Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Weirdtopia's Invented
So after long delay here is a follow up to my Weirdtopia promise. The "Utopia" and "Distopia" are from Eliezer Yudkowsky, the Weirdtopia's are mine. I think it's interesting to note how similar most of the "dystopias" sound to our current reality... I suspect that this exercise reveals more about the writer than about the future, but even so it's a very interesting exercise...
Economic...
Sexual...
Governmental...
Technological...
Cognitive...
Obviously I personally wouldn't want to live in many of those Weirdtopia's, but I do think that people living in them could be "better off" than in the utopia. Also check out Eli's latest Lower Bound on Utopia.
Economic...
- Utopia: The world is flat and ultra-efficient. Prices fall as standards of living rise, thanks to economies of scale. Anyone can easily start their own business and most people do. Everything is done in the right place by the right person under Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage. Shocks are efficiently absorbed by the risk capital that insured them.
- Dystopia: Lots of trade barriers and subsidies; corporations exploit the regulatory systems to create new barriers to entry; dysfunctional financial systems with poor incentives and lots of unproductive investments; rampant agent failures and systemic vulnerabilities; standards of living flat or dropping.
- Weirdtopia: Money still exists, but is dealt with primarily by machines. People focus on higher level goals such as happiness, fun, personal development, and H+ augmentations. Due to the superior numerical skills of the machines, "money" has been allowed to complexify such that it transmits much more information than a single dimension. These extra dimensions are used to regulate in an economic way most of what the 20th century called "externalities". The environment is a primary beneficiary.
Sexual...
- Utopia: Sexual mores straight out of a Spider Robinson novel: Sexual jealousy has been eliminated; no one is embarrassed about what turns them on; universal tolerance and respect; everyone is bisexual, poly, and a switch; total equality between the sexes; no one would look askance on sex in public any more than eating in public, so long as the participants cleaned up after themselves.
- Dystopia: 10% of women have never had an orgasm. States adopt laws to ban gay marriage. Prostitution illegal.
- Weirdtopia: Everyone is gay. Straight relationships are seen as hopelessly doomed due to conflicts of interest; straight marriage is forbidden due to the high incidence of divorce & resulting horrible child custody battles. Reproduction is accomplished either via artificial wombs, or via liaisons between a male pair and a female pair, for their mutual benefit.
Governmental...
- Utopia: Non-initiation of violence is the chief rule. Remaining public issues are settled by democracy: Well reasoned public debate in which all sides get a free voice, followed by direct or representative majority vote. Smoothly interfunctioning Privately Produced Law, which coordinate to enforce a very few global rules like "no slavery".
- Dystopia: Tyranny of a single individual or oligarchy. Politicians with effective locks on power thanks to corrupted electronic voting systems, voter intimidation, voting systems designed to create coordination problems. Business of government is unpleasant and not very competitive; hard to move from one region to another.
- Weirdtopia: Global issues like climate change and global catastrophic risks forced the creation of binding global governance. After interminable failure of a democratic model, dictatorship was tried. Benevolent dictatorship of global issues worked amazingly well, and this lead to expansion of the system. The world is ruled like Singapore, and there is much talk of how foolish democracy was - how can uninformed citizens who have perverse incentives possibly rule well, even by proxy? This most simple form of government is widely hailed as the end-point of political history. Without the need to worry about governance (and freedom, taxes, elections, etc), people are free to pursue their own lives...
Technological...
- Utopia: All Kurzweilian prophecies come true simultaneously. Every pot contains a chicken, a nanomedical package, a personal spaceship, a superdupercomputer, amazing video games, and a pet AI to help you use it all, plus a pony. Everything is designed by Apple.
- Dystopia: Those damned fools in the government banned everything more complicated than a lawnmower, and we couldn't use our lawnmowers after Peak Oil hit.
- Weirdtopia: Technology is magic. The vast majority of people have no idea how technology works, nor do they care. A segregated priest-hood of technologists creates and maintains the magical artifacts which the population uses - dedicated devices are the rule, with very simple, easy to use interfaces. Quality is kept so high that the illusion of magic is unbroken. Nanosanta machines and immortality are just some of the magic on offer...
Cognitive...
- li>Utopia: Brain-computer implants for everyone! You can do whatever you like with them, it's all voluntary and the dangerous buttons are clearly labeled. There are AIs around that are way more powerful than you; but they don't hurt you unless you ask to be hurt, sign an informed consent release form and click "Yes" three times.
- Dystopia: The first self-improving AI was poorly designed, everyone's dead and the universe is being turned into paperclips. Or the augmented humans hate the normals. Or augmentations make you go nuts. Or the darned government banned everything again, and people are still getting Alzheimers due to lack of stem-cell research.
- Weirdtopia: We're all still human, but we've created killer telepathy with a record function, and memories and experiences are traded like baseball cards. Identity is fluid and flexible - people choose all the time to absorb material which will change them fundamentally, and this is seen as a good thing ("moving on"). People also use the system to rapidly retrain for new jobs, to make themselves fit their partner(s) better, and for shear novelty.
Obviously I personally wouldn't want to live in many of those Weirdtopia's, but I do think that people living in them could be "better off" than in the utopia. Also check out Eli's latest Lower Bound on Utopia.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Weirdtopia
Eliezer Yudkowsky, at Overcoming Bias (one of my favorite blogs), writes about Weirdtopia, the place which is neither Utopia (the projection of your hopes / beliefs) or Dystopia (the projection of your fears), but something altogether different and at least potentially better than Utopia to actually live in. His recent series on Fun Theory give potential civilization engineers much food for thought. The opposite of happiness isn't isn't sadness - it's boredom. And it follows that a "perfect" world probably isn't a very happy one.
Does your perfect world leave room for personal development/growth? Challenge? Failure? If so, what makes it different from this world?
I hope soon to actually fill in those blanks in Eliezer Weirdtopia post - at least several have fairly interesting answers you can generate from "sustainable/green transhumanism"... in the mean time, please enjoy thinking of some weirdtopia's yourself.
Does your perfect world leave room for personal development/growth? Challenge? Failure? If so, what makes it different from this world?
I hope soon to actually fill in those blanks in Eliezer Weirdtopia post - at least several have fairly interesting answers you can generate from "sustainable/green transhumanism"... in the mean time, please enjoy thinking of some weirdtopia's yourself.
Friday, January 9, 2009
The Edge 2009 Annual Question
What will change everything? 150 scientists, authors and public figures answer this question. You can learn lots. How to sum it up?
George Dvorsky said it best: Edge.org Answers Overwhelmingly Transhumanist.
Having seen George's collection, I don't feel like I can top that view of the answers. So what I present here is just a collection of the ideas which were novel to me, i.e. said something I didn't already know... I've also picked a few I think are relevant to the metaciv project. Obviously I think you should read all the answers yourself. But if you want a curated collection, here's mine.
Kevin Kelly - a new kind of mind. Not strong AI, but ubiquity of intelligence. Fascinating insight.
Chris Anderson - a web empowered revolution in teaching (by video, of course)
George Dyson - Interstellar Viruses - actually, transmitting alien intelligences, and having civilizations "unpack them", similar to hosting a virus... interesting idea - why send messages when you can send yourself?
Daniel L. Everett - Undoing Babylon: universal accurate language translation
Nicholas Humphrey - this one really sums up WHY transhumanism is the dominate answer. If you change human nature, you change everything in the most fundamental sense.
Freeman Dyson - radiotelepathy
Haim Harari - education is still awaiting revolution
Leo Chalupa - drugs for brain plasticity!
Steven Pinker - thoughts on failed futurism, personal genomics
Keith Devlin - the mobile phone!
Howard Rheingold - social media explosion?
Eric Drexler - carbon emissions problem, nanotech removal
David Gelernter - track & cluster to replace school as we know it
Brian Eno - self fufilling feelings of things getting worse
Sherry Turkle - robots as companions - and dangers thereof
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster - miniaturizing people to reduce their burden
David M Buss - exploitability
Robert Sapolky - people who can intuit in six-dimensions. But such humans may never exist!
George Dvorsky said it best: Edge.org Answers Overwhelmingly Transhumanist.
Having seen George's collection, I don't feel like I can top that view of the answers. So what I present here is just a collection of the ideas which were novel to me, i.e. said something I didn't already know... I've also picked a few I think are relevant to the metaciv project. Obviously I think you should read all the answers yourself. But if you want a curated collection, here's mine.
Kevin Kelly - a new kind of mind. Not strong AI, but ubiquity of intelligence. Fascinating insight.
Chris Anderson - a web empowered revolution in teaching (by video, of course)
George Dyson - Interstellar Viruses - actually, transmitting alien intelligences, and having civilizations "unpack them", similar to hosting a virus... interesting idea - why send messages when you can send yourself?
Daniel L. Everett - Undoing Babylon: universal accurate language translation
Nicholas Humphrey - this one really sums up WHY transhumanism is the dominate answer. If you change human nature, you change everything in the most fundamental sense.
Freeman Dyson - radiotelepathy
Haim Harari - education is still awaiting revolution
Leo Chalupa - drugs for brain plasticity!
Steven Pinker - thoughts on failed futurism, personal genomics
Keith Devlin - the mobile phone!
Howard Rheingold - social media explosion?
Eric Drexler - carbon emissions problem, nanotech removal
David Gelernter - track & cluster to replace school as we know it
Brian Eno - self fufilling feelings of things getting worse
Sherry Turkle - robots as companions - and dangers thereof
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster - miniaturizing people to reduce their burden
David M Buss - exploitability
Robert Sapolky - people who can intuit in six-dimensions. But such humans may never exist!
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Metaciv Project Goals
I want this "Meta Civilization" project to deliver on multiple fronts.
First, I see it as an evolution of my older Digital Crusader blog (no longer accessible - but I hope to import the archives here soon) - which was subtitled "questing for sustainable transhumanism". I was interested in the application of sustainable/green/environmental ideas to transhumanism/mega-engineering. And vice-versa. Narrowly, I was motivated by the idea that if we're going to live a long time, doesn't it behoove us to preserve our natural environment to the best of our ability, so that our options remain open, or at least so that we don't actively destroy our own past? So I see Metaciv as a platform for the continued comparisom of the green movement with the transhuman project - an interdisiplinary learning & cross-fertilization exercise. I remain convinced that greens and transhumanists have a lot of valuable stuff to learn from each other - and that we need not be enemies. STEER.
Second, I'm motivated by a long-term view of personal identity. Carefully consider what you'll be around to experience if you live for thousands of years. History is cyclic - there are periods of civilization, and periods of decline/collapse. Highly improbable but highly damaging events occur. Circumstances change in ways which make the future/past almost incomphrensible. The reason this bears thinking about is that a transhuman person may wish to perserve some things between cycles, after major events, etc. The most obvious thing is life itself - come what will, it's important to preserve enough infrastrucutre and knowledge to stay alive. We need both civilizational "life boats" and personal philosophies which will allow us to handle real change. An important goal here is to build our civilizational resilience. UNDERSTAND/STEER.
Third, a study of civilizations should lead to theories of behavior - a knowledge of how to act given the surroundings in order to achieve the best kinds of results. Properly understanding how a civilization really works should be a key which allows you to unlock the wealth of that civilization to your personal benefit. My main contention here is that it's possible to recognize and exploit the systems which govern a civilization. Obviously you need to balance such exploitation against your resilience goals. OPTIMIZE.
Finally, I hope that with a sufficiently broad understanding of civilization, and the natural laws within which they must function, it will be possible to design civilizations to achieve goals which are not well matched with our current one. This is admittedly the craziest of the goals, but I think it speaks to the heart of the transhumanist project: the idea that changing human nature should allow us to open up a possability space in "the meaning of life" which is far broader than anything we can now implement. Virtual worlds populated with AI agents (whether uploads or designed minds) offer the most obvious "freedom" on that front, but there are many other ways as well. This kind of work could be supported by a through understanding of how human nature leads to human civilizations - so that changes in human nature could be projected into expected changes in civilization. Massively ambitious, and not the only thing we need by far, but at least it's something. ENGINEER.
With a mandate this broad, my vision is that almost anything can be grist for our mill - I expect to link to lots of online content and offer a few bon mots of commentary, as well as to write larger peices, to review books, to build arguments and material over time (at the wiki), etc. And I invite other people to contribute - I'd like very much for this blog to have multiple authors and an active, commenting readership. This is a very long-term project, as benefits something with such a huge scope - so I hope to still be here writing about something fascinating years from now. Join me.
First, I see it as an evolution of my older Digital Crusader blog (no longer accessible - but I hope to import the archives here soon) - which was subtitled "questing for sustainable transhumanism". I was interested in the application of sustainable/green/environmental ideas to transhumanism/mega-engineering. And vice-versa. Narrowly, I was motivated by the idea that if we're going to live a long time, doesn't it behoove us to preserve our natural environment to the best of our ability, so that our options remain open, or at least so that we don't actively destroy our own past? So I see Metaciv as a platform for the continued comparisom of the green movement with the transhuman project - an interdisiplinary learning & cross-fertilization exercise. I remain convinced that greens and transhumanists have a lot of valuable stuff to learn from each other - and that we need not be enemies. STEER.
Second, I'm motivated by a long-term view of personal identity. Carefully consider what you'll be around to experience if you live for thousands of years. History is cyclic - there are periods of civilization, and periods of decline/collapse. Highly improbable but highly damaging events occur. Circumstances change in ways which make the future/past almost incomphrensible. The reason this bears thinking about is that a transhuman person may wish to perserve some things between cycles, after major events, etc. The most obvious thing is life itself - come what will, it's important to preserve enough infrastrucutre and knowledge to stay alive. We need both civilizational "life boats" and personal philosophies which will allow us to handle real change. An important goal here is to build our civilizational resilience. UNDERSTAND/STEER.
Third, a study of civilizations should lead to theories of behavior - a knowledge of how to act given the surroundings in order to achieve the best kinds of results. Properly understanding how a civilization really works should be a key which allows you to unlock the wealth of that civilization to your personal benefit. My main contention here is that it's possible to recognize and exploit the systems which govern a civilization. Obviously you need to balance such exploitation against your resilience goals. OPTIMIZE.
Finally, I hope that with a sufficiently broad understanding of civilization, and the natural laws within which they must function, it will be possible to design civilizations to achieve goals which are not well matched with our current one. This is admittedly the craziest of the goals, but I think it speaks to the heart of the transhumanist project: the idea that changing human nature should allow us to open up a possability space in "the meaning of life" which is far broader than anything we can now implement. Virtual worlds populated with AI agents (whether uploads or designed minds) offer the most obvious "freedom" on that front, but there are many other ways as well. This kind of work could be supported by a through understanding of how human nature leads to human civilizations - so that changes in human nature could be projected into expected changes in civilization. Massively ambitious, and not the only thing we need by far, but at least it's something. ENGINEER.
With a mandate this broad, my vision is that almost anything can be grist for our mill - I expect to link to lots of online content and offer a few bon mots of commentary, as well as to write larger peices, to review books, to build arguments and material over time (at the wiki), etc. And I invite other people to contribute - I'd like very much for this blog to have multiple authors and an active, commenting readership. This is a very long-term project, as benefits something with such a huge scope - so I hope to still be here writing about something fascinating years from now. Join me.
Friday, January 2, 2009
Meta Civilization Blog Launch
First post!
From my taking notes at Convergence '08:
Meta-Civilization: how to think about civilizations as if you'll outlive them all. Understand, steer, optimize, engineer...
Structure:
- transhumanist intro - How to think about civilizations as if you'll outlive them all. Cynthia Breazeal at SS: "what kinds of experiences do we need in order to make living forever worth enduring? How to maintain trans/posthumanism during periods between civs?
- civilization intro: governance, infrastructure, language, eventually via virtual worlds, the laws of reality. Cyclic history (Chinese: dictatorship, oligarchy, democracy, chaos, start over...). Governance/politics: "how shall we live together". Infrastructure: roads, communications equipment, economics, etc. Language: Form that minds use to communicate with each other (not equipment) - current poverty of serialized vibrations in air / linear strings of symbols.
- UNDERSTAND: studying history, dynamics of power, human nature, institutions, bureaucracy. Guns, Germs & Steel. Collapse. Rise & Fall. On Human Nature. The Amish. The Long Decent. The Ultimate Resource. The Upside of Down.
- STEER: politics, technology/innovation, advocacy, civics. Don't bail! Citizen Cyborg. The Assault on Reason. League of Angry Voters. democracylab.org
- OPTIMIZE: maximize your returns from a given civilization. What does it reward? Which rewards are the best? Rich Dad Poor Dad. Mystery of Capital. Wealth of Nations. How do we ensure we get posthumanity from THIS civilization?
- ENGINEER: Utopia/Science Fiction (Brave New World). Founding Fathers. Long Now. Seasteading. Virtual Worlds. Fun Theory.
From my taking notes at Convergence '08:
Meta-Civilization: how to think about civilizations as if you'll outlive them all. Understand, steer, optimize, engineer...
Structure:
- transhumanist intro - How to think about civilizations as if you'll outlive them all. Cynthia Breazeal at SS: "what kinds of experiences do we need in order to make living forever worth enduring? How to maintain trans/posthumanism during periods between civs?
- civilization intro: governance, infrastructure, language, eventually via virtual worlds, the laws of reality. Cyclic history (Chinese: dictatorship, oligarchy, democracy, chaos, start over...). Governance/politics: "how shall we live together". Infrastructure: roads, communications equipment, economics, etc. Language: Form that minds use to communicate with each other (not equipment) - current poverty of serialized vibrations in air / linear strings of symbols.
- UNDERSTAND: studying history, dynamics of power, human nature, institutions, bureaucracy. Guns, Germs & Steel. Collapse. Rise & Fall. On Human Nature. The Amish. The Long Decent. The Ultimate Resource. The Upside of Down.
- STEER: politics, technology/innovation, advocacy, civics. Don't bail! Citizen Cyborg. The Assault on Reason. League of Angry Voters. democracylab.org
- OPTIMIZE: maximize your returns from a given civilization. What does it reward? Which rewards are the best? Rich Dad Poor Dad. Mystery of Capital. Wealth of Nations. How do we ensure we get posthumanity from THIS civilization?
- ENGINEER: Utopia/Science Fiction (Brave New World). Founding Fathers. Long Now. Seasteading. Virtual Worlds. Fun Theory.
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