ESSAYS
The Council of the Apes
The year is 20,000,000 BC. In a jungle somewhere in Pangaea, a green clearing on the side of a great sloping mountain is made entirely brown. Not by mud or dirt, but by the presence of thousands of apes. Some small, some large. Some with long legs, some with stocky,...
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Negative Utilitarianism Won’t Take Us Where We Need to Go
What matters more, happiness, or suffering? For almost all of us - utilitarians or not - both positive and negative qualia matter, and register when we make decisions about our own lives or decisions that might affect the lives of others. Negative utilitarianism (NU),...
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Conflict, Fecundity and the Birth of Artificial General Intelligence
Can we do better than the state of nature? Or, rather, can we do better than nature herself? When it comes to the trajectory of intelligence itself, some humans seem to think that we can. From Goertzel's ideas about decentralized artificial general intelligence to...
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The “Good Monster” – The Entity We Might Have to Build
Defining the Term A utility-monster is Rober Nozak's thought experiment about an entity who could be so happy as to outshine all possible happiness of all possible humans, and humans (by utilitarian logic) would be obligated to serve this monster - and even "bow out"...
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How to Optimize the Universe
This past week I posted the following on Facebook, in reference to my article Where Should Humanity Steer Sentience?: If utilitronium (a conscious, super-blissful substrate) could simultaneously explore future kinds of "the good" (beyond utilitarianism), and...
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Higher Good – AI and the Pursuit of Moral Value Above Utilitarianism
The philosopher David Pearce has posited that the pain-pleasure axis of conscious experience may well be the "world's inbuilt metric of value," a kind of ultimate barometer of good or bad. While I agree with Pearce that positive qualia (positive conscious experience)...
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Husk – The Supremacy of Digital Worlds in the Posthuman Transition
In the coming 20-30 years, I suspect we'll enter a phase of the posthuman transition (what I refer to as "Phase 4") where brain-machine interface technology (possibly in combination with VR, pharmacology, and nanotech) will facilitate better entertainment, more...
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There is No Love After the Singularity
I have heard it argued that post-human intelligence will be "loving", or will inevitably express love to other intelligences - humans an animals included. In this essay, I aim to lay out an argument for why the singularity or post-human transition will almost...
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State of Nature, or Solidarity? The Birth of Artificial General Intelligence
The advancement of the sciences will, at some point in the decades of centuries ahead, lead humanity to a place where we can expand our cognition and sentience, and potentially build artificial general intelligences vastly beyond our own. Exactly how that transition...
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As Much as Humanity Can Hope for in the Long Term
As human beings we are propelled by our varied hopes, our lives are in many ways driven by them. On the day-to-day, we hope to make the sale, to avoid traffic, to feel better after a good night's sleep. In the context of our lifetime, we hope to finish our book, sell...
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