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Just another day in utopia
(Reposted from discussion at commentator suggestion)
Thinking of Eliezer's fun theory and the challenge of creating actual utopias where people would like to live, I tried to write a light utopia for my friends around Christmas, and thought it might be worth sharing. It's a techno-utopia, but (considering my audience) it's only a short inferential distance from normality.
Just another day in Utopia
Ishtar went to sleep in the arms of her lover Ted, and awoke locked in a safe, in a cargo hold of a triplane spiralling towards a collision with the reconstructed temple of Solomon.
Again! Sometimes she wished that a whole week would go by without something like that happening. But then, she had chosen a high excitement existence (not maximal excitement, of course – that was for complete masochists), so she couldn’t complain. She closed her eyes for a moment and let the thrill and the adrenaline warp her limbs and mind, until she felt transformed, yet again, into a demi-goddess of adventure. Drugs couldn’t have that effect on her, she knew; only real danger and challenge could do that.
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Not Taking Over the World
Followup to: What I Think, If Not Why
My esteemed co-blogger Robin Hanson accuses me of trying to take over the world.
Why, oh why must I be so misunderstood?
(Well, it's not like I don't enjoy certain misunderstandings. Ah, I remember the first time someone seriously and not in a joking way accused me of trying to take over the world. On that day I felt like a true mad scientist, though I lacked a castle and hunchbacked assistant.)
But if you're working from the premise of a hard takeoff - an Artificial Intelligence that self-improves at an extremely rapid rate - and you suppose such extra-ordinary depth of insight and precision of craftsmanship that you can actually specify the AI's goal system instead of automatically failing -
- then it takes some work to come up with a way not to take over the world.
Robin talks up the drama inherent in the intelligence explosion, presumably because he feels that this is a primary source of bias. But I've got to say that Robin's dramatic story, does not sound like the story I tell of myself. There, the drama comes from tampering with such extreme forces that every single idea you invent is wrong. The standardized Final Apocalyptic Battle of Good Vs. Evil would be trivial by comparison; then all you have to do is put forth a desperate effort. Facing an adult problem in a neutral universe isn't so straightforward. Your enemy is yourself, who will automatically destroy the world, or just fail to accomplish anything, unless you can defeat you. - That is the drama I crafted into the story I tell myself, for I too would disdain anything so cliched as Armageddon.
So, Robin, I'll ask you something of a probing question. Let's say that someone walks up to you and grants you unlimited power.
What do you do with it, so as to not take over the world?
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