The Yudkowsky Ambition Scale

loup-vaillant

We're going to build the next Facebook!

We're going to found the next Apple!

Our product will create sweeping political change! This will produce a major economic revolution in at least one country! (Seasteading would be change on this level if it worked; creating a new country successfully is around the same level of change as this.)

Our product is the next nuclear weapon. You wouldn't want that in the wrong hands, would you?

This is going to be the equivalent of the invention of electricity if it works out.

We're going to make an IQ-enhancing drug and produce basic change in the human condition.

We're going to build serious Drexler-class molecular nanotechnology.

We're going to upload a human brain into a computer.

We're going to build a recursively self-improving Artificial Intelligence.

We think we've figured out how to hack into the computer our universe is running on.

This made me laugh, but from the look of it, I'd say there is little work to do to make it serious. Personally, I'd try to shorten it so it is punchier and more memorable.

From Hacker News.

We're going to build the next Facebook!

We're going to found the next Apple!

Our product will create sweeping political change! This will produce a major economic revolution in at least one country! (Seasteading would be change on this level if it worked; creating a new country successfully is around the same level of change as this.)

Our product is the next nuclear weapon. You wouldn't want that in the wrong hands, would you?

This is going to be the equivalent of the invention of electricity if it works out.

We're going to make an IQ-enhancing drug and produce basic change in the human condition.

We're going to build serious Drexler-class molecular nanotechnology.

We're going to upload a human brain into a computer.

We're going to build a recursively self-improving Artificial Intelligence.

We think we've figured out how to hack into the computer our universe is running on.

This made me laugh, but from the look of it, I'd say there is little work to do to make it serious. Personally, I'd try to shorten it so it is punchier and more memorable.

Nice! I'm thinking my idea of a self-adjusting currency that uses a peer to peer proof of work algorithm which solves useful NP problems as a side effect and incorporates automated credit ratings based on debt repayment and contract fulfillment rates is probably in the 3 range. But if I hook it up to a protein folding game that teaches advanced biochemistry to akrasiatic gamers as a side effect it could be boosted up to the 6 range.

I trust you've looked into Ripple? It strikes me as fairly interesting, though the implementation is, at present, uninspiring.

2gwern14y

I've been musing about the same sort of proof-of-work algorithm, but I haven't come up with a good actual system yet - there's no obvious way to decentralizedly get a guaranteed-hard new useful problem.

3SilasBarta14y

If you ignore the credit rating system, and replace its hash algorithm with variable-length (expanding) one, that's basically what Bitcoin is. (Inversion of variable-length collision-resistant hash functions is NP-hard. I had to ask on that one.) [EDIT: That question has been dead for a while, but now that I posted a link, it got another answer which basically repeats the first answer and needlessly retreads why I had to rephrase the question in a way such that the hash inversion problem has a variable size so that asymptotic difficulty becomes meaningful, thus being non-responsive to the question as now phrased. I hope it wasn't someone from here that clicked that link.] They've made a lot of progress getting games to derive protein-folding results, but I think there's a lot of room for improvement there (better fidelity to the laws of the protein folding environment so players can develop an "intuition" of what shapes work, semiotics that are more suggestive of the dynamics of their subsystems, etc).

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The Yudkowsky Ambition Scale

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The Yudkowsky Ambition Scale

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