There is no time machine utilized here; you just live into the future normally.
Well, I think the most plausible way for me to live to see more than 120 years after my date of birth involves cryonics - and that might as well be time travel into the future.
If I'm teleported to the future and see all kind of horrifying things around me, this evidence that the future is a bad future is somewhat discounted because first I have to rule out the possibility that the "horrors" I see are manifestations or side effects of moral progress.
I would think so too; if all goes reasonably well, the future would be better for those that live in it, but that doesn't mean I won't be disturbed by it. And people in the future would probably judge me guilty of either contributing to or failing to prevent horrible crimes, much the same as we consider the ancient Romans to have been responsible for many horrible things. I don't want to be put on trial for eating factory farmed meat, for example.
I don't want to be put on trial for eating factory farmed meat, for example.
Behold the radiant beauty that is nullum crimen sine lege (specifically forbidding ex post facto laws as many modern legal systems do). Of course while this is pretty widely embraced by most decent places to live, it in practice isn't really robust since we've seen violations of this principle on a massive scale in recent history.
But a future that upheld it consistently would be pretty neat. Or so it seems to me when naively looking at it.
On October 29th, I asked Eliezer and the LW community if they were interested in doing a video Q&A. Eliezer agreed and a majority of commenters were in favor of the idea, so on November 11th, I created a thread where LWers could submit questions. Dozens of questions were asked, generating a total of over 650 comments. The questions were then ranked using the LW voting system.
On December 11th, Eliezer filmed his replies to the top questions (skipping some), and sent me the videos on December 22nd. Because voting continued after that date, the order of the top questions in the original thread has changed a bit, but you can find the original question for each video (and the discussion it generated, if any) by following the links below.
Thanks to Eliezer and everybody who participated.
Update: If you prefer to download the videos, they are available here (800 MB, .wmw format, sort the files by 'date created').
Link to question #1.
Link to question #2.
Link to question #3.
Link to question #4.
Eliezer Yudkowsky - Less Wrong Q&A (5/30) from MikeGR on Vimeo.
Link to question #5.
(Video #5 is on Vimeo because Youtube doesn't accept videos longer than 10 minutes and I only found out after uploading about a dozen. I would gladly have put them all on Vimeo, but there's a 500 MB/week upload limit and these videos add up to over 800 MB.)
Link to question #6.
Link to question #7.
Link to question #8.
Link to question #9.
Link to question #10.
Link to question #11.
Link to question #12.
Link to question #13.
Link to question #14.
Link to question #15.
Link to question #16.
Link to question #17.
Link to question #18.
Link to question #19.
Link to question #20.
Link to question #21.
Link to question #22.
Link to question #23.
Link to question #24.
Link to question #25.
Link to question #26.
Link to question #27.
Link to question #28.
Link to question #29.
Link to question #30.
If anything is wrong with the videos or links, let me know in the comments or via private message.