Ben_Jones

Thirding D Franke's idea.

Eliezer, a thought occurs. I'm sure the new setup will be great for everyone who wants to make sure they're using the right priors and calculating the correct odds about whether to bet on Obama or not. Or indeed, trying their utmost to eliminate every source of bias from their life and turn into a giant lookup table or something. But I've much preferred reading your assorted ramblings on things like quantum mechanics, timeless physics, and especially low-level AI theory. Wrong motives? Meh, maybe. I'm sure the answer is 'the elimination of bias and mind projection is the first step along the Way,' and that's fine, and I'm going... (read more)

Rob - that's because The Wire is more like real life than real life.

I can see the link to the Chronophone here Eliezer. What would Benny F have found most shocking about today? How can we extrapolate that forwards?

Surely the most scary changes will be in ethics and the way we think of the human condition and personal identity.

I'm currently most of the way through The Mind's I, and if Hofstadter's (very plausible) musings on identity are anything like accurate, we're going to have to start thinking very differently about who we are, and even whether that question has any real application. My shocking prediction for 100, 500, 1000 years' time? There... (read more)

Eliezer, does The Adaptive Stereo have an analogic application here?

To compress the idea, if you slowly turn down the strength of a signal into perception (in this case sound), you can make large, pleasant, periodic steps up without actually going anywhere. Or at least, you can go slower.

Any logical reason why this wouldn't work for hedons? 'Going digital' might nullify this effect, but in that case we just wouldn't do that, right?

Finally, I would dispute the notion that a periodic incremental increase in hedons flowing into us is how human pleasure works. The key notion here is surely not pleasure but payoff - continually getting something (even exponentially more of something) for... (read more)

Thus fails the Utopia of playing lots of really cool video games forever.

Not convinced. Based on my experience of what people are like; from the moment where games are immersive enough, and we have the technology to plug in for good, the problem of 'no lasting consequences' will vanish for people who want it to. There are already plenty of people willing to plug into WoW for arbitrary amounts of time if they are able. Small increases in immersiveness and catheter technology will lead to large increases in uptime.

phane touches on something interesting just above. One shouldn't talk about video games or even VR as a special case; one should talk about... (read more)