The terrifying truth about TESCREAL eschatology. E/accs offer us one option: human extinction. Doomers offer us two options: human extinction or human extinction. Here's why ... (3,800 words)
I think this is a fair opinion, although the counter made by Bostrom (and others) would be that ASI would usher in a post scarcity society (and digital people consume less resources) so biological humans could continue due to the fact that resource competition is less of an issue. That claim is dubious in the long term, but it could be true.
But to me it doesn’t change the fact that the current best course is to acknowledge the correct claims of the AI doomers and try to push forward against the accelerationists. Maybe that doesn’t mean compromising morals and getting on stage with Yud, but it does mean red pilling Hasan Piker on instrumental convergence right now.
One of the efforts to help me in the depths of suicidal depression entailed a fair number of psychological evaluations, attempting to nail down a diagnosis that would point the way toward treatment. I was diagnosed by one clinician with Borderline Personality Disorder, which included that I have an incoherent sense of self: I do not synthesize my history into a single entity, but regard myself as the most recent instantiation of a person in a long line of similar instantiations.
One of the ways in which I am more functional than others who labor under this kind of identity diffusion is via acceptance. Who I am in any given year of my life is a short-lived self who is destined to experience ego death soon. I inherit a life from my previous self, and I bequeath a life to whomever comes next.
I don't assign overwhelming value to my current self over my past and future selves. I can't bring myself to be upset with my ancestral selves for having set me up poorly in some way, and I wouldn't dream of saddling some descendant self with obligations that serve me but not them.
If we consider a nation and analogize it to a person, we can talk about how a nation has a need to acquire and consume resources, make decisions for building a healthy home and establishing a brighter future. But we acknowledge that this analogy isn't perfect, right? It's not that the US is a person (Uncle Sam, perhaps) who needs to have a bath, eat a meal, get to bed early, etc.
But we do mythologize a nation as having a coherent sense of self over its history, as if Uncle Sam was instantiated with the signing of the Constitution and is now doddering along at 250 years of age, riddled with amendments and struggling to remember key events with clarity, harkening back to his days of youthful vigor and wondering where it all went wrong, why his back hurts, and how can anyone stand that noise kids play these days?
The reality is that nations undergo ego death often, but its people carry different myths of continuity with them. And if those whose myths are glorious were asked, "Should this nation continue?" they would be horrified to consider its death. While those whose myths are an ongoing horror show might well be bold enough to say, "Burn it down and start over."
Should the United States exist for another 250 years? Or should it go extinct, and some Post-American nation exist? Well, I guess it depends on who we think runs Post-America, what its traits are, and how it compares to the United States today. (And isn't the United States, with Trump threatening genocide, just a little sad?)
I don't have a strong attachment to myself as I am. I don't have a strong attachment to my culture, to my society, or to humanity. There are experiences that have set me up to have some antipathy, even. (So it's probably good that I'm not the one in charge of things, making decisions for everybody.)
Do I think we should be around for another 250 years? Me, as I am now? America, as it is now? Humans, as we are now? I'm not so bold as to declare we should burn it all down and start over, and certainly not by noon tomorrow. By 2030? 2050? 2100? I tell you this: if humanity hasn't figured out a way to make things substantially better for itself, the nations of the world, and the individuals living by 2126, I will consider us to have been a colossal failure, and to retroactively reconsider whether lighting a match by noon tomorrow wouldn't have been the better move. (See, this is by way of that flattening effect of slippery slops and hypotheticals: I'm drawing stark lines and coloring within them, and all the crayons are black and white.)
This did not do a good job of anything but implicitly advocating FOR human extinction from my perspective. The "implicit acceptance of hobbes" did a very good job of that in itself, especially by pointing out the nonviability of it in space... since space is longterm the only way to eke out a few billi years at least of earth-derived life and consciousness, that would need to change anyways(and if not concerned with eking out a few more billion years at least... why care about human extinction? Just a bit quicker) and if that is(I don't think is) the only way for humans to function(bacteria funnily enough show a different way is POSSIBLE) in groups then... humans are a dead end at least without severe modification of social instincts(And that's leaving aside the fact that a species that functions that way surviving is not necessarily desirable in first place... what, oppression in perpetuity just to keep some bodies breathing rather than striving for a life and being people worth living and being?)
In the sense the extinction is better than living in a world where people work that way and have no other options(especialy given the potential risk to other life who DOESN'T act that way). Basically th contention is that if Hobbes is right there isn't any REAOSN to value humanity.
> I also am pretty down for creating many other types of minds…
LMAO no thank youuuuu, I'm not.
Also, it's telling that the ultimate conclusions that come from the suppositions underpinning TESCREAL ideologies resemble the failure states of utilitarian thought in general, like utility monsters and the problem of extending the logic of risk management to obscenely long time-scales and extremely high impact risk; like… the model *breaks*, man. You get nonsense.
Also, the options you have is death, versus… trying to outrun the heat death? I've heard SF proposals to beating the heat death, everything from transforming your minds into adiabatic computing to schemes where you just run your internal clocks slower and slower as entropy increases to the maximum and idk man, all these options kind of *suck*. That's basically just running away. I think… at some point you might as well just fucking die.
Also also:
> …consider the fact that becoming a digital space brain would open up the unspeakably horrifying possibility of being tortured for literally trillions of years.
You don't need that. Imagine existing for trillions of years with a grating inconvenience that individually does not mean much, but doesn't go away. Imagine the plot of Sartre's play, No Exit, where it's just you, two other people you *don't* really get along and are designed to irritate and frustrate you, and trillions of years. Imagine a trillion years with underpants just a little bit *too* tight. Imagine ennui, acedia, and boredom for a trillion years.
Or… you know. Imagine insufficient fun for a trillion years. Nothing *terrible*, just… everything's fine. Just… fine. For a trillion years. For quadrillions. Until all the stars extinguish themselves. Until all the black holes evaporate. Like… you know, I'd rather die? At least it'll end?
Like, this is the same problem with obscenely long timescales. It warps your models and your outcomes all just suck.
Also, what the fuck's “better”? What's the “better” being measured here? “Better” for who? Utilitarians never fucking answer this question.
I think this is a fair opinion, although the counter made by Bostrom (and others) would be that ASI would usher in a post scarcity society (and digital people consume less resources) so biological humans could continue due to the fact that resource competition is less of an issue. That claim is dubious in the long term, but it could be true.
But to me it doesn’t change the fact that the current best course is to acknowledge the correct claims of the AI doomers and try to push forward against the accelerationists. Maybe that doesn’t mean compromising morals and getting on stage with Yud, but it does mean red pilling Hasan Piker on instrumental convergence right now.
One of the efforts to help me in the depths of suicidal depression entailed a fair number of psychological evaluations, attempting to nail down a diagnosis that would point the way toward treatment. I was diagnosed by one clinician with Borderline Personality Disorder, which included that I have an incoherent sense of self: I do not synthesize my history into a single entity, but regard myself as the most recent instantiation of a person in a long line of similar instantiations.
One of the ways in which I am more functional than others who labor under this kind of identity diffusion is via acceptance. Who I am in any given year of my life is a short-lived self who is destined to experience ego death soon. I inherit a life from my previous self, and I bequeath a life to whomever comes next.
I don't assign overwhelming value to my current self over my past and future selves. I can't bring myself to be upset with my ancestral selves for having set me up poorly in some way, and I wouldn't dream of saddling some descendant self with obligations that serve me but not them.
If we consider a nation and analogize it to a person, we can talk about how a nation has a need to acquire and consume resources, make decisions for building a healthy home and establishing a brighter future. But we acknowledge that this analogy isn't perfect, right? It's not that the US is a person (Uncle Sam, perhaps) who needs to have a bath, eat a meal, get to bed early, etc.
But we do mythologize a nation as having a coherent sense of self over its history, as if Uncle Sam was instantiated with the signing of the Constitution and is now doddering along at 250 years of age, riddled with amendments and struggling to remember key events with clarity, harkening back to his days of youthful vigor and wondering where it all went wrong, why his back hurts, and how can anyone stand that noise kids play these days?
The reality is that nations undergo ego death often, but its people carry different myths of continuity with them. And if those whose myths are glorious were asked, "Should this nation continue?" they would be horrified to consider its death. While those whose myths are an ongoing horror show might well be bold enough to say, "Burn it down and start over."
Should the United States exist for another 250 years? Or should it go extinct, and some Post-American nation exist? Well, I guess it depends on who we think runs Post-America, what its traits are, and how it compares to the United States today. (And isn't the United States, with Trump threatening genocide, just a little sad?)
I don't have a strong attachment to myself as I am. I don't have a strong attachment to my culture, to my society, or to humanity. There are experiences that have set me up to have some antipathy, even. (So it's probably good that I'm not the one in charge of things, making decisions for everybody.)
Do I think we should be around for another 250 years? Me, as I am now? America, as it is now? Humans, as we are now? I'm not so bold as to declare we should burn it all down and start over, and certainly not by noon tomorrow. By 2030? 2050? 2100? I tell you this: if humanity hasn't figured out a way to make things substantially better for itself, the nations of the world, and the individuals living by 2126, I will consider us to have been a colossal failure, and to retroactively reconsider whether lighting a match by noon tomorrow wouldn't have been the better move. (See, this is by way of that flattening effect of slippery slops and hypotheticals: I'm drawing stark lines and coloring within them, and all the crayons are black and white.)
This did not do a good job of anything but implicitly advocating FOR human extinction from my perspective. The "implicit acceptance of hobbes" did a very good job of that in itself, especially by pointing out the nonviability of it in space... since space is longterm the only way to eke out a few billi years at least of earth-derived life and consciousness, that would need to change anyways(and if not concerned with eking out a few more billion years at least... why care about human extinction? Just a bit quicker) and if that is(I don't think is) the only way for humans to function(bacteria funnily enough show a different way is POSSIBLE) in groups then... humans are a dead end at least without severe modification of social instincts(And that's leaving aside the fact that a species that functions that way surviving is not necessarily desirable in first place... what, oppression in perpetuity just to keep some bodies breathing rather than striving for a life and being people worth living and being?)
How does Hobbes' view support a pro-extinctionist stance? This makes no sense.
In the sense the extinction is better than living in a world where people work that way and have no other options(especialy given the potential risk to other life who DOESN'T act that way). Basically th contention is that if Hobbes is right there isn't any REAOSN to value humanity.
Some thoughts:
Jeffrey Ladish:
> I also am pretty down for creating many other types of minds…
LMAO no thank youuuuu, I'm not.
Also, it's telling that the ultimate conclusions that come from the suppositions underpinning TESCREAL ideologies resemble the failure states of utilitarian thought in general, like utility monsters and the problem of extending the logic of risk management to obscenely long time-scales and extremely high impact risk; like… the model *breaks*, man. You get nonsense.
Also, the options you have is death, versus… trying to outrun the heat death? I've heard SF proposals to beating the heat death, everything from transforming your minds into adiabatic computing to schemes where you just run your internal clocks slower and slower as entropy increases to the maximum and idk man, all these options kind of *suck*. That's basically just running away. I think… at some point you might as well just fucking die.
Also also:
> …consider the fact that becoming a digital space brain would open up the unspeakably horrifying possibility of being tortured for literally trillions of years.
You don't need that. Imagine existing for trillions of years with a grating inconvenience that individually does not mean much, but doesn't go away. Imagine the plot of Sartre's play, No Exit, where it's just you, two other people you *don't* really get along and are designed to irritate and frustrate you, and trillions of years. Imagine a trillion years with underpants just a little bit *too* tight. Imagine ennui, acedia, and boredom for a trillion years.
Or… you know. Imagine insufficient fun for a trillion years. Nothing *terrible*, just… everything's fine. Just… fine. For a trillion years. For quadrillions. Until all the stars extinguish themselves. Until all the black holes evaporate. Like… you know, I'd rather die? At least it'll end?
Like, this is the same problem with obscenely long timescales. It warps your models and your outcomes all just suck.
Also, what the fuck's “better”? What's the “better” being measured here? “Better” for who? Utilitarians never fucking answer this question.