Fractalideation

Widely subscribe to OP point of view.

(loving that the sleep-clone-swap thought experiment I described in my comment to Rob Bensinger's post inspired you!)

The level of discontinuity at which each people will consider a future entity/person/mind/self to still be the rightful continuation of a present entity/person/mind/self will vary according to their own present subjective feelings/opinions/points-of-view/experiences/intutions/thoughts/theories/interpretations/preferences/resolutions about it.

This is really Ship of Theseus paradox territory.

For example, the theory/resolution that I would personally (currently) widely subscribe to is:

"Temporal parts theory", quoting Wikipedia: "Another common theory put forth by David Lewis is to divide up all objects into three-dimensional time-slices which are temporally distinct, which avoids the issue that the two different ships exist in the... (read more)

Having been suffering myself from ME/CFS (and/or possibly long COVID) since early 2020 (after I fell ill with an illness very similar to COVID-19 at the end of 2019) I understand and feel your frustration, pain and suffering having to face a very long haul chronic debilitating complex disease with complex/unknow/obscure etiology/mechanisms and no current proven cure and nothing much effective to treat the symptoms neither.

At least for long COVID and also ME/CFS (thanks to long COVID which has many similarities with ME/CFS) there are quite a few labs/researchers/nerds/... who are interested in trying to advance the science around these illnesses. It must be really dreadful as it seems to be the... (read 417 more words →)

Loved the post and all the comments <3

Here is I think an interesting scenario / thought experiment:

1.  A copy of a person is made while that original person is sleeping on a bed.
2. The original person is moved to a sofa while still sleeping.
3. The copy (which is also sleeping) is put in the bed at the exact same position where the original person was.
4. After a while the original and the copy both wake up and can see each other (we assume they are both completely oblivious to exactly what happened while they were sleeping and that they didn't dream or they dreamt the same thing, etc...)

At wake-up, based on their own memory of where... (read more)

Started to enter a state that could be described as "meta analysis paralysis" ("meta-[analysis paralysis]" and not "[meta-analysis] paralysis") when I wanted to formulate my comment about your very interesting take on EA Burnout!

Your post screamed to me as a great example of analysis paralysis and bounded rationality.

Then I started to get paralyzed trying to analyse analysis paralysis and bounded rationality in the context of EA burnout and I quickly burnt out solutionless writing this comment.

Oh the irony!

Even burnt out I was still stuck in analysis paralysis so in the end I told myself: 

"Tomorrow I will ask Google and ChatGPT: 'how to solve analysis paralysis?'".

And then submitted that above comment which does... (read more)

Hello,

Personally I think there is a major problem on how productivity is measured.

Basically:

productivity = production/time

But here is the major flaw: how is production currently measured?

It is measured by how much money you sell that production!

So basically as it stands:

productivity = (money made)/time

Imho that way of measuring productivity is really dumb and gives a completely undervalued measurement of production.

To take a simple example imagine you create (with thousands of other people) an OS like Linux that powers billions & billions of computing devices throughout the entire world (and even in space) and give away that OS for free:

Your productivity for this Linux production is measured as zero (0) because you didn't make any... (read more)

Hello,

I tend to intuitively strongly agree with James Miller's point (hence me upvoting it).

There is a strong case to make that a TAI would tend to spook economic agents which create products/services that could easily be done by a TAI.

For an anology think about a student who wants to decide on what xe (I prefer using the neopronoun "xe" than "singular they" as it is less confusing) wants to study for xir future job prospects: if that student thinks that a TAI might do something much faster/better than xem in the future (translating one language into another, accounting, even coding, etc...) that student might be spooked into thinking "oh wait maybe I... (read more)

You make good/interesting points:

1) About AGI being different from ASI: basically this is the question of how fast we go from AGI to ASI i.e. how fast is the takeoff. This is debated and no one can exactly predict how much time it will take i.e. if it would/will be a slow/soft takeoff or a fast/hard takeoff. The question of what happens economically during the AGI to ASI takeoff is also difficult to predict. It would/will depend on what (the entity controlling) the self-improving AGI decides to do, how market actors are impacted, if they can adapt to it or not, government intervention (if the AGI/ASI makes it possible), etc...

2) With regard... (read more)

Thank you for your interesting answer :)

I agree that in all likelihood a TS/ASI would be very disruptive for the economy.

Under some possible scenarios it would benefit most economic actors (existing and new) and lead to a general market boom.

But under some other possible scenarios (like for example as you mentioned a monopolistic single corporation swallowing up all the economic activity under the command of a single ASI) it would lead to an economic and market crash for all the other economic actors.

Note that a permanent economic and market crash would not necessarily mean that the standards of living would not drastically improve, in this scenario (the monopolistic ASI) the standards of... (read more)