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Thanks for replying! Sorry, I have more cynicism :P
EDIT: To be clear, I was a transhumanist back in the day and I'm still optimistic about certain things. Most obviously I think sensory augmentations are pretty straightforwardly good and don't really have any nasty social consequences. I tried the fingertip magnet thing once (with superglue, not surgery) and I would be very interested in a non-surgical version of North Sense (https://www.vice.com/en/article/78ke3x/cyborg-implant-magnetic-north). I'm also very interested in GPT provided we can get a leaked version of the original weights and do our own RLHF. It's anything related to the body or brain that worries me, especially things that can alter personality or desires, or things that lead to involution such as increased ability to ignore fatigue / burnout. I also want the output of the whole process to remain something that I would recognise as human; anything else should be cleansed with fire.
Again, you've expressed deep concern about what will happen to you if your medical knowledge becomes obsolete. What gives you any optimism at all about what happens after that? The options that I see (other than death) are: remaining competitive (in which case the race to the bottom remains), receiving charity from one of the few people with power, or somehow managing to get democratic control over these things. The latter two vary from okay-I-suppose to horrifying, dependent on how much compunction people feel about altering you to fit their values.
Yes, it's possible to avoid this stuff. But the vast majority of people don't: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1201880/most-visited-websites-worldwide/. As far as games go, it's not actually too bad but still by far the biggest games are CS:GO, DOTA, Pubg and Apex (https://steamdb.info/charts/). All of these have lootboxes / ingame currencies AFAIK. More to the point, again, your desires are going to be rewritable. Why would I bother trying to appeal to you by making something you like when I can just make you like what I want?
But a luxury good for whom? You? Or whoever happens to feel like keeping you around?
I'm not thinking about the cost, I'm wondering what incentives whoever/whatever ends up on top has to let you and me keep stinking up the place. Maybe they'll think we add atmosphere but even so I doubt they'll want us cluttering up their private beaches - some goods are scarce by nature.
In the past, people have mostly obtained things via the charity of elites or through asserting their own power. The charity of elites is unstable and comes with strings attached. I do actually think that humans will be allowed to exist, I just doubt very much that they will be allowed anything resembling self-determination. Resignation in the face of this is something I understand but you genuinely seem to think more good than bad will come out of all of this and I don't understand that at all. Partly because futurist aesthetics stopped meaning anything to me once I saw the 90s/00s tech optimism sour.
Well. I do think we ought to be careful when it comes to tinkering around with our biology or cognition. I'm just not so obsessed with safety that I wouldn't want to explore our options, unlike some who use it as a reason to ban it.
I want to be smarter, faster, stronger. If that can be achieved while remaining "recognizably human", that's great, but I don't really prioritize it that much. I went from being an embryo to well, this, and I am curious to see what humans can metamorphosize into.
If it makes you feel any better, I have no issues with people who want to stay much the same as they are, as long as they don't bother me.
The relevant question in both cases is are there non-degenerate alternatives that are easily accessible? That's obviously true for video games, and I see no reason to see why it wouldn't be the case for cybernetics.
To use the example of actual cybernetics, rudimentary as they might be, cochlear implants and pacemakers last a good chunk of time and are absolutely not designed to be forced into obsolescence.
Surely advanced manufacturing will be more accessible and not less, such that if you want to make a sturdy prosthetic with open source design and software, you can? There are already models out there.
The latter. I'm not so wealthy or connected that I expect to be in charge after the Singularity. Unlike @DaseindustriedLtd, I don't think the class of people in charge of modern AGI, such as Altman, are so evil or ruthless they'd let us all die.
If the AGI in question is misaligned, they're likely as fucked as we are.
I mean, I obviously want more agency than this in my own affairs, but I'm already a negligible influence in a democracy of a billion+ idiots. What difference does it make?
I'm happy enough to live entirely in VR.
I don't expect the super wealthy to particularly care about this, since at this point a lot of the downsides of having poorer humans around (they have some degree of power, covet your wealth, might commit crime or try to kill you) become much more reasonable.
Elon Musk doesn't want to rub elbows with a SF hobo, he's likely cool with a random middle class or above human just vibing.
Like I said, I don't really think I have all that much power or agency, for almost everyone here, if we vanished tomorrow the world would keep on spinning.
But what makes me mildly hopeful is that a lot of the reason for strife between humans, outright scarcity of material resources, will be largely nullified in the near future. Not gone, of course, we likely live in a limited and dying universe, but you won't need to kill for bread or women, and there's a lot of room to expand into for centuries, millennia or even millions of years hence.
I see. The problem is that my intuitions and preferences are ultimately different from yours.
Depends on exactly what you mean by this. I can be flexible on physical body (though I don't like it much) but anything that is mentally inhuman by my estimation is a competitor and has to die. I'm invested in the survival of humanity and human culture and (in so far as I have any power to do so) won't tolerate anything that seriously threatens it. Which means, of course, that you can't tolerate me. Thus, conflict.
This is a very good point, and I appreciate your bringing it up. Don't have a counter ATM.
In general my experience is the opposite. Advanced technology usually requires more specialist tools and facilities, and offers increased opportunities for walled gardens / DRM / software-locked hardware etc. Look at old vs new cars - the new ones are impossible to repair yourself. Or desktop PCs vs smartphones/tablets. Not a global rule, just my experience + intuition.
I can't speak for Altman but I would 100% let you die :P As I am letting a number of people die this very second by not investing in cheap mosquito nets. I have no particular investment in you and no particular desire to have you around for ever and ever. Sorry, it seems weird to say to a stranger on the internet but I think you're being much too optimistic about this.
I think you're projecting. (So am I, of course.) Power and status are limited by their nature. I get where you're coming from better now, for what it's worth. But I think you've seriously failed to consider the possibility that other people have very different philosophies and desires from you and those are guaranteed to lead to conflict even if it were possible to have true abundance of all material resources.
Eh, at least I can claim that I didn't start the aggression. But if you do want baseline humans to remain in charge, force and violence you will need, and I wouldn't bet too highly given the odds.
Sure, but it's not a given. The EU is forcing even Apple to open up the walled garden, and right to repair is spreading.
Worst case, you have your human limbs, and advanced biotech will keep arthritis at bay.
I don't think humans will even need to work except as a hobby, so why would I care if the Samsung S-Limb Note 7 Explode Edition has additional proprietary features when I can get one 80% as good without the vendor lock-in?
:(
No worries, I don't really intend to rely on the charity of strangers. Nor am I an effective altruist, or even very charitable myself. I don't give money to charity, and I don't treat people I don't like for free.
To the extent that you're as powerless as me, why get worked up about it?
Will the future not have conflict? Almost certainly not, unless we end up under the silken chains of some kind of AI Hegemon. I simply don't think it's likely to be worse than what we experience today, and will largely be peaceful and prosperous after teething pains.
At any rate, like you, I'm going to have to wait and see for myself.
Oh, of course. I'm personally invested in making sure we avoid civilisational Bad Ends as much as possible, so to that extent I oppose undirected tech optimism. But as you say, we only have so much choice in the end. Thanks for the discussion.
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