ESSAYS
Total Recall – What They Got Right and Wrong About the Future
Total Recall is a 1990 Schwarzenegger blockbuster that, until yesterday, I had never seen. The movie centers around the story of a construction worker who is treated by a company that claims to be able to "implant memories" of exciting or fulfilling experiences. From...
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Circuits – and the Arbitrariness of Beauty and Value
Some lines from Keats: Linger awhile upon some bending planks That lean against a streamlet's rushy banks, And watch intently Nature's gentle doings: They will be found softer than ring-dove's cooings. How silent comes the water round that bend; Not the minutest...
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The Simulation Argument Gets Us Nowhere
I have a great respect for Bostrom, and genuinely believe him to be one of the most important thinkers alive today. I agree with a great many of his ideas, and have been influenced my many of his essays over the last decade, from What is a Singleton? to Utopia and...
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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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