Nick Bostrom

And yes, I'm getting over a cold, so I've got my favorite podcasty voice back again.

Back in 2013, my attention was taken by a book called Our Final Invention, which was one of a few books that I've added to my physical library, coming as it did a year before even Bostrom's Superintelligence.

The author, James Barrat, made one of the earlier cases for the potentially dire path AI would set us on.

He got us into this food fight long before it looked like a place to attract lots of eyeballs.

Yeah, things could go very wrong.

When that book came out in 2013, I was really the only one saying things could go very wrong.

Except for Nick Bostrom, who had written a lot of academic papers about it.

And Elias Yukowsky, who'd been looking at this issue since around 2000.

Suppose for a minute that we do live in a matrix and our reality is nothing but an illusion.

What is the simulation argument? Nick Bostrom, professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University and founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute and the Program on the Impacts of Future Technology within the Oxford Martin School, presented his so-called simulation argument some years ago, and the theory is still widely debated among many scientists.

If we omit the mathematical part of the argument, it starts with the assumption that future civilizations will have enough computing power and programming skills to be able to create what I call ancestor simulations," he says.

These would be detailed simulations of the simulator's predecessors, detailed enough for the simulated mind to be conscious and have the same kinds of experiences we have.

And in terms of what it can do in the machine world already, I think that that stuff's pretty incredible.

I don't think it's more incredible than what it can do in the human world by humans kind of deploying it for their own purposes, which is going to accelerate potentially a really good cycle of humanity it's not just about like birthing the next version of the machine intelligence that pushes everything forward like the recursive self-improvement and the rest of it there are other ways to recursively self-improve like if we were if the machine was primarily directed toward maximizing for love in the universe, for instance, rather than maximizing for intelligence or the old Nick Bostrom example, where it was tuned to like maximizing for paper clips.

You know, there are ways that we could look at these problems that go beyond just the material calculations that are commonly discussed when we're discussing these things.

And whatever, I'll shut up for now and let you respond.

and there's a certain component from my vantage point here that, that, and again, um, there's no need for you to agree to any of this, but I just, I do want to put it on the table.

These are the things we bandy about with, from a Nick Bostrom to a Jack Sosa stack who's recording in a handful of days.

The, this, this idea that, um, uh, there's a way to kind of love the fruit and like ignore the tree in the following regard.

Like Jeepers, these things persist and like I as a human persist by the bunny rabbits being there and the trees being there and like, hey, and then I got other people around me that I like and okay, that's what persistence is sort of based on.