ESSAYS
Two Questions – All That Humanity Ultimately Should be Concerned With
The human race has two critical questions to answer in the 21st century: 1. What is a beneficial transition beyond humanity? 2. How do we get there from here without destroying ourselves? These questions presuppose the following hypotheses: Humanity will likely...
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Sugar Cubes – Mind Uploads and the Final Form of Humanity
"Sugar cubes" - Refers to the tiny hypothetical form that human mind uploads might take when they are condensed and stored. These small cubes of computational substrate would likely contain more than our human senses, memories, and consciousness - but would permit for...
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AI Value Alignment isn’t a Problem if We Don’t Coexist
The AI value alignment argument goes something like this: As artificial intelligence will continue to approach human-level intelligence Artificial intelligence will generally be driven by a reward function, by a kind of abstract goal Any such goal could have...
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Universal Basic Happiness (Not Income) – The Result of AI and Abundance
Many renown technology pundits, entrepreneurs, and inventors have posited a similar vision of an artificial intelligence-enabled future: Artificial intelligence and other future technologies will amass tremendous wealth in the hands of a few powerful, dominant...
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Exploration Post-Human Consciousness States – The Value of Psychedelics
Nick Bostrom’s 2007 TED presentation (titled: Humanity's biggest problems aren't what you think they are) involved an illustration that I liked so much that I modeled it - and credited Bostrom - in my first TEDx back in late 2014. I present a modified version of...
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The Most Important Questions That AGI Might Help Us Explore
What matters most? If we have a reasonable chance of building conscious AI and/or post-human intelligence in the next 60 years, it makes sense for us to consider where we’re headed. If we presume we have any control over our fate at all - where will we point the...
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Super-intelligent Machines May be Conscious, but Not Like We Are
During my most recent UN speaking engagement in Shanghai, I wasn't able to access Google (or my email), and was left with only a few books and the tabs I had open. One of those tabs was a blog post from Andres Gomez Emilsson, which I'm glad I had opened weeks earlier....
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What is the “Meaning” of the Singularity
What is the "meaning" of the Singularity? If we look forward to the potential trajectories of intelligence and sentience, we wonder: Where is the future taking us? What does the future "want"? Some people have posited theories about the meaning of the Singularity....
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The Grand Trajectory of Intelligence and Sentience
The "Grand Trajectory" refers to the direction of development of intelligence and sentience. If the following two hypotheses are true: The moral worth of an entity can be measured - as best we can - by the richness of its intelligence and sentience (consciousness)....
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The Last Words of Alexander – and the Future of Artificial Intelligence
Alexander the Great had enough time in his 32 years to accomplish many objectives. Defeating the Persian empire, conquering the Hellenic world and large swaths of India, and so on. Succession planning, as it turns out, hadn't been much a priority for the greatest...
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