…and what the bright light of the dawn of superintelligent AI might reveal
Let’s delve into speculation, not about the answers AI might bring but the questions it might be able to answer. If concrete answers to the game-changing questions here are found, either by ourselves or the AI we create, our world and the actions we should take will pivot around them.
Yep, let’s jump in at the deep end
If there’s one thing we don’t want humankind’s legacy to be, it’s a boring universe dedicated entirely to making paperclips. Yes, that can happen. But so long as the power to recreate things exists, is there any reason to preserve anything? Ourselves included?
Can you just create people, if you have the right recipe? Can you even make most of that recipe up?
This just makes plotting a safe future way more complicated than it already is.
You might think that pain stops you from putting your hand into a fire, or jumping off tall buildings but that doesn’t wash. Your brain could just stop you from burning your hand by refusing to move it into the fire when you try, or work like fear when it stops you from jumping off that building, with no suffering involved.
So what is it for? If we’re going to formulate a plan to avoid it, we’d like to find out.
Is joy and suffering a zero-sum - you can’t have one without the other? Must any joy or happiness you experience be balanced by the opposite of joy at some other time?
Yep, if true, this one throws an enormous spanner in the works when you’re trying to make the world a better place.
It is at least one way where the universe starts to make sense. If you were a superbeing that wanted to rack up some points on the suffering side, and you could create any universe for yourself to live in for a while to score those points, wouldn’t it look like this one?
…and why your brain won’t even let you think about this problem
Can you keep someone’s brain alive in a jar and launch it off into space with enough equipment to keep it alive for millions of years in perpetual misery? Can you turn off the usual protections that make people pass out when things get too bad? Can you transfer consciousness to machines and do the same thing, only now each second feels like a million years? Will aliens land in the next five seconds and start doing all of this?
Well, I doubt it, to be honest, to all of the above, although it does highlight our ability to ignore horrific possibilities and just carry on.
No, the universe isn’t that mean to us, consciousness is just going to detach at some point. Or do something far more interesting, like initiate False Vacuum Decay[@wiki].
There’s more to this one though. It is difficult to think about this kind of thing. It feels like part of a mental block evolution has given us so we can get on with our lives.