Worrying about lack of variability in the human condition, as the author does here, seems like a strange fear in the face of the future ability to edit, copy, and amend the function of the mind. Once human minds are emulated, those capabilities follow, and emulation should happen fairly rapidly after the computing power to do it emerges, since there are already well established research establishments working on the predecessor simulations.
"The pace of progress today bumps up against the limits imposed by organization of efforts, in that it takes a few years for humans to digest new information, talk to one another about it, decide on a course of action, gather together a group, raise funds, and start working. There is no necessary reason for any of these parts of the process to take more than a few seconds, however: consider a world in which human minds run far faster, because they run on something other than biological neurons, because they run hundreds of distinct streams of consciousness simultaneously, and because they are augmented by forms of artificial intelligence that take on some of the cognitive load for task assignment and decision making.
"It is, frankly, hard to even speculate about the potential forms taken by society in such an environment. Technology clearly drives human organizational strategies and struggles, for all that the minds of prehistory, of Ur, and of our modern times are all the same. In the past, evolution of society was largely shaped by the ability to communicate over distances and by the size of the population. In the future it will be shaped to a far greater extent by the way in which intelligences think and feel, and the way in which their minds depart from the present standard for human nature. We struggle to model human action in the broadest sense of economic studies, and I suspect that this will be true for any society of minds, no matter how capable they are. The complexity of the group always exceeds the capabilities of any individual or research effort within that group. We can do little more than point out incentives and suggest trends that are likely to emerge from those incentives."
For my money, the greater fears lie in what factions of humanity and its descendants might choose to do about pleasure and suffering, when handed the controls over the box.
"Altering the operation of our brains to induce pleasure without the need to undertake as much work was a fairly early innovation - see alchohol, etc. The point of much of technological progress is to achieve better results with less effort. The logical end of that line is wireheading or a life science equivalent yet to be designed: an augmentation in the brain, a button that you push, and the system causes you to feel pleasure whenever you want. There are numerous other alternatives in the same technological genre that seem plausible, such as always-on happiness, regardless of circumstances. This sort of thing makes many people nervous, and, sadly, rarely for useful reasons. That said, I suspect that even the most self-controlled of individuals has sufficient self-doubt to be wary of the advent of implementations of wireheading that might be, say, a hundred times better, cheaper, and safer than today's most influential mood-altering drugs.
"To my eyes this is actually the less interesting and less consequential of the two sides of the hedonistic imperative. It is the elimination of suffering, not the gaining of pleasure, that, when taken to its conclusions, will lead to a world and a humanity changed so radically as to be near unrecognizable."
" a world in which human minds run far faster, because they run on something other than biological neurons, because they run hundreds of distinct streams of consciousness simultaneously, and because they are augmented by forms of artificial intelligence that take on some of the cognitive load for task assignment and decision making."
Isn't that what is happening right now with the internet?
"human minds" would then be social circles or any other groups of entities.
Powered by biological neurons, by regulations, by software, by hardware, by all of them together. Running "hundreds of distinct streams of consciousness simultaneously" inside the human participants' skulls and, lets define it broad, other kinds of 'consciousness' inside of software and hardware.
It's just a zoomed out view.
For myself, I suspect that raw 'happiness' is ultimately not sufficient, and that instead shares a common (and much more complex) cause with 'satisfaction', which will be much harder to hack because it's counterinductive (ie. the awareness that you're hacking your 'satisfaction' criterion is itself dissatisfying.)
I don't think this title is clickbait. It's true that it doesn't spell everything out, but HN has a tradition of allowing such titles as long as the submission delivers the goods in terms of substantiveness. I haven't read this article so am not sure if it's good, but at least it isn't obviously lame, which is the real clickbait scourge.
We don't want every title to be like that, of course, but it's good for HN's front page not to be trivially grokkable. It makes readers work a little, and that's a good thing. It's like dietary fiber.
The article itself, the site it's from, and even the wikipedia article which ... fairly successfully fails to provide any relevant information ... are all a hot mess.
The article is the draft of something which might be vaguely interesting, and raises a few points (some of which are on topics of interest to me -- the sudden influx of wealth, transportation, and Westernisation to the Arabian peninsula, for example).
How about a more descriptive title?
Worrying about lack of variability in the human condition, as the author does here, seems like a strange fear in the face of the future ability to edit, copy, and amend the function of the mind. Once human minds are emulated, those capabilities follow, and emulation should happen fairly rapidly after the computing power to do it emerges, since there are already well established research establishments working on the predecessor simulations.
https://www.exratione.com/2017/04/blind-upon-the-eve-of-apot...
"The pace of progress today bumps up against the limits imposed by organization of efforts, in that it takes a few years for humans to digest new information, talk to one another about it, decide on a course of action, gather together a group, raise funds, and start working. There is no necessary reason for any of these parts of the process to take more than a few seconds, however: consider a world in which human minds run far faster, because they run on something other than biological neurons, because they run hundreds of distinct streams of consciousness simultaneously, and because they are augmented by forms of artificial intelligence that take on some of the cognitive load for task assignment and decision making.
"It is, frankly, hard to even speculate about the potential forms taken by society in such an environment. Technology clearly drives human organizational strategies and struggles, for all that the minds of prehistory, of Ur, and of our modern times are all the same. In the past, evolution of society was largely shaped by the ability to communicate over distances and by the size of the population. In the future it will be shaped to a far greater extent by the way in which intelligences think and feel, and the way in which their minds depart from the present standard for human nature. We struggle to model human action in the broadest sense of economic studies, and I suspect that this will be true for any society of minds, no matter how capable they are. The complexity of the group always exceeds the capabilities of any individual or research effort within that group. We can do little more than point out incentives and suggest trends that are likely to emerge from those incentives."
For my money, the greater fears lie in what factions of humanity and its descendants might choose to do about pleasure and suffering, when handed the controls over the box.
https://www.exratione.com/2016/06/the-hedonistic-imperative-...
"Altering the operation of our brains to induce pleasure without the need to undertake as much work was a fairly early innovation - see alchohol, etc. The point of much of technological progress is to achieve better results with less effort. The logical end of that line is wireheading or a life science equivalent yet to be designed: an augmentation in the brain, a button that you push, and the system causes you to feel pleasure whenever you want. There are numerous other alternatives in the same technological genre that seem plausible, such as always-on happiness, regardless of circumstances. This sort of thing makes many people nervous, and, sadly, rarely for useful reasons. That said, I suspect that even the most self-controlled of individuals has sufficient self-doubt to be wary of the advent of implementations of wireheading that might be, say, a hundred times better, cheaper, and safer than today's most influential mood-altering drugs.
"To my eyes this is actually the less interesting and less consequential of the two sides of the hedonistic imperative. It is the elimination of suffering, not the gaining of pleasure, that, when taken to its conclusions, will lead to a world and a humanity changed so radically as to be near unrecognizable."
" a world in which human minds run far faster, because they run on something other than biological neurons, because they run hundreds of distinct streams of consciousness simultaneously, and because they are augmented by forms of artificial intelligence that take on some of the cognitive load for task assignment and decision making."
Isn't that what is happening right now with the internet? "human minds" would then be social circles or any other groups of entities. Powered by biological neurons, by regulations, by software, by hardware, by all of them together. Running "hundreds of distinct streams of consciousness simultaneously" inside the human participants' skulls and, lets define it broad, other kinds of 'consciousness' inside of software and hardware. It's just a zoomed out view.
The part about wireheading reminded me of this post on SSC: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/01/28/wirehead-gods-on-lotus-...
For myself, I suspect that raw 'happiness' is ultimately not sufficient, and that instead shares a common (and much more complex) cause with 'satisfaction', which will be much harder to hack because it's counterinductive (ie. the awareness that you're hacking your 'satisfaction' criterion is itself dissatisfying.)
Could we have an ever-so-slightly less clickbaity title?
I realise it's the source article's title, that's not the point.
I'll suggest the author's own book title as a reasonable alternative: "Brain and Culture; Neurobiology, Ideology and Social Change"
@dang?
I don't think this title is clickbait. It's true that it doesn't spell everything out, but HN has a tradition of allowing such titles as long as the submission delivers the goods in terms of substantiveness. I haven't read this article so am not sure if it's good, but at least it isn't obviously lame, which is the real clickbait scourge.
We don't want every title to be like that, of course, but it's good for HN's front page not to be trivially grokkable. It makes readers work a little, and that's a good thing. It's like dietary fiber.
The article itself, the site it's from, and even the wikipedia article which ... fairly successfully fails to provide any relevant information ... are all a hot mess.
The article is the draft of something which might be vaguely interesting, and raises a few points (some of which are on topics of interest to me -- the sudden influx of wealth, transportation, and Westernisation to the Arabian peninsula, for example).
But muddy as hell.
I disagree that it's clickbait Might have some silly opinions toward the end, but I think the summary and analysis in the first half-2/3s is nice.
I'm not arguing that the article is clickbait, only that it's largely incoherent.
The site as a whole reflects the same problem.