13 metaphors to give the flavor of why sufficiently advanced A.I. could be extremely dangerous

April 2, 2023

1. Suppose a new species evolves on earth with the same intellectual, planning, and coordination abilities relative to us that we have relative to chimps. Chimps are faster and stronger than most humans - why don't they run the show? 2. Suppose aliens show up on earth that are far smarter than the smartest among us at all cognitive tasks. They have specific goals that aren't fully aligned with ours, are completely unconstrained by human morality, and don't value our survival. What happens ne...

Society and civilization: possible future paths

August 31, 2020

Written: August 31, 2020 | Released: May 21, 2021 There are many paths by which, in our lifetimes, the world could end up looking very different than it does today. Below I've outlined just a few of the many possibilities, each in ~280 characters or less. Note that they are not mutually exclusive. Path A: China could end up as the world's sole superpower. Not only is its GDP growing faster than the U.S. (~double the rate), but it seems to be suffering less institutional decay, seems b...

16 Potentially-Dystopian Utopias

November 7, 2017

Suppose that humans one day (whether 20 or 200 years from now) create far more advanced technology, with power sufficient to reshape what the world is like, and even to determine what humanity becomes. If that comes to pass, we’re going to be in trouble unless we also reach a better understanding of our own values and resolve the inconsistencies in them. We don’t have sufficient clarity on our values to say what the ideal world looks like. So if we ever have the power to truly redesign the w...

Amazing Possibilities in Virtual Reality

August 23, 2017

I think that people tend to greatly underestimate how amazing (and also insane) virtual reality could be one day, once it achieves all of the following: (1) sufficient image and audio realism that (at least a lot of the time) your brain is fooled into thinking it is having a real-life experience (state of the art is progressing steadily in this direction). (2) massively multiplayer real-time environments (with fast internet and computers with state of the art GPUs, this is fairly doable a...

Tough Questions about Utopia

July 16, 2017

Some tough questions for you about utopia (along with my very tentative and very likely wrong guesses for answers): If you were attempting to design a true utopia for ten million people on an obscure island deep out in the ocean, and you had total control over institutions and unlimited money, but you could NOT change human nature or human psychology then:(a) what would you hope people would spend their time doing in this utopia?(b) how would you incentivize people to actually spend their t...

Goals are Valuable and Dangerous

June 30, 2017

One of the most dangerous and useful things about goal setting is that it feels good to achieve challenging goals even if they are meaningless, only five minutes old, or created by someone else. Imagine throwing away a crumpled piece of paper in a waste bin. Now imagine doing it again, but assume this time that you set the goal of throwing it in from 6 feet away. As your tossed paper ball sails through the air, you may feel an edge of nervousness. When it falls into the bin, you may feel a s...

Convincing Your Future Self

January 31, 2014

You have control over yourself for the next eight seconds. Maybe even the next three minutes. Right now you can choose to go to the gym right now. Right now you can choose to start something difficult (but valuable) that you've been putting off for a long time. But right now you can't choose to go to the gym tomorrow. You definitely can't choose to quit your job a year from now. Because tomorrow if you don't feel like it, you're not going to go to the gym, regardless of what the you of today dec...