All Possible Views About Humanity's Future Are Wild
cold-takes.com
cold-takes.com
Seriously, how are you going to prove mind uploads will somehow be different from this: https://www.whompcomic.com/2013/06/19/pork-futures/
Even a Moravec transfer boils down to taking a leap of faith on the ship of Theseus thought experiment having a definite answer, not to mention the inherent creepiness of the proposition of slowly replacing your brain with some foreign substance.
In fact, if you do not believe in transcendental souls of some kind, there should be no fear of this type of scenario. You anyway go to sleep each night and awaken after a discontinuity. Why would this be significantly different? Now, killing yourself after having your mind copied to the machine doesn't make any sense.
More interestingly though, if we had the necessary technology for this type of transfer, we should also be able to do mind/machine interfaces, such that either copy of you could directly experience what the other does, meaning that this could be experienced differently from a notion of either a single entity OR 2 separate entities. Of course, it would follow that in fact multiple people could share experiences in similar ways, with unclear effects on the very notion of identity.
If I could see, feel, hear, even think the same things as you, would the concept of me and you as separate identities actually mean anything to us anymore? I suspect that we can't really imagine what society and humanity would actually look like if/when such technology were widely available.
Clearly yes. If your body is destroyed, I will stop experiencing your thoughts and your senses, and vice versa.
> You anyway go to sleep each night and awaken after a discontinuity. Why would this be significantly different?
I'm more interested in why it would be the same. As it stands, there is no account of what is the thing that persists through deep sleep, or more broadly, of why there is sentience to begin with. I'm perfectly ok with conjecturing that sentience is not physical, given that we can't observe it, like we can with the physical. And I don't expect we will find some physics redefining discovery in the brain that will allow us to see us. Some philosophers hold that the more interesting question is why do neuroscientific accounts of the brain seem insufficient to us, but at that point the jig's up, you're doing philosophy and not science. Which is the problem of mind uploading, there's no scientific surety to it, believing in it will be conditional on not thinking too much about it, or on taking the position that "the philosophy is settled!".
Well, assuming a copy of my mind was being perfectly executed by some machine, that would mean that even if my body is destroyed, along with the sensations and thoughts coming from the copy of my brain residing in my body, the machine copy will still continue to feel perceptions (through machine sensors or through your body) and think my thoughts. This would be roughly similar to losing a hand or an eye today - it is a loss, but it does not fundamentally affect your sense of you.
> As it stands, there is no account of what is the thing that persists through deep sleep, or more broadly, of why there is sentience to begin with.
Physics in general has no notion of anything persisting - as far as all our physics is concerned, there are just instants of time (and space) that influence each other (from past to future) but are otherwise separate. The same is true of course in space - there is no physical account for "an object". At the macroscopic level every "object" can be equivalently modeled by smaller pieces held together by various forces. At the quantum level, elementary particles are indivisible, but also indistinguishable: there is no distinction between saying "this electron moved from atom 1 to atom 2" and "the electron in atom 1 disappeared and a new electron appeared in atom 2".
Of course, this may mean that our account of nature is missing something much more basic than consciousness (persistence / the flow of time). Or, it may mean that identity is a fundamentally meaningless notion, an unnecessary (in the logical sense) heurisitc that evolution has bred into us because it is useful for predicting the behavior of the macro world.
Edit: phrasing.
At least if we get to that stage, if we survive enough time, if that is feasible, etc, too many ifs.
Instead what we got, was the ability to self-surveil us (cellphone-panopticon), to entertain us without consuming to much resources (games, stream-movies, electronic communication-social sphere) and other funny mechanical limbs. We got the ability to practice birth control and we are currently working to get a hold of the worser angels of our nature, left, right and center.
"You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes - you get what you need..."
My only worry is that whoever is social engineering this "golden path" has not factored in the tendency to get stuck in feudalistic local optima happily ever after.
But im toasting them. This all could be so much worser..
All seem mathematically valid (in the broadest sense) but I don't see a reason to dismiss other options in favor of the asymptotic outcome. But like many people I am intuitively skeptical about we-become-as-gods.
An argument I heard was that the number of things recognizable by someone from the past has dropped to almost 0.
Consider, for example, major inventions like airplanes, refrigerators, automobiles, microwaves, telephones.
You take those inventions and people from just 10 years before they became ubiquitous would be completely amazed by them. Most of those inventions took a hold of society from the 1900s -> 1960s. If you look at the 1960s->2020, there are very few stand out inventions that would be completely unrecognizable to the general public. Personal computers and medical treatment options with CRISPER seem to be the only major standouts.
From my perspective, we look to be out of the age of invention. Instead, I expect humanity to continue refining and perfecting already existing tools. That's roughly the same state we were in from the 1600s to the 1800s.
One of the possible reasons is that we haven't found a cheaper source of energy for a long time.
A lot of things are possible if energy gets cheaper.
Going from personal computer of the 1960s to what we have today in our pocket is an enormous achievement in itself so it's a bit disingenuous to list it off as a single word "personal computer".
If we measure progress by whatever metrics: number of patents, number of scientific publication, ... in fact things are speeding up even more.
My point is that we don't have those mind blowing inventions that were hard to predict or see coming. Smartphones are the natural evolution of computer chips. Machine learning was already an active discipline in the 60's. In the 60s they were already seeing computing power increase at very fast rates. Internet things is, again, just an extension of general communication. And ecommerce is a real natural extension of the internet.
Compare that to a refrigerator. Before the refrigerator there was an entire industry of ice distribution. It was not a natural extension of really anything.
Same for the microwave. You MIGHT be able to argue that it was somewhat the natural extension of radio, just finally recognized but that's a stretch to think anyone would leap from radio waves to microwave ovens.
As for patent numbers and scientific publications, that doesn't really seem to indicate actual innovation. Rather, it points to population growth and more participation in those programs. Patents, in particular, are issued more out of defense than actual innovation.
What we aren't seeing is massively disruptive technologies. We've not see the power generation which makes fossil fuels obsolete. We aren't seeing the breakthrough in rockets that allow for space vacations. We aren't seeing flying cars. Instead, we are seeing cars getting gradually more efficient, batteries getting gradually better, and computing power getting gradually better.
Actual, honest to goodness, life changing innovation has just stopped.
That's not really all bad, but it does point to "we probably won't be like the gods" any time soon. Just like life got better in the new world from the 1600s to the 1800s (for the most part), I expect life to get better from here on out, but not so mindbogglingly better that 100 years from now it will be completely different from what we experience today. The only major difference in life in 100 years is going to the the impacts of climate change.
I would bet that the whole series will end up being mostly meaningless, in the sense that it will be either trivial or wrong. That is, either it will continue to make trivial observations (either we live in the first ~100k years of a billion-year civilization, or such a civilization will never exist - a truism); or, they will start making obviously wrong claims, such as the AI singularity idea.
Edit: In general, talking about stability on the order of billions of years is absurd. This is literally enough time to conceive of self-conscious organisms evolving inside our bodies. It is enough times for the radioactive decay of many stable materials. Imagining that a man-made structure could be stable for this amount of time is laughable.
How far will these civilizations crumble? What will they use for energy, given that we have exhausted the easily accessible sources of coal and oil?
"Spreading throughout the galaxy would certainly be harder if nothing like mind uploading (which I'll discuss in a future piece, and which is part of why I think future space settlements could have "value lock-in" as discussed above) can ever be done."
"Mind uploading" is the wrong way to look at it. How about "mind copying" for a best case (whether that copying requires the destruction of the original is another issue); "mind simulation" is a less palatable case.
"But space expansion seems feasible, and our galaxy is empty. These two things seem in tension. A similar tension - the question of why we see no signs of extraterrestrials, despite the galaxy having so many possible stars they could emerge from - is often discussed under the heading of the Fermi Paradox."
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. (Yeah, that's pretty lame.)
That’s a source of much depression for me. We’re so close to being ready to fill the galaxy, while simultaneously close to a collapse that might prevent any future civilization from doing the same.
And what if we really are the only hope in the galaxy, or even beyond that, to propagate life that can truly appreciate the universe?
So I think if humanity used up every scrap of fossil fuel, we’d still be able to bootstrap to industrialization and modernity. But using up all fossil fuels is actually pretty hard (which is why climate change is hard to mitigate…). There’s hundreds of years of gas and oil, probably a thousand years of coal, etc. Biomass can be used up over a faster time, but if you modulate its harvesting, it can last indefinitely and even when you scour the landscape of trees and desertify the landscape, over tens of thousands of years, nature will reverse what you did (minus extinct species).
In other words, absent tons of "free" resources like fossil fuels, it will require a larger percentage of available civilizational surplus to be dedicated to space than it would today. That implies either strong wealth inequality (more than today), authoritarian central government with high taxes, or a unified population interested in long term investments. The first two seem more likely than the latter.
Gotta realize that the fossil fuel energy surplus is often highly wasted on authoritarian regimes and such. Industrious nations can & do find other sources of energy, and there are many to choose from (hydro, wind, biomass, geothermal, nuclear fission, tidal, photovoltaic, solar thermal, ocean temperature gradient, even space based solar, nuclear fusion, etc).
Simply wind energy and hydrogen electrolysis would work. Both are relatively simple.
I think we have a kind of fatalism when it comes to energy sources which isn’t helped by the fact that advocates of one energy source often invest a lot of time in downplaying other energy sources, but we actually have a LOT of good, economic-surplus-compatible options to choose from, and fossil fuels are just one.
The real key is knowledge and precision. From that, and nearly any mix of energy sources and raw materials, comes abundance.
No human civilization did that. Until coal and iron were found near each other, industry did not get beyond wood and brass.
(Although to make hardenable steel—probably essential for industrialization—is harder than mere iron and requires better process control… but charcoal can still be the fuel source. And it was, for ancient steelmaking.)
EDIT: in fact, even in the first Industrial Revolution, water power was more important economically for motive power in Britain than coal driven steam power. Globally, coal didn’t start to exceed traditional biomass for prime energy until around 1900.
That’s assuming that there is any value in humans spreading throughout the universe.
One way we could do it, it's to slowly replace one by one natural neuron by a virtual or synthetic one and by keeping all synapse correctly connected. It should allow an "upload" (well more a conversion) without breaking consciousness continuity.
1) Speed of light, that inconvenient fact. Somehow in sci-fi stories, that's supposedly "overcome" someday? What if it never is?
2) Intelligent life on Earth is indeed "unlikely" given all the things that could have extinguished it by now. However, given billions of galaxies, it must have existed in many, many places, maybe even in our own galaxy, and some of them are maybe even still around.
3) Given (1), they will never contact us, nor will we contact them.
4) Even if you don't accept (1) through (3), what could anyone usefully do about it?
"Must" is an extremely strong word to use for something with entirely unknown probability. There is absolutely no basis to calculate a probability of life existing at all (except to say that it is >0, since we exist), and intelligence is many more steps above that.
The full extent of what we can say with any kind of certainty at all about intelligent life is that the probability of it existing outside Earth is non-0. Basically anything else is wild speculation.
I'll also add that discussing time across the entire universe is meaningless, as we know from special relativity. An event in another galaxy that is outside our light hyper-cone has no time-like relation to our own history. A civilization in a galaxy that's 1M light years away from us can be seen as concurrent with us by some observers, can be seen as existing in our distant past by other observers (up to 1M years ago), or in our distant future by yet others (up to 1M years in our future).
It's always overcome in stories about humans, conducted at biological timescales.
There are many ways to construct a functional interstellar civilization that just aren't very interesting to read about, much like how nearly all people living today have lives that wouldn't make a good novel.
Nonsentient mesoscale replicators riding solar sails that take thousands of years of years to visit stars would be cheap, reliable, scalable, and fantastically boring as the subject of a fiction novel; given the lack of any human characters or human conflict.
we could also use nuclear propulsion, which the russians have been able to successfully do with cruise missles
There's a question then of whether we'd have been stuck on a pre industrial ladder rung if it hadn't happened.
It just seems necessary, but of course the opposite might be true, that if we didn't have this easy energy we'd have jumped ahead with solar and wind or others instead.
There are lots of alternative energy sources, but we haven't managed to switch to them with our pretty advanced science and energy, so there may not be a developmental path for less advanced societies that ends in plentiful energy sources without fossil fuels as a stepping stone.
Put another way: If a society at the level of pre-industrial revolution Europe didn't have access to oil and coal, do you think they could have figured out nuclear energy? How would they obtain the energy to process and refine fissionable material? Or even for that matter... how could they obtain the energy to smelt iron and steal, let alone build computer chips and solar panels.
So our failure now also limits what any successor intelligent species could accomplish (until enough fossil fuels can form again).
Think for a moment what would happen if we, the whole planet, all decide one Sunday afternoon : it’s enough, it’s fine if the entire human race doesn’t make it 100 years more. Let’s leave the planet to the other species. Thanks for all the fish!
I agree. I was already on this line of thinking and watching our collective response to COVID really solidified just how little work we're ever going to do on climate change. We badly misunderstand history as a linear function of progress, so we believe things always get better. We rely too much on the hope of a technological breakthrough that would mean we don't have to do any real work, because we got used to that in the 20th century. Living standards and health outcomes are already worse for this generation compared to the previous generation and we soothe ourselves with cheap consumer goods because they're the only things we can afford. We're not going to leave Earth, we're going to stay here and ruin it out of selfishness.
Industry needs loads of energy and only practical power sources in space are solar (up to some distance but there water is scarce) and nuclear.
So if there was a missing chance, I'd say it was developing ubiquitous nuclear power. Would help on Earth, would help in space.
I’m curious to hear what leads you to this idea. Global warming is really the only major threat (well, covid too) our entire species faces but that is just a cultural/political issue and is largely technologically solved. All other issues that would stop our species from expanding are solved to a large degree (at a level where they don’t threaten our species growth).
There are too many people living living lives that consume too many resources currently. While we've slowed our growth, we're going to shrink our resource utilization absent extra capacity from space. That reduction will either be managed or unmanaged reduction (e.g. collapse).
Soil degradation, ocean acidification, basic resource scarcity (running out of copper or phosphates for example)
Others which come to mind that are "fixable" through technology vs psycho-cultural features:
Overfishing - > global enforceable legislation of the seas Meat consumption - > high quality meat analogs Plastics endocrine disruption - > improved discovery of protein folding to discover problematic endocrine disruptors Batteries - > novel types of battery chemistry Lack of Water - > drip irrigation, desalination (desertification itself can't be per se fixed) Lack of Energy longterm - > SPARK, ARC nuclear type reactors
Even soil degradation could be tackled with GMO crops and improved nitrates/phosphates, it would not be ideal because these also generate toxic algae blooms on river deltas but "would make do". Ocean acidification is the scary one just like most other effects related to global warming
The life we see (and are) now is the very beginning of that phase transition, the seed crystals if you will.
It also leads to my personal speculation about the Fermi paradox: if the universe is relatively uniform and has cooled and evolved at a consistent rate, we might not see any star-faring aliens because there aren't very many of them around yet. All across the universe there could be a ton of worlds with life approximately as complex as is found on this one. I call this the "uniform cooling hypothesis." We don't see things like alien megastructures because that stuff hasn't happened yet.
Of course for the uniform cooling hypothesis to fully explain the Fermi paradox the standard deviation for living complexity/diversity would have to be relatively small. The distribution would have to be tight enough that at least a non-trivial fraction of galaxies do not yet contain any significant number of star-faring aliens. We would therefore have a decent chance of being in one of those not-yet-colonized galaxies, explaining our "paradox."
If the distribution is really tight we might go to the stars and run right into others who are on their first journeys, or get visited within a short time frame +/- our first interstellar trips. If some fraction of UFOs are aliens maybe we are seeing them because we are about to do the same thing. It's "steam engine time."
Note also that intergalactic travel is many orders of magnitude harder than interstellar travel. It would require speeds close to 'c' and accompanying time dilation to even be imaginable, since over such long time scales complex materials actually start to fall apart at the atomic and molecular level. Sleeper ships could go to Centauri but they won't take you to Andromeda. The uniform cooling hypothesis would easily explain a lack of intergalactic colonists. They simply do not exist yet.
In which case our earth will probably end up looking like one of those suffocated ponds that expanded too fast for its given resources.
[0] http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160126-the-monkeys-that-sai...
However, if you’re happy with this, I guess we could just launch balls of biological matter at different planets and be content that in a few thousand years the balls may land and start the seed of life.
But it wouldn’t help us much…
But the OP aims for galaxy-scale settlement, which is the context I was replying too
The thing about exponential growth is that all points seem "wild" with growth.
Humans or AI traveling in space seems like a smaller leap to me than several previous "advancements" like the origin of life itself or the evolution of multicellular organisms.
But I'm biased to think the Galaxy is already inhabited for the same reasons people think we are living in a simulation. What continues to amaze me is why people think the Earth must be so very very special and that if aliens were out there they would be paying attention to us other than at best monitoring us like a beehive to make sure we don't start stirring up the galactic pot.
As to why they don't just wipe us out, I figure any world with billions of years of evolutionary progress is valuable IP and worth preservation if possible. Or as I joked for a very long time: worlds like ours are the equivalent of reality television for advanced species. And I loved it when South Park covered that very subject.
Human extinction bit seems pretty probable, not particularly wild. It will be wild if we can stick around long enough to get our technology to the point where it can continue advancing indefinitely without us.
This is the productivity explosion. I hate to break it to you, but it's hard to imagine places where AI isn't being implemented, and while our current research is progressing pretty smoothly on the topic, I don't really see any 10x or 100x improvements in that pipeline, unless we're strictly talking about model training (which can feel like an entirely different discipline altogether).
We can barely manage to colonize the antarctic....
We're destroying the earth and suffocating in our own waste, yet "there's a good chance of productivity explosion by 2100 which could quickly lead to what one might call a "technologically mature" civilization"
It is possible for destruction to happen just fast enough for everybody to finally take notice, but not fast enough to preclude geoengineering solutions for good. That's one possible (if not pretty) path to get to a technologically mature stage.
The risk is always that we wake up already in a boiling frog state, or that even when dangers become self-evident for everybody, we still spend time on power games instead of fixing the problems. In that case, well, we kinda deserve it...
Sure there might be some life that survives the climate crisis after we're gone, but the planet is going to lose most of its biodiversity before then.
To be clear: Global warming is bad. It is going to kill tens of millions of people, drown a lot of cities, and render alarmingly large sections of the planet uninhabitable to unmodified humans.
It does not actually pose an existential threat to technological civilization. Even 5C of warming would not kill all humans.
The cities will just move north. We are not in danger of running out of oil or coal before transitioning to clean electricity. 2100 will look very different, (less international trade, almost certainly no unified global internet like we have now) but regular ole global capitalism will keep rolling along.
Humanity is not dealing with global warming very effectively. But it won't kill 100% of all humans. It won't even kill 50%.
You're greatly underestimating the societal impact that this will have. Cities don't 'just move' somewhere else in a few decades without causing massive turmoil. For one thing, the countries up north (or south) will not just accept (or be able to handle) a few hundred million immigrants. There will be global war, and it's hard to say what will be left at the end. At the very least, billions will die, not 'tens of millions'.
Not to mention, we have no idea what impact this will have on global agriculture. Like it or not, we are not entirely separated from existing ecosystems, and the destruction of most land-dwelling animals living near the equator will not be a small thing.