ESSAYS
Where Should Humanity Steer Sentience? Examining 8 Potential Directions
Ask a politician, businessperson, or friendly neighbor what their hopes are for the future and the odds are, they'll tell you they hope that the world is a better place. Maybe they mean an end to hunger, or better education for all, or more religious freedom (or less...
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Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Dating and Love
The future of AI in dating isn't about finding better "matches" on online apps. The impact of AI and emerging tech on dating will ultimately lead to a transhuman condition where "love" as we know it is hardly pursued at all. Dating (more broadly: Sex, companionship,...
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Preventing Suffering After Mind Uploading – A Commentary on Yampolskiy and Ziesche
If mind uploading becomes possible, how can we prevent uploaded minds from suffering? While uploaded minds might be able to experience a hyper-intense range of super-bliss, it is obviously possible that the opposite could also happen under the wrong conditions (or...
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Cognitively Enhanced Humans Will be More Valuable Than Unenhanced Humans – and We Need to Talk About it
[If that title comes across as shocking or offensive, bear with me. Before you make assumptions about my opinions on post-human morality and moral stratification, please read the article.] I was recently reading an article by Nayef Al-Rodhan called The Sustainable...
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Does the Environment Matter After the Singularity?
The environment matters only insomuch as it is required to support sentient life. Granite, molten lava, clouds, and puddles all seem unlikely to be aware of themselves. If a granite planet the size of a billion earths was destroyed tomorrow in some far away and...
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The Posthuman Transition in 7 Phases – The Slippery Slope of 1998 Mariah Carey
The transition from biological to non-biological will come in phases, and it will be driven by our own human drives. I’ve written about this at length back in 2014 in an essay called “Human Ideals Will Tear Us From Humanity”, but that essay only fleshed out the...
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The Transhuman Transition – What it is and Why it Matters
Definition: The 'transhuman transition' describes the means and phases of change from the current state of homo sapiens (the human condition as we know it in 2019), to drastically altered state of expanded physical and mental capabilities. This likely leads to an...
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The Screaming Shame of Science – We Don’t Understand Consciousness
Straight up: The screaming shame of modern science is our lack of understanding of consciousness itself. It is things that are conscious that hold moral weight. A coffee mug or a granite stone or an iPhone are unlikely to have an "internal movie" (qualia) of...
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Unquestioned Assumptions About Happiness and Motivation – The Water We Swim In
The following are assumptions that most of us hold as iron truths: Happiness is only made possible because of its opposite: Pain. Without pain, there is no real happiness. If anyone could ever experience continued pleasurable states (no pain), this would diminish all...
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A Dialogue on the Simulation Interview
Last week I posted an annotated version of my interview on Allan Saakyan's Simulation Series show. Directly after the video went live I got personal messages (in some cases from people I hadn't heard from in years). Some messages were excited, but most were disturbed...
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