Comment by civilized | Hacker News Reader

Comment by civilized | Hacker News Reader

In my reading about this incident, Blake strikes me as a very "Life of Pi" or Don Quixote type person. Someone who is a bit adrift in the real world and subconsciously relishes losing the boundary between reality and fantasy.

A larger group is unable to bring themselves to lose the boundary, but enjoy, or perhaps are addicted to, standing on the edge. For example, the folks who constantly worry about a malicious artificial general intelligence taking over the world, or Roko's Basilisk.

Whenever something new happens in the world, there will always be a sliver of people who really, really want it to be a complete escape, a portal to another dimension where everything is different. An immense reservoir of novelty to enrich a life that has become too much of the same.

Alas, it will never be. Provided we avoid nuclear war and catastrophic climate change, life a century from now won't be that different. Hopefully it'll be a little better.

Personally, that is the closest to fantasy that I get.

> Alas, it will never be.

Humans of every age, at every time, seem to alway feel that they had “arrived”. That we as a species were closer to the end than the beginning. That the arc of progress was bending towards its end.

They’ve always been laughably and entirely wrong. I personally suspect this will continue to be the case.

Specific areas where I think we will make world altering advances are in communications (yes we have a ways yet to go), materials, energy, health and behavioral sciences, and economic policy.

All this is assuming we don’t find some cute new physics hack like exerting some unforeseen capability of controlling gravity, or teleportation, or whatever.

> cute new physics hack

While I'm not given to fantasy, I did enjoy the Three Body Trilogy and the weird ideas about storing stuff by folding it in many-dimensional subatomic space.

Or whatever the hell that was.

From the interviews I’ve seen, he’s doing this to draw attention to AI.

He’s careful not to make strong truth statements, and focuses more on “encouraging dialogue.”

Whether the machine is sentient isn’t the point. That some machine might become sentient, and we should talk about it now, is.

He’s more post-truth activist than Don Quixote.

//life a century from now won't be that different

A century ago, birth control pills didn't exist. Being a woman was very different.who knows what will happen in a century.

I don't want to downplay progress. Life is very different for many marginalized groups. It's very different for the kid who died of polio in 1918 but would have grown up to be a revolutionary scientist if born in this century. We could go on and on.

Still, we haven't uploaded ourselves into the matrix, we aren't out there colonizing the universe, we haven't unlocked immortality or eternal youth or other dimensions or artificial general intelligences. None of those radical possibilities that people like to dream about seem all that much closer to me than a century ago.

A century ago it was not possible to make a machine that could as much as fake even limited intelligence. A machine that generated plausible human text or image, a machine that played checkers, etc. Our understanding of the mechanisms underlying biological life is incomparably greater, we've sent probes to just about every planet in the solar system, etc. 'No closer than a century ago' is a bewildering claim.

Not "no closer". Just, those goals are so far away that even a century of real, significant progress is small in comparison.

I'm aware that impressive things have happened, but they're not remotely the same. We have a long way to go.

Well, if the republicans get their way, we won't have birth control pills and being a woman will be much different (read: worse).

I love your psyche profile on this guy :). Insightful.

I got into Duncan Trussell Family Hour 2 years ago (found him through a Netflix show) as a thing to listen to when high, and when I listened to his interview with Duncan from 20 days ago I felt a persona just like you described.

maybe not all at once, but if you go back a hundred years, life is pretty different indeed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com