What counts as a lie? Centrally, a lie is a statement that contradicts reality, and that is formed with the explicit intent of misleading someone. If you ask me if I’m free on Thursday (I am), and I tell you that I’m busy because I don’t want to go to...
(A work of anthropic theory-fiction). Motivating question: Why do you find yourself to be a human, living right before a technological singularity? Why not a raccoon, or a medieval peasant, or some far-future digital mind? The Dreams of Greater Minds Somewhere, in some universe, there’s an Earth-like planet that has,...
Prior to the era of superintelligent actors, we’re likely to see a brief era of superagentic actors—actors who are capable of setting and achieving goals in the pursuit of a given end with significantly greater efficiency and reliability than any single human. Superagents may in certain restricted senses act superintelligently—see...
What counts as a lie?
Centrally, a lie is a statement that contradicts reality, and that is formed with the explicit intent of misleading someone. If you ask me if I’m free on Thursday (I am), and I tell you that I’m busy because I don’t want to go to your stupid comedy show, I’m lying. If I tell you that I’m busy because I forgot that a meeting on Thursday had been rescheduled, I’m not lying, just mistaken.
But most purposeful misrepresentations of a situation aren’t outright falsehoods, they’re statements that are technically compatible with reality while appreciably misrepresenting it. I likely wouldn’t tell you that I’m busy if I really weren’t; I... (read 1187 more words →)
Oh, sorry about that... Thanks for the feedback, though, I'll consider this in the future
There's nothing special about humans, save for their capability to cause a technological singularity, which is what is being selected for here. This does rule out the overwhelming majority of non-human life forms, though: turtles, for instance, are clearly not going to construct an artificial superintelligence any time soon. They can't, because they don't have the neurological means to construct and transmit the encyclopedias of knowledge that are required to build one, or the physiological means to achieve the industrial capacity required to manufacture the programmable computational substrates that are required to build one. They aren't capable of technological evolution.
(The human form in particular is especially suitable for technological evolution—we are social... (read more)
(A work of anthropic theory-fiction).
Motivating question: Why do you find yourself to be a human, living right before a technological singularity? Why not a raccoon, or a medieval peasant, or some far-future digital mind?
Somewhere, in some universe, there’s an Earth-like planet that has, independently, evolved life. The dominant form of this life is a fungus-like organism that has, essentially, won at evolution, growing to cover the entire planet to the exclusion of other life forms. Having eliminated its competition and suppressed internal mutations, this organism only needs to stay alive—and, for the past few billion years, it has, capturing the vast majority of sunlight incident on the planet’s... (read 3635 more words →)
Prior to the era of superintelligent actors, we’re likely to see a brief era of superagentic actors—actors who are capable of setting and achieving goals in the pursuit of a given end with significantly greater efficiency and reliability than any single human. Superagents may in certain restricted senses act superintelligently—see principles 8, 9—but this isn’t strictly necessary. A superagent may be constructed from a well-scaffolded cluster of artificial intelligences, but in the near-term it’s far more likely that superagents will consist of one or more humans, aided by well-scaffolded AIs, since humans still have a few properties vital to agency that AIs haven’t fully acquired (yet).
As with ‘superintelligence’, there’s no canonical demarcation... (read 3527 more words →)
Yes, oops -- whether speech is a 'lie' in this context should definitely depend on the speaker's world model, not the facts of the world itself. I probably accidentally cut this dependence out during a rewrite and then missed it b/c of editorial blindness.