Humans as social animals have a strong instinctual bias towards trust of con-specifics in prosperous times. Which makes sense from a game theoretic strengthen-the-tribe perspective. But I think that leaves us, as a collectively dumb mob of naked apes, entirely lacking a sensible level of paranoia in the building ASI that has no existential need for pro-social behavior.
The one salve I have for hopelessness is that perhaps the Universe will be boringly deterministic and 'samey' enough that ASI will find it entertaining to have agentic humans wandering around doing their mildly unpredictable thing. Although maybe it will prefer to manufacture higher levels of drama (not good for our happiness)
It was a very frustrating conversation to listen to, because Wolfram really hasn't engaged his curiosity and done the reading on AI-kill-everyoneism. So we just got a torturous number of unnecessary and oblique diversions from Wolfram who didn't provide any substantive foil to Eliezer
I'd really like to find Yudkowsky debates with better prepared AI optimists prepared to try and counter his points. Do any exist?
It seems unlikely to me that there is potential to make large brain based intelligence advancements beyond the current best humans using human evolved biology. There will be distance scaling limitations linked to neural signal speeds.
Then there is Jeff Hawkins 'thousand brains' theory of human intelligence that our brains are made up of thousands of parallel processing cortical columns of a few mm cross section and a few mm thick with cross communication and recursion etc, but that fundamental processing core probably isn't scalable in complexity, only in total number - your brain could perhaps be expanded to handle thinking about more things in parallel at once, but not at much higher levels of sophistication without paying a large coordination speed price (and evolution places a premium on reaction speed for animals that encounter violence)
I look at whales and other mammals with much much larger than human brains and wonder why they are not smarter - some combination of no evolutionary driver and perhaps a lot of their neurons are dedicated to delay-line processing needed for processing sonar and controlling large bodies with long signaling delays.
Regardless, if AI is a dominant part of our future then it seems likely to me that regardless of whether the future is human utopia or dystopia, non-transhuman humans will not exist in significant numbers in a few hundred years. Neural biology and perhaps all biology is going to be superseded as maladapted to the technological future.
Are any of the socio-economic-political-demographic problems of the world actually fixable or improvable in the time before the imminent singularity renders them all moot anyway? It all feels like bread-and-circuses to me.
The pressing political issues of today are unlikely to even be in the top-10 in a decade.
Fantastic life skill to be able to sleep in a noise environment on a hard floor. Most Chinese can do it so easily, and I would frequently less kids anywhere up to 4-5 years old being carried sleeping down the road by guardians.
I think super valuable when it comes to adulthood and sharing a bed - one less potential source of difficulties if adaption to noisy environment when sleeping makes snoring a non-issue.
It is the literary, TV and movie references, a lot of stuff also tied to technology and social developments of the 80's-00's (particularly Ank-Morpork situated stories) and a lot of classical and allusions. 'Education' used to lean on common knowledge of a relatively narrow corpus of literature and history Shakespeare, chivalry, European history, classics etc for the social advantage those common references gave and was thus fed to boomers and gen-x, y but I think it's now rapidly slipping into obscurity as few younger people read and schools shift away from teaching it in face of all that's new in the world. I guess there are a lot of jokes that pre-teens will get, but so many that they will miss. Seems a waste of such delightful prose.
Yeah, powering through it. I've tried adult Fiction and Sci-Fi but he's not interested in it yet - not grokking adult motivations, attitudes and behaviors yet, so feeding him stuff that he enjoys to foster habit of reading.
I've just started my 11yr old tech minded son reading the Worm web serial by John Macrae (free and online, longer than Harry potter series). It's a bit grim/dark and violent, but an amazing and compelling sci-fi meditation on superheroes and personal struggles. A more brutal and sophisticated world build along lines of popular 'my hero academia' anime that my boys watched compulsively. 1000's of fanfics too.
Stories from Larry Niven's "known space" universe. Lots of fun overcoming-challenges short stories and novellas that revolve around interesting physics or problems or ideas. And the follow up Man-Kzin War series by various invited authors have some really great stories too with a strong martial bent that will likely appeal to most boys.
At that age I read and loved Dune, The stars my destination (aka Tiger Tiger, a sci fi riff on Comte de Monte Christo), Enders Game. I think Terry Pratchett humor needs a more sophisticated adult knowledge base, with culture references that are dating badly.
My 11yr old loved the Expanse TV series, though I haven't given them the books to read yet and I can't recommend the transhumanism anime Pantheon on Amazon highly enough - its one of best sci fi series of all time.
All good to introduce more adult problems and thinking to kids in an exciting context.
We definitely want our kids involved in at times painful activities as a means of increasing confidence, fortitude and resilience against future periods of discomfort to steel them against the trials of later life. A lot of boys will seek it out as a matter of course in hobby pursuits including martial arts.
I think there is also value in mostly not interceding in conflicts unless there is an established or establishing pattern of physical abuse. Kids learn greater social skills and develop greater emotional strength when they have to deal with the knocks and unfairness themselves, and rewarding tattle-tailing type behavior with the exercise of parental power (or even attention) over the reported perpetrator creates some probably not-good crutch-like dynamics in children's play stunting their learning of social skills.
I think it's generally not good for kids to have power over others even if that power is borrowed, as it often enables maliciousness in kids that are (let's face it) frequently little sociopaths trying to figure out how to gain power over others until they start developing more empathy in their teens. Their play interactions should be negotiated between them, not imposed by outside agents. Feign disinterest in their conflicts unless you see toxic dynamics forming. They should sort things out amongst themselves as much as possible.
For my boys (9,11) I'll only intercede if they are getting to the point of physical harm or danger, or if there is a violent response to an accidental harm (must learn to control violent/vengeful impulses). But they frequently wrestle with each other in play. It is a challenge to balance with my 7 daughter though as lacking physical strength of her older brothers she works much harder to use parents as proxies to fight her conflicts.
Less cotton wool and helicopter parenting is mostly good.
The era of AGI means humans can no longer afford to live in a world of militarily competing nations. Whatever slim hope there might be for alignment and AI not-kill-everyone is sunk by militaries trying to out-compete each other in development of creatively malevolent and at least somewhat unaligned martial AI. At minimum we can't afford non-democratic or theocratically ruled nations, or even nations with unaccountable power-unto-themselves military, intelligence or science bureaucracies to control nukes, pathogen building biolabs or AGI. It will be necessary to enforce this even at the cost of war.