I watched the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdjMoykqxys, I can't say I was overly impressed with the intelligence of Émile Torres, but perhaps I'm just not smart enough to understand what he's saying. I agree with him that long-termism is silly, not for any philosophical reason but for the practical reason that we can't really know what problems will be paramount in the very long term, and even if we could we wouldn't have the tools to solve it, it would be like demanding that the Wright brothers discover and solve the problem of airport congestion five years before they built their first airplane. But then Torres says he has no objection in principle about somebody altering their mind or their body but nobody should do it until we are certain what the long term consequences of it will be. Am I wrong or is that a blatant contradiction? And Torres keeps complaining that too many transhumanists are western white males, but I maintain it doesn't matter who is saying something, what matters is if what they're saying is true. I could add that most anti-transhumanist are also western white males.
I strongly agree with everything Max More said with one exception, his skepticism of the Singularity. I think, not a proof but, a strong case can be made for the Singularity and I will try to do so now. We know for a fact that the human genome is only 750 MB long (it contains 3 billion base pairs, there are 4 bases, so each base can represent 2 bits, and there are 8 bits per byte) and we know for a fact it contains a vast amount of redundancy and gibberish (for example many thousands of repetitions of ACGACGACGACG) and we know it contains the recipe for an entire human body, not just the brain, so the technique the human mind uses to extract information from the environment must be pretty simple, VASTLY less than 750 MB. I’m not saying an AI must use that exact same algorithm that humans use, they may have found an even simpler one, but it does tell us that such a simple thing must exist, 750 MB is just the upper bound, the true number must be much much less. So even though this AI seed algorithm would require a smaller file size than a medium quality JPEG, it enabled Albert Einstein to go from understanding precisely nothing in 1879 to being the first man to understand General Relativity in 1915. And once a machine discovers such an algorithm then like it or not the world will start to change at an exponential rate.
So we can be as certain as we can be certain of anything that it should be possible to build a seed AI that can grow from knowing nothing to being super-intelligent, and the recipe for building such a thing must be less than 750 MB, a LOT less. For this reason I never thought a major scientific breakthrough was necessary to achieve AI, just improved engineering, but I didn't know how much improvement would be necessary; however about a year ago a computer was able to easily pass the Turing test so today I think I do. That's why I say a strong case could be made that the Singularity is not only likely to happen it is likely to happen sometime within the next five years, and that's why I'm so terrified of the possibility that during this hyper critical time for the human species the most powerful human being on the face of the planet will be an anti-science, anti-free market, wannabe dictator with the emotional and mental makeup of an overly pampered nine-year-old brat who probably can't even spell AI.
Let me add to my previous reply to John that the "liberal left" in the U.S. should have learned a lesson in November 2016. Almost 8 years later, not only they haven't learned the lesson, but they have sunk even deeper in "woke" bullshit. Do you guys really want to elect idiots to run your country (and de-facto much of the rest of the world)? Really???
<...the most powerful human being on the face of the planet will be an anti-science, anti-free market, wannabe dictator with the emotional and mental makeup of an overly pampered nine-year-old brat...>
It is the "liberal left" that created the Trump phenomenon and continues to promote Trump. I put "liberal left" in scare quotes because they are neither liberal (e.g. they hate free speech) nor left (e.g. they hate the working class). I'm really mad at the "liberal left" for embracing the "woke" travesty that shamelessly perverts the struggle for civil rights and social justice until it becomes a pathetically ridiculous but also dangerously authoritarian ideology.
Many working class voters have embraced Trump in reaction. And many moderate voters have done the same. And I perfectly understand them. I hope there's a third way, but if the only choice is between "woke" and Trump, I choose Trump.
<Torres keeps complaining that too many transhumanists are western white males...>
And this is exactly the kind of "liberal left" bullshit that pushes people to Trump. With enemies like these, Trump doesn't need friends.
> "if the only choice is between "woke" and Trump, I choose Trump".
It's telling that I never use the word "Trump" but from my description (an anti-science, anti-free market, wannabe dictator with the emotional and mental makeup of an overly pampered nine-year-old brat) you knew exactly who I was talking about.
> <Torres keeps complaining that too many transhumanists are western white males...>
> "And this is exactly the kind of "liberal left" bullshit that pushes people to Trump. With enemies like these, Trump doesn't need friends."
Yes, that sort of woke statement is maddening and total bullshit, but it's simply not comparable to the action, not just a statement, of attempting a coup d'état to overturn a 250 year old democracy that has the most powerful military in the world. Wokeism is stupid and irritating, no doubt about that, however it's no more an existential threat than Drag Queen Story Time or unisex restrooms are; but giving the keys to a fleet of nuclear submarines to a man as ignorant, amoral, and intellectually lazy as Donald Trump right in the middle of the Singularity, the most critical time in the entire existence of Homo sapiens, would be a Chicxulub level extinction event for the human race. Even without Donald Trump the chances that you or I we'll make it through the Singularity meat grinder in one piece are pretty low, but given the choice between low chance and no chance I choose low chance.
John, we'll just have to agree to disagree on which one (Trump or "woke") is the greatest evil.
But I think we can agree that both are far from good (please correct me if I'm wrong). Therefore, while there's not much we can do to avoid having to make this choice at the next elections (not only in the U.S. - these are global trends with different local names), it is important to promote third-way alternatives for the longer term.
What should the third way alternative be? If I had a precise answer, I would be a politician. But my rough answer is that the third way should protect both individual liberty and social justice. These are and will remain conflicting goals, so the devil will always be in the details and negotiation will always be needed. Another important point is that our Western culture (and its political aspects) must recover its strength and stop treating weakness and despair as virtues.
> "John, we'll just have to agree to disagree on which one (Trump or "woke") is the greatest evil. But I think we can agree that both are far from good"
Actually I don't think it's very important if Biden is not good because History tells us we can survive a president that is not good, we've certainly had a lot of experience with presidents that are not good, yet we are still here. A catastrophic president would be another matter entirely because there is an upper limit to the amount of good a president can do even if he is a genius and a saint, but there is no lower limit, there is no bottom too bad. It's far more important to avoid a catastrophic president than it is to elect a good one.
> "it is important to promote third-way alternatives for the longer term."
That would be nice but here in the US, thanks to our crazy electoral college system, that is not possible. Our electoral college systems results in some crazy things, such as (according to the most recent census) giving a voter in Wyoming 68.3 times more power over deciding who gets to be a US senator than a voter in California and giving a Wyoming voter 18.3 times more power in choosing who next President should be than California voter. The electoral college system also discourages the formation of a viable third-party. In all the states except for Maine and Nebraska there is a winner take all system, in the other 48 states and the District Of Columbia if candidate X has just one more person voting for him then candidate Y then candidate X receives 100% of the electoral votes. And that makes it nearly impossible for any third-party to get a foothold. A much more rational system would be to eliminate the ridiculous electoral college so that whoever got the most votes would be the president, if we had that Donald Trump would never have been president and hundreds of thousands of Americans wouldn't of died needlessly due to an inept response to the Covid pandemic, and George W. Bush would never have been president and we wouldn't have had the Iraq war .
I also think It would be a good idea if people were allowed to vote for more than one person. For example, suppose you believed that candidate X would be a mediocre president, candidate Y would be a catastrophically bad president, and candidate Z would be a wonderful president, but you figured that candidate Z had almost no chance of winning. Who do you vote for? If I could only pick one I would vote for candidate X, but if I could vote for as many people as I wanted to I would vote for candidate X AND candidate Z, and that would encourage the formation of a third-party, but unfortunately that is not the system we have. And that's why in the entire history of the US there has never been more than 2 viable political parties.
<… don't think it's very important if Biden is not good…>
This foreign observer apologizes for talking too much about U.S. politics and hopes not to be seen as disrespectful. It is your country, your elections, and your President. Having said that, I don’t dislike Biden at all. I think he is a good man and a decent President. If anything, I see him as an anchor to sanity for his party, a large part of which has become insane. And *this* is the problem. Again, sorry.
<I also think It would be a good idea if people were allowed to vote for more than one person…>
I totally agree, and isn’t this exactly what Andrew Yang’s Forward Party wants? I wish them all the best.
I watched the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdjMoykqxys, I can't say I was overly impressed with the intelligence of Émile Torres, but perhaps I'm just not smart enough to understand what he's saying. I agree with him that long-termism is silly, not for any philosophical reason but for the practical reason that we can't really know what problems will be paramount in the very long term, and even if we could we wouldn't have the tools to solve it, it would be like demanding that the Wright brothers discover and solve the problem of airport congestion five years before they built their first airplane. But then Torres says he has no objection in principle about somebody altering their mind or their body but nobody should do it until we are certain what the long term consequences of it will be. Am I wrong or is that a blatant contradiction? And Torres keeps complaining that too many transhumanists are western white males, but I maintain it doesn't matter who is saying something, what matters is if what they're saying is true. I could add that most anti-transhumanist are also western white males.
I strongly agree with everything Max More said with one exception, his skepticism of the Singularity. I think, not a proof but, a strong case can be made for the Singularity and I will try to do so now. We know for a fact that the human genome is only 750 MB long (it contains 3 billion base pairs, there are 4 bases, so each base can represent 2 bits, and there are 8 bits per byte) and we know for a fact it contains a vast amount of redundancy and gibberish (for example many thousands of repetitions of ACGACGACGACG) and we know it contains the recipe for an entire human body, not just the brain, so the technique the human mind uses to extract information from the environment must be pretty simple, VASTLY less than 750 MB. I’m not saying an AI must use that exact same algorithm that humans use, they may have found an even simpler one, but it does tell us that such a simple thing must exist, 750 MB is just the upper bound, the true number must be much much less. So even though this AI seed algorithm would require a smaller file size than a medium quality JPEG, it enabled Albert Einstein to go from understanding precisely nothing in 1879 to being the first man to understand General Relativity in 1915. And once a machine discovers such an algorithm then like it or not the world will start to change at an exponential rate.
So we can be as certain as we can be certain of anything that it should be possible to build a seed AI that can grow from knowing nothing to being super-intelligent, and the recipe for building such a thing must be less than 750 MB, a LOT less. For this reason I never thought a major scientific breakthrough was necessary to achieve AI, just improved engineering, but I didn't know how much improvement would be necessary; however about a year ago a computer was able to easily pass the Turing test so today I think I do. That's why I say a strong case could be made that the Singularity is not only likely to happen it is likely to happen sometime within the next five years, and that's why I'm so terrified of the possibility that during this hyper critical time for the human species the most powerful human being on the face of the planet will be an anti-science, anti-free market, wannabe dictator with the emotional and mental makeup of an overly pampered nine-year-old brat who probably can't even spell AI.
John K Clark
Let me add to my previous reply to John that the "liberal left" in the U.S. should have learned a lesson in November 2016. Almost 8 years later, not only they haven't learned the lesson, but they have sunk even deeper in "woke" bullshit. Do you guys really want to elect idiots to run your country (and de-facto much of the rest of the world)? Really???
Hi John,
<...the most powerful human being on the face of the planet will be an anti-science, anti-free market, wannabe dictator with the emotional and mental makeup of an overly pampered nine-year-old brat...>
It is the "liberal left" that created the Trump phenomenon and continues to promote Trump. I put "liberal left" in scare quotes because they are neither liberal (e.g. they hate free speech) nor left (e.g. they hate the working class). I'm really mad at the "liberal left" for embracing the "woke" travesty that shamelessly perverts the struggle for civil rights and social justice until it becomes a pathetically ridiculous but also dangerously authoritarian ideology.
Many working class voters have embraced Trump in reaction. And many moderate voters have done the same. And I perfectly understand them. I hope there's a third way, but if the only choice is between "woke" and Trump, I choose Trump.
<Torres keeps complaining that too many transhumanists are western white males...>
And this is exactly the kind of "liberal left" bullshit that pushes people to Trump. With enemies like these, Trump doesn't need friends.
Hi Giulio, I respectfully disagree:
> "if the only choice is between "woke" and Trump, I choose Trump".
It's telling that I never use the word "Trump" but from my description (an anti-science, anti-free market, wannabe dictator with the emotional and mental makeup of an overly pampered nine-year-old brat) you knew exactly who I was talking about.
> <Torres keeps complaining that too many transhumanists are western white males...>
> "And this is exactly the kind of "liberal left" bullshit that pushes people to Trump. With enemies like these, Trump doesn't need friends."
Yes, that sort of woke statement is maddening and total bullshit, but it's simply not comparable to the action, not just a statement, of attempting a coup d'état to overturn a 250 year old democracy that has the most powerful military in the world. Wokeism is stupid and irritating, no doubt about that, however it's no more an existential threat than Drag Queen Story Time or unisex restrooms are; but giving the keys to a fleet of nuclear submarines to a man as ignorant, amoral, and intellectually lazy as Donald Trump right in the middle of the Singularity, the most critical time in the entire existence of Homo sapiens, would be a Chicxulub level extinction event for the human race. Even without Donald Trump the chances that you or I we'll make it through the Singularity meat grinder in one piece are pretty low, but given the choice between low chance and no chance I choose low chance.
John K Clark
John, we'll just have to agree to disagree on which one (Trump or "woke") is the greatest evil.
But I think we can agree that both are far from good (please correct me if I'm wrong). Therefore, while there's not much we can do to avoid having to make this choice at the next elections (not only in the U.S. - these are global trends with different local names), it is important to promote third-way alternatives for the longer term.
What should the third way alternative be? If I had a precise answer, I would be a politician. But my rough answer is that the third way should protect both individual liberty and social justice. These are and will remain conflicting goals, so the devil will always be in the details and negotiation will always be needed. Another important point is that our Western culture (and its political aspects) must recover its strength and stop treating weakness and despair as virtues.
> "John, we'll just have to agree to disagree on which one (Trump or "woke") is the greatest evil. But I think we can agree that both are far from good"
Actually I don't think it's very important if Biden is not good because History tells us we can survive a president that is not good, we've certainly had a lot of experience with presidents that are not good, yet we are still here. A catastrophic president would be another matter entirely because there is an upper limit to the amount of good a president can do even if he is a genius and a saint, but there is no lower limit, there is no bottom too bad. It's far more important to avoid a catastrophic president than it is to elect a good one.
> "it is important to promote third-way alternatives for the longer term."
That would be nice but here in the US, thanks to our crazy electoral college system, that is not possible. Our electoral college systems results in some crazy things, such as (according to the most recent census) giving a voter in Wyoming 68.3 times more power over deciding who gets to be a US senator than a voter in California and giving a Wyoming voter 18.3 times more power in choosing who next President should be than California voter. The electoral college system also discourages the formation of a viable third-party. In all the states except for Maine and Nebraska there is a winner take all system, in the other 48 states and the District Of Columbia if candidate X has just one more person voting for him then candidate Y then candidate X receives 100% of the electoral votes. And that makes it nearly impossible for any third-party to get a foothold. A much more rational system would be to eliminate the ridiculous electoral college so that whoever got the most votes would be the president, if we had that Donald Trump would never have been president and hundreds of thousands of Americans wouldn't of died needlessly due to an inept response to the Covid pandemic, and George W. Bush would never have been president and we wouldn't have had the Iraq war .
I also think It would be a good idea if people were allowed to vote for more than one person. For example, suppose you believed that candidate X would be a mediocre president, candidate Y would be a catastrophically bad president, and candidate Z would be a wonderful president, but you figured that candidate Z had almost no chance of winning. Who do you vote for? If I could only pick one I would vote for candidate X, but if I could vote for as many people as I wanted to I would vote for candidate X AND candidate Z, and that would encourage the formation of a third-party, but unfortunately that is not the system we have. And that's why in the entire history of the US there has never been more than 2 viable political parties.
John K Clark
<… don't think it's very important if Biden is not good…>
This foreign observer apologizes for talking too much about U.S. politics and hopes not to be seen as disrespectful. It is your country, your elections, and your President. Having said that, I don’t dislike Biden at all. I think he is a good man and a decent President. If anything, I see him as an anchor to sanity for his party, a large part of which has become insane. And *this* is the problem. Again, sorry.
<I also think It would be a good idea if people were allowed to vote for more than one person…>
I totally agree, and isn’t this exactly what Andrew Yang’s Forward Party wants? I wish them all the best.