From a thread http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1551#comments in Armed and Dangerous:
Andy Freeman Says: January 6th, 2010 at 1:11 am
There’s another factor. Regulation is systemic risk.
Indeed, I have made the argument on a Less Wrong thread about existential risk that the best available mitigation is libertarianism. Not just political, but social libertarianism, by which I meant a wide divergence of lifestyles; the social equivalent of genetic, behavioral dispersion.
The LW community, like most technocratic groups (eg, socialists), seems to have this belief that there is some perfect cure for any problem. But there isn’t always, in fact for most complex and social problems there isn’t. Besides the Hayek mentioned earlier, see Thomas Sowell’s “A Conflict of Visions”, its sequel “Vision of the Anointed”, and his expansion on Hayek’s essay “Knowledge and Decisions”.
There is no way to ensure humanity’s survival, but the centralizing tendency seems a good way to prevent its survival should the SHTF.
... seems to have this belief that there is some perfect cure for any problem.
There may not be a single strategy that is perfect on it's own, but there will always be an optimum course of action, which may be a mixture of strategies (eg dump $X into nanotech safety, $Y into intelligence enhancement, and $Z into AGI development). You might never have enough information to know the optimal strategy to maximise your utility function, but one still exists, and it is worth trying to estimate it.
I mention this because previously I have heard "there is n...
In this video, Julian Savulescu from the Uehiro centre for Practical Ethics argues that human beings are "Unfit for the future" - that radical technological advance, liberal democracy and human nature will combine to make the 21st century the century of global catastropes, perpetrated by terrorists and psychopaths, with tools such as engineered viruses. He goes on to argue that enhanced intelligence and a reduced urge to violence and defection in large commons problems could be achieved using science, and may be a way out for humanity.
Skip to 1:30 to avoid the tedious introduction
Genetically enhance humanity or face extinction - PART 1 from Ethics of the New Biosciences on Vimeo.
Genetically enhance humanity or face extinction - PART 2 from Ethics of the New Biosciences on Vimeo.
Well, I have already said something rather like this. Perhaps this really is a good idea, more important, even, than coding a friendly AI? AI timelines where super-smart AI doesn't get invented until 2060+ would leave enough room for human intelligence enhancement to happen and have an effect. When I collected some SIAI volunteers' opinions on this, most thought that there was a very significant chance that super-smart AI will arrive sooner than that, though.
A large portion of the video consists of pointing out the very strong scientific case that our behavior is a result of the way our brains are structured, and that this means that changes in our behavior are the result of changes in the way our brains are wired.