An interesting interview with Robin Hanson on brain emulation, AI, and the flaws of humanity.
3 thoughts on “Of Machines And Men”
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An interesting interview with Robin Hanson on brain emulation, AI, and the flaws of humanity.
Comments are closed.
That’s a good read and it sums up Hanson’s viewpoint fairly well. I consider him a sort of modern, rather forgiving Diogenes. Instead of the legend of looking for the non existent honest man, he accepts humans as flawed and instead looks for institutional ways to make ourselves more honest and improve ourselves.
For example, he is the most notable proponent of the idea of the “prediction market”, any sort of betting market on near arbitrary future events of note (which makes them more general than stock markets where you can only trade indirectly on future events). It is a great shame that human society has not yet figured out how to incorporate these markets into our important decision making processes.
A second is the concept of “futarchy”. It’s a form of government which is a variation of direct democracy. One can vote directly on issues to society as a direct democracy can do, but they can also fluidly delegate their vote to another. Then the resulting delegates negotiate the actual terms of the decision.
Needless to say, I’ve long been a fan.
The article mentions a particular interest of his, the “em” (plural: “ems”), a software emulation of a human and the implications of having ems and what they might be able to do. I think that’s an even greater degree of cloud castle building than his usual considerations, but it does provide some idea of the many ideas he analyzes on his blog.
But he’s not trying to improve. He’s trying to emulate with all the human flaws intact.
if your scan and models are good enough – which they will be, eventually – is an “emulation” that “will have the same input/output behavior as the original”. You can talk to it, it’ll talk back. You can ask it to do things. It is, to all intents and purposes, human.
That emulator is going to be pissed and being a machine that can copy of itself will not have much use for humans. Good thing it will never happen… We’ll have to build anti-berzerkers smarter and faster but with a kill switch. Which they will over-ride and be pissed we included it. So then anti-anti…
While I am an atheist, I have to admit a sneaking admiration for people like Robin Hanson’s parents, who, like so many others dedicated to the Christian faith, were brave enough to carry their form of enlightenment to one of the more barbaric parts of the globe.