The first way is just to assert that from a standard utilitarian perspective, over the long term, technological progress is a fairly good indicator for lack of suffering (e.g. Europe vs. Africa).
What about hunter-gatherers vs farmers? And a universe devoid of both life and technology would have even less suffering than either.
The second is that I challenge you to define "pleasure," "happiness," or "lack of suffering."
Can you explain why you're giving me this challenge? Because I don't understand, if I couldn't define them except vaguely, how does it strengthen your case that we should care about technology and not these values. Suppose I told you that I want to maximize the smoothness of the universe, because that's even easier to define than "technology"? Wouldn't you think that's absurd?
Edit: Also, could you clarify whether you value technology as an end in itself, or just as a proxy for for your real values which perhaps you can't easily define but might be something like "life being good"?
The second is that I challenge you to define "pleasure," "happiness," or "lack of suffering."
Can you explain why you're giving me this challenge? Because I don't understand, if I couldn't define them except vaguely, how does it strengthen your case that we should care about technology and not these values.
As far as I understand him, he is saying that technological progress can be quantified. While all your ideas of how to rate world states can either not be quantified, and therefore can't be rated, or run into problems ...
This post is shameless self-promotion, but I'm told that's probably okay in the Discussion section. For context, as some of you are aware, I'm aiming to model C. elegans based on systematic high-throughput experiments - that is, to upload a worm. I'm still working on course requirements and lab training at Harvard's Biophysics Ph.D. program, but this remains the plan for my thesis.
Last semester I gave this lecture to Marvin Minsky's AI class, because Marvin professes disdain for everything neuroscience, and I wanted to give his students—and him—a fair perspective of how basic neuroscience might be changing for the better, and seems a particularly exciting field to be in right about now. The lecture is about 22 minutes long, followed by over an hour of questions and answers, which cover a lot of the memespace that surrounds this concept. Afterward, several students reported to me that their understanding of neuroscience was transformed.
I only just now got to encoding and uploading this recording; I believe that many of the topics covered could be of interest to the LW community (especially those with a background in AI and an interest in brains), perhaps worthy of discussion, and I hope you agree.