[extropy-chat] A brief transhuman life, anyone?

[Eliezer Yudkowsky]

Damien Broderick wrote:
> At 01:08 PM 2/9/2005 -0800, Eliezer was baffled:
> 
>>>>>> I think that in the end I would choose the ten years of transhuman
>>>>>> life, for that I cannot imagine I would choose forty years at average
>>>>>>  intelligence over twenty years continued as myself.
>>>
>>> [Paraphrase: Eliezer currently stands halfway between average human 
>>> and transhuman and would prefer it that way even at a cost of 
>>> abbreviated life span]
>>
>> I don't know how you get the "halfway" figure.
> 
> 40 at average cf. 20@"myself": 2/1
> 20@"myself" cf. 10 at transhuman: 2/1

If we assumed that I was ambivalent between both choices and that I used 
integrated moment utility, then it would follow that I valued 40 at average as 
much as 20 at myself as much as 10 at transhuman, from which it would follow that 
the moment utilities were a scalar multiple of 1/4, 1/2, and 1, from which 
it would follow that I considered my instants to have utility of 1/3 on a 
scale affinely normalized to have a 0 at "average human" and a 1 at 
"transhuman".  Since the assumptions are wrong, this conclusion doesn't follow.

-- 
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence