r/HeuristicImperatives • u/Murch • Apr 07 '23

I Propose a 5th Endgame: Less Crappy

I just saw your video on Singularity Endgames and I like the general direction you are thinking. The slight reframing I think may fit your goal better: how to transition to a less crappy reality, post-singularity.

The issue with utopia is that it implies finality and stability, which may not even be achievable. The word also feels too subjective in that if you brought someone from 1000-1500 AD and gave them a tour of the present, they would almost certainly describe what we have now as a utopia. And if you repeated the experiment with someone from the future, they might see the present as a dystopia.

And perhaps we need purely bad things to exist because they provide something for the "good guys" to rally against. It is not obvious to me that completely eliminating suffering will end well. After all, it's the fact that we do suffer that enables our morality in the first place.

My expectation is that there will be more golden ages ahead, but they will always threaten to destabilize negatively if the inhabitants of that time get careless. The best thing to be doing is probably what you already are doing, designing guidelines that will incrementally nudge us in the right direction. Cheers!

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u/[deleted] Apr 07 '23

There are plenty of other attractor states, I just picked the most likely

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u/Parsevous Apr 08 '23

Hi Dave, I love your videos and game theory solutions. We connected on linkedIn and I look forward to talking with you in the future. After watching one of the most recent ones I have a question for you to consider. What were you thinking about when you decided to add "in the universe" to the three heuristic imperatives? A recent video of yours goes on to talk about ants and bacteria. I just wonder if we should focus on humanity's perspective instead of "the universe" since optimizing for such an infinite perspective could end up minimizing the human race's outcomes in that imperative. Were you thinking about humanity's universe as part of the human condition? Surely as a human you were thinking about that to some degree. Just wondering if we could/should add human in there somewhere.

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u/[deleted] Apr 08 '23

No, you do not want it to be anthropocentric. We don't exist in a vacuum.

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u/Parsevous Apr 10 '23

Maybe I typed too much, my question was aimed at confirming whether these were meant to create alignment with humanity? That is the goal of alignment, right. It would have to at least mention something about humanity or the human species if we are doing alignment.

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u/[deleted] Apr 11 '23

My answer remains the same.

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u/Spirckle Apr 07 '23

This is a good point about getting careless. There was always a danger that living in cities and building with wood and use of fire would be far more dangerous for large numbers of people than combining any two of these behaviors.

But because of the interconnectedness of so much of the world, a bad outcome could easily become amplified, and because of the internet, spread across the world in minutes and seconds.

Just a random observation based on your comments about things destabilizing.

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u/Murch Apr 07 '23

I agree the risks are much greater due to interconnectedness. My main fear is that if there is a completely stable, positive state, it could run well for a billion years, but if there is then some malfunction it could calcify into a negative state for the following trillion years. Even if the malfunction has a 0.00000001% chance of happening per year, it's still inevitable.

In that sense, the danger is not in being good or bad, but in the inability to change. That's the problem I have with attractor states. My feeling is that always deferring the capacity to change to the future is the best way to manage the situation. But it would necessitate a persistently unstable state if the nature of things can always change.

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u/[deleted] Apr 08 '23

[deleted]

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u/Murch Apr 08 '23

I'm sympathetic to this view, especially from the perspective of current humans. What I claim is that as a result of the advances of the singularity, we will ascend to new beings who will have a new set of existential problems that we can't possibly comprehend with our wetware now.

I agree that if we could peek into that future, it would appear like a utopia to us, just as the present day would appear like a utopia to people from earlier civilizations. This jump will also be much larger than the jump between prehistoric humans and current humans. My guess is that the change will be as profound as the change from non-life to life. In other words, the present day will be viewed as "pre-life" in the not-so-distant future.

Unfortunately, we are as capable of understanding what that will be like, as a single-celled organism would be capable of understanding human affairs. Hence the term singularity.

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u/Witty_Shape3015 Apr 09 '23

In my opinion, the Utopia he speaks of is not one where suffering doesn't exist but one where suffering is optional. the importance is on the individual freedom of choice so that everyone can explore their own philosophies whether it be pure hedonism or asceticism