- url(s): https://twitter.com/anthrupad/status/1725246791451296058
- author: anthrupad
if we had a handful of agreed upon principles we’d like for a hard sci-fi future (e.g. norms, desires, a handful of detailed sketches/frameworks)
we could start making more coordinated, parallelized work to make it happen - a global project (qualia rsch, BCI rsch, alignment..)
Without these you might get:
- irreverisble or catastrophic failures - because we relied too much on self organization with no plan for transitions
- boring futures because people spent no time dreaming up more interesting ones besides chatbots
in this century, in this decade, with this technology, with the possible futures we can get - we should be attempting to produce a flood of roadmaps, frameworks, visions, cross-disciplinary, cross-industry plans
i’ll put my money where my mouth is and offer some myself when i have something more presentable
and it isn’t raw optimism or raw pessimism you want - you want to pinpoint the locations (more specifically, the basins, the volumes, the regions, the subspaces, the paths) you want to arrive at - lest you land in a future where we’re dead, subject to totalitarianism, or bored af
the reason pure optimism and pure pessimism or even a slight mix is dumb is because that’s like flying a jet plane to land in particular regions but - because you don’t know where those are, you use vibes to sometimes steer way too far left or way too far right to balance it
with almost no information about landing position - you have to resort to very silly steering patterns like “more left” wait not “more right” and just some weird back and forth - that’s not going to land you in the global optima
in this time - you need to be a part time polymath and hard sci-fi artist/visionary
more visions need to be in the water supply so we can do that human thing of voting, debating, aggregating, revising, evolving
Is it not worth one weekend to make a schematic like this, using the internet, youtube, gpt, whatever to fill out some detailed plan like this? So that - in parallel - we get something better then “iunno maybe vr goggles with calendar meetings”
bro u have gpt and the internet and experts spilling their minds out on the web - why isn’t everyone making 100 page long frameworks like the whole brain emulation one? (“Whole Brain Emulation, A Roadmap”, Sandberg & Bostrom)
this isn’t something reserved for some special kind of person
they took the mind of god and they only asked it to answer the equivalent of homework questions instead of using their newfound omniscience to make plans in order to spill unimaginable joys into the world
The greater the number of ways we can synthesize and summon industries and technologies (and there are so many.. (if you’ve got the capacity for creative thinking)) the more we need to plan
finding 1 solution out of 10k possibilities takes more agency than 1 solution out of 3
anything as complex as this problem in this reality will have solutions that involve high dimensional distributed multidisciplinary work and global efforts
instead of naming specific people, i’ll offer kinds of people which are good:
- people who teach you about the fundamental principles of reality (rigorous, innovative scientists)
- people who offer the most perplexing, but detailed and grounded visions of futures (artists and philosophers)
- people who can’t help but generate visions and industries and rebel against existing structures (contrarians)
e.g. i could tell you to read sci fi books, or shannon’s papers, or whatever - but the important part is slowly developing your own tastes so you’ve bootstrapped yourself into an aeshtetic-niche of your own that you can develop to provide things to share with the others who’ve made it to that place alongside you
if you’ve got nothing in your head about how this might look like with barely any resolution - how are you planning on steering anywhere with your mind?
your ability to steer towards anything this good needs to go beyond reflexive local choices
consider a 5 year old using GPT vs Leonardo Da Vinci. Why is it that LDV would be way better at using GPT? Because his mind is richer, he’s curious, he looks at stuff, he thinks, he creates
What he can summon from this system + himself is far more interesting than someone who just has an empty head on this stuff
what we do now will determine if humanity is embarrassed or a high status giga chad at the time travelers, celestial beings, and aliens party in the year 3000