Humans as social animals have a strong instinctual bias towards trust of con-specifics in prosperous times.  Which makes sense from a game theoretic strengthen-the-tribe perspective.  But I think that leaves us, as a collectively dumb mob of naked apes, entirely lacking a sensible level of paranoia in the building ASI that has no existential need for pro-social behavior.

The one salve I have for hopelessness is that perhaps the Universe will be boringly deterministic and 'samey' enough that ASI will find it entertaining to have agentic humans wandering around doing their mildly unpredictable thing.  Although maybe it will prefer to manufacture higher levels of drama (not good for our happiness)

It was a very frustrating conversation to listen to, because Wolfram really hasn't engaged his curiosity and done the reading on AI-kill-everyoneism.  So we just got a torturous number of unnecessary and oblique diversions from Wolfram who didn't provide any substantive foil to Eliezer

I'd really like to find Yudkowsky debates with better prepared AI optimists prepared to try and counter his points.  Do any exist?

It seems unlikely to me that there is potential to make large brain based intelligence advancements beyond the current best humans using human evolved biology.  There will be distance scaling limitations linked to neural signal speeds.

Then there is Jeff Hawkins 'thousand brains' theory of human intelligence that our brains are made up of thousands of parallel processing cortical columns of a few mm cross section and a few mm thick with cross communication and recursion etc, but that fundamental processing core probably isn't scalable in complexity, only in total number - your brain could perhaps be expanded to handle thinking about more things in parallel at once, but not at much higher levels of sophistication without paying a large coordination speed price (and evolution places a premium on reaction speed for animals that encounter violence)

I look at whales and other mammals with much much larger than human brains and wonder why they are not smarter - some combination of no evolutionary driver and perhaps a lot of their neurons are dedicated to delay-line processing needed for processing sonar and controlling large bodies with long signaling delays.

Regardless, if AI is a dominant part of our future then it seems likely to me that regardless of whether the future is human utopia or dystopia, non-transhuman humans will not exist in significant numbers in a few hundred years. Neural biology and perhaps all biology is going to be superseded as maladapted to the technological future. 

Are any of the socio-economic-political-demographic problems of the world actually fixable or improvable in the time before the imminent singularity renders them all moot anyway?  It all feels like bread-and-circuses to me.

The pressing political issues of today are unlikely to even be in the top-10 in a decade.

Fantastic life skill to be able to sleep in a noise environment on a hard floor.  Most Chinese can do it so easily, and I would frequently less kids anywhere up to 4-5 years old being carried sleeping down the road by guardians.

I think super valuable when it comes to adulthood and sharing a bed - one less potential source of difficulties if adaption to noisy environment when sleeping makes snoring a non-issue.

It is the literary, TV and movie references, a lot of stuff also tied to technology and social developments of the 80's-00's (particularly Ank-Morpork situated stories) and a lot of classical and allusions.  'Education' used to lean on common knowledge of a relatively narrow corpus of literature and history Shakespeare, chivalry, European history, classics etc for the social advantage those common references gave and was thus fed to boomers and gen-x, y but I think it's now rapidly slipping into obscurity as few younger people read and schools shift away from teaching it in face of all that's new in the world.  I guess there are a lot of jokes that pre-teens will get, but so many that they will miss.  Seems a waste of such delightful prose.

Yeah, powering through it.  I've tried adult Fiction and Sci-Fi but he's not interested in it yet - not grokking adult motivations, attitudes and behaviors yet, so feeding him stuff that he enjoys to foster habit of reading.   

We definitely want our kids involved in at times painful activities as a means of increasing confidence, fortitude and resilience against future periods of discomfort to steel them against the trials of later life.  A lot of boys will seek it out as a matter of course in hobby pursuits including martial arts.  

I think there is also value in mostly not interceding in conflicts unless there is an established or establishing pattern of physical abuse.  Kids learn greater social skills and develop greater emotional strength when they have to deal with the knocks and unfairness themselves, and rewarding tattle-tailing type behavior with the exercise of parental power (or even attention) over the reported perpetrator creates some probably not-good crutch-like dynamics in children's play stunting their learning of social skills.

I think it's generally not good for kids to have power over others even if that power is borrowed, as it often enables maliciousness in kids that are (let's face it) frequently little sociopaths trying to figure out how to gain power over others until they start developing more empathy in their teens.  Their play interactions should be negotiated between them, not imposed by outside agents.  Feign disinterest in their conflicts unless you see toxic dynamics forming.  They should sort things out amongst themselves as much as possible.

For my boys (9,11) I'll only intercede if they are getting to the point of physical harm or danger, or if there is a violent response to an accidental harm (must learn to control violent/vengeful impulses).  But they frequently wrestle with each other in play.  It is a challenge to balance with my 7 daughter though as lacking physical strength of her older brothers she works much harder to use parents as proxies to fight her conflicts.

Less cotton wool and helicopter parenting is mostly good. 

"In many cases, however, evolution actually reduces our native empathic capacity -- for instance, we can contextualize our natural empathy to exclude outgroup members and rivals."

Exactly as it should be.

Empathy is valuable in close community settings, a 'safety net' adaption to make the community stronger with people we keep track of to ensure we are not being exploited by people not making concomitant effort to help themselves.  But it seems to me that it is destructive at wider social scales enabled by social media where we don't or can't have effective reputation tracking to ensure that we are not being 'played' for the purpose of resource extraction by people making dishonest or exaggerated representations.

In essence at larger scales the instinct towards empathy rewards dishonest, exploitative, sociopathic and narcissistic behavior in individuals, and is perhaps responsible for a lot of the deleterious aspects of social media amongst particularly more naturally or generally empathic-by-default women.  Eg 'influencers' (and before them exploitative televangelists) cashing in on follower empathy.  It also rewards misrepresentations of victimhood/suffering for attention and approval - again in absence of more in depth knowledge of the person that would exist in a smaller community - that may be a source of rapid increase in 'social contagion' mental health pathologies amongst particularly young women instinctually desirous of attention most easily attained by inventing of exaggerating issues in absence of other attributes that might garner attention.

In short the empathic charitable instinct that works so well in families and small groups is socially destructive and dysfunctional at scales beyond community level.