= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
gwern comments on Malthusian copying: mass death of unhappy life-loving uploads - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (82)
'Pain asymbolia' is when people feel pain but it isn't painful: they are aware of the damage but it causes no suffering. (As opposed to conditions like leprosy or diabetes, where the pain nerves are dead, report nothing, and this causes endless health problems.)
We already find it very useful to override pain in the interests of long-term gain or optimization (eg. surgery). Why should we not expect uploads to quickly be engineered to pain asymbolia? Pain which is more like a clock ticking away in the corner of one's eye than a needle through the eye doesn't seem like that bad a problem.
You probably don't even need to do that much re-engineering. The 'suffering' of uploads in a Malthusian existence isn't physical pain, just endless mental drudge work. They could probably just interfere with their emotional experience of time so that they didn't get bored or overwhelmed. See, e.g. Diane Van Deren who became one of the world's top ultra-runners (100-300 mile races) after epilepsy surgery damaged her perception of time.
Interesting; I'd never heard of her before. My closest example was the late Jure Robic
Those uploads would probably be outcompeted by uploads that feel extreme pain any time they aren't working.
Do companies that judge projects based on their Return on Investment over the next week outcompete companies that judge RoI over months or years?
Okay, it couldn't be taken to extreme levels, but I think some things (like arguing about uploads on LW) are sufficiently unlikely to improve workplace productivity that a dose of pain for doing it would be have positive expected survival value.
Far more efficiently dealt with by some simple cognitive prostheses like RescueTime... What's better, a few machine instructions matching a blocked Web address, or reengineering the architecture of the brain with, at a minimum, operant conditioning? This is actually a good example of how a crude ancestral mechanism like pain is not very adaptive or applicable to upload circumstances!
I'll concede that it's not terribly likely, then (with the pascal's wager caveat of it being very bad if it is true (and the anti-caveat that I don't think the upload scenario is stable anyway))
Selection, not reegineering. The question is whether there are people alive today with the best sets of characteristics to become these malthusian uploads.
The mass of uploads seem much more likely to be contractors rather than employees or bosses; hence they would be required to be very performant in the short term. Even if they are employees, their short-term copies would have the same requirements.
Only if nobody succeeded in developing non-pain-based cognitive architecture modifications that achieved competitive results. E.g., making work addictive via positive feedback.
Very simplified POCs are already feasible in lab rats, so I expect future ems (which would allow for very rapid and extensive modification and testing) could solve the problem for humans. The interesting question is whether there will be legal or market pressures for anyone to work on the problem at all.