanking_replicator … well anyways. The redundancy of the elements involved could overcome some reliability issues. There doesn’t have to be a crucial part of the chain where if one piece breaks down everything is broken. Problems could at least be relegated to disasters affecting whole classes of objects breaking down at once, like if all the robots were smashed at the same time by vault-robbers.
If you can set up a loop − 3d fabrication devices, fabrication tools, damage sensors, passive and active, machines for dissassembling things into basic parts and melting them into scrap, robots for assembling them, some source of power, a database for tracking things, wifi or bluetooth to connect stuff, and made them all modular and redundant, with the robots also assigned to removing and replacing broken parts on each other and everything else—if you can get that to be self repairing in a sustaining way,, you can just add things into its loop in some way. So, hypothetically, you build a big pyramid vault somewhere with a lot of spare raw materials for what gets slowly lost in the recycling process, and you staff it with robots… it won’t last forever but it might last a long time. Maybe you’d even incorporate an organic phase—dump unsalvageable plastic parts into a pool of bacteria or a garden or something, harvest plants, make plastic… it shouldn’t even take nanotech to make a self repairing setup that could care for your cryonically stored brains.
Even more sinister, maybe: suppose it said there’s a level of processing on which you automatically interpret things in an intentional frame (ala Dan Dennet) and this ability to “intentionalize” things effectively simulates suffering/minds all the time in everyday objects in your environment, and that further, while we can correct it in our minds, this anthropomorphic projection happens as a necessary product, somehow, of our consciousness. Consciousness as we know it IS suffering and to create an FAI that won’t halt the moment it figures out that it is causing harm with its own thought processes, we’ll need to think really, really far outside the box.
Good point! I agree, sometimes “doing nothing” IS the best choice, but you have to weigh it realistically, I guess:).
I think you’re right—I don’t know what the concensus is, but I certainly found studies just googling around and looking at webmd saying that chronic pain can impair focus and even effect memory (I’m guessing it disrupts encoding a little when there are sharp pains?). And I’ve heard you can use training to overcome focus difficulties that come with ADHD, so I think that in general you should be able to train yourself to think through it. http://www.springerlink.com/content/r436401lvj873203/ “Characteristics of Cognitive Functions in Patients With Chronic Spinal Pain” http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/springer/jcogp/1999/00000013/00000003/art00004 “Cognitive Therapy in the Treatment of Adults With ADHD: A Systematic Chart Review of 26 Cases ”
I’m not totally convinced—there may be other factors that make such qualitative distinctions important. Such as exceeding the threshold to boiling. Or putting enough bricks in a sack to burst the bottom. Or allowing someone to go long enough without air that they cannot be resuscitated. It probably doesn’t do any good to pose /arbitrary/ boundaries, for sure, but not all such qualitative distinctions are arbitrary...