I'm writing an article about the alignment problem and AI risk, and I'm sharing a draft with the fine folks here on LessWrong to elicit some feedback. I suspect most frequent readers here will already be familiar with the contents and arguments presented below, so bear in mind that this...
Declining growth rates and technological stagnation since the 70s correlate with flatlining energy use per capita. I've been reading "Where Is My Flying Car?: A Memoir of Future Past" by J Storrs Hall. Ostensibly a book about a promised future that never arrived, it's a broader commentary on a technologically...
Both evolution and the free market are powerful forces in our universe. They can create both immense suffering and unimaginable success. We make moralistic judgments about the outcomes, but they are amoral. By approaching economic policy in much the same way we approach biology I believe we can begin to...
I'm writing an article about the alignment problem and AI risk, and I'm sharing a draft with the fine folks here on LessWrong to elicit some feedback. I suspect most frequent readers here will already be familiar with the contents and arguments presented below, so bear in mind that this isn't really written for you guys, but for a broader "lay" audience. As I'm learning about AI risk and alignment, I'd like feedback on whether or not there are any obvious mistakes or untruths I should correct, whether I've mischaracterized any of the arguments, whether I've missed something obviously important and whether the overall structure works for the purpose of the article.... (read 7262 more words →)
Interesting!
Do you buy the premise (or perhaps the conclusion) that the energy stagnation of the past ~50 years is one of the key reasons why "the future" hasn't yet been realized in the way that one might have assumed back then, had we been more willing to use the required amount of energy to produce and sustain those innovations (like flying cars and nanotech)?
Given my reading of his arguments in the book, it does seem that at least nanotech and nano-scale manufacturing at a societal scale would require much more energy than we have been willing to provide it, so in effect, maybe using a lot more energy in the short term is a prerequisite? Of course, there are also all the regulatory issues and the Machiavellian "power struggles" in academia that Hall claims as reasons for why we don't have advanced nanotech already.
Biotech might be different though since a lot of innovation there is mediated by computing and software.
I've been reading "Where Is My Flying Car?: A Memoir of Future Past" by J Storrs Hall. Ostensibly a book about a promised future that never arrived, it's a broader commentary on a technologically stagnating culture and society. A few others have reviewed it here on Less Wrong already, and Jason Crawford has a great summary and commentary of the book at Roots of Progress.
I'm sharing this post here to get feedback on the coherence of the idea that declining growth rates and the technological stagnation since the 70s strongly correlate with flatlining energy use per capita:
A... (read 1550 more words →)
Thanks a lot for the feedback - actionable and specific.
Yeah I guess this type of argument is table stakes for the Less Wrong community - which is why I wanted to share this post here (which was originally posted on my blog).
I'm pretty new to the Less Wrong community. Getting a lot of value from a lot of the content people are posting and commenting on. Would like to figure out how I can contribute, if at all.
Both evolution and the free market are powerful forces in our universe. They can create both immense suffering and unimaginable success. We make moralistic judgments about the outcomes, but they are amoral.
By approaching economic policy in much the same way we approach biology I believe we can begin to resolve a lot of our ideological grievances.
Evolution through natural selection is the means by which simpler organisms evolve into more complex ones (generally over long periods of time) through many, small incremental changes (mutations).
Although the mutations are random, the selective pressure put on any given organism by its environment allows the organisms “lucky” enough to have gotten beneficial mutations to copy these on... (read 1348 more words →)