Hacker News Reader

Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

If it is optimising all your decisions, even the mundane ones, is it really your life any more? If it plugged into your brainstem and took over, by definition nobody else would notice the difference (you always did what it said anyway, or you’d be suboptimal), so why not just flood the 20 watt carbon-based neural network with bliss drugs and let the silicon-based neural network be the person instead?

View on HN

I think sometimes it's hard for us to zoom out and solve bigger problems that we might not see. Like, if I don't enjoy the chore I'm doing, I can make it easier, or I can eliminate it. (Paying a bill in person is a good example). Or, maybe there is an object that is generating a lot of work for me, like a house, and there is an alternative object (an apartment). Heck, sometimes it would be nice to have a record of all the things I enjoy and just have an AI path-find to maximize revisiting those things.

Or just replace the brain completely with the computer, like in Greg Egan's jewel stories. http://will.tip.dhappy.org/blog/Compression%20Trees/.../book...

You set the destination, it sets the route. Maybe you tell it you feel like you aren't getting enough exercise, or you need more time at night for a friend. It schedules the mundanity around those goals. I would love that.

Sort of like Surrogates: http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0986263/

well if you chose and modified the representation of the world yourself, and set it so it would be making decisions based on a heuristic you provided it, then at the end of the day, it is not so different from how our biological circuits work, to the extent we have control over them

Reply on news.ycombinator.com