[ExI] Ossification (Was: riots)

[Anders Sandberg]

On 25/09/2012 09:34, Charlie Stross wrote:
> On 25 Sep 2012, at 00:09, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
>> But what we remember is a function of what we are now: knowledge and mindstates filter recollections. Key experiences are reinforced by being recalled often and made part of our autobiographical "critical paths" (no matter what their actual importance were). So learned schemas might be self-reinforcing and persist even if the brain is very plastic.
> That too. You'd need to enforce some degree of rolling amnesia if you want to maintain plasticity. Which itself is probably a bad thing -- you lose any benefits you might have gained from depth of experience.

The amnesia is a natural effect of learning. In a finite learning system 
you will get overwriting of old information (or it eventually fills up 
and stops working, which is not how real brains seems to function). 
Higher learning rate will tend to overwrite more efficiently, so you get 
a bias towards the present. It turns out that the optimal learning rate 
changes like 1/sqrt(t) if you want to maximize recalled info at 
reproductory age. If you want to optimize things I suspect you still 
want to keep the learning rate declining a bit (you have a lot of 
valuable knowledge that it is expensive to relearn) but at a lower rate. 
Then we should probably investigate if we can make some parts of memory 
more or less plastic.

In the really long run it is pretty clear that we ought to back up 
bio-memories to external storage, that we would benefit from life 
recording documentation (with good search) for "objective" memories, and 
some of our memories are going to be social entities (like Wikipedia). 
Each type have their own use.


> The first order effects of age extension *right now* would be to tip the balance of power further towards the elderly -- who, in our current system, are largely a transient rentier class. Immediate consequences: rising youth unemployment, a recession or depression caused by the partial collapse of the investment sector due to the destabilization of pension schemes, the collapse of social security systems, and a rain of boiling frogs. (Well, not the latter bit.)

Boiling frog rains are almost imperceptibly slow anyway.

The speed of the LE transition is something that rarely has been 
studied. I did some very crude demography hacks a while ago, 
http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2009/09/life_extension_model.html
and it is interesting to note that even fairly radical extension 
introduced suddenly takes decades to transform society.

The pension issue is in my opinion a bit of a red herring. Yes, the 
schemes need reform and there is going to be political struggle over it. 
But long-lived people will want to have long-range investments too, and 
it is not implausible that many of the funds simply transmute into 
healthcare insurance funds instead.

>
>> It might be useful to have simple rules of thumb like the century rule: nobody gets to keep a job/office more than a century, but again there are likely exceptions.
> Try applying that to self-employed people? Or artists? (I suspect self-employment would rapidly rise among the young-elderly as they have the self-confidence and assets to make a fist of it.)

In fact, it is not a problem if self-employed or artists keep at what 
they are good at for centuries (except maybe boredom). Their success is 
largely dependent on them doing a good or desired job, so they are 
possible to circumvent if they are out of touch. The shuttle mechanic 
who doesn't do newfangled models or the artist who insists on painting 
in classical postmodernism will not be terribly big problems.


> The real problem, though, is to find ways of destabilizing rigid structures while encouraging social fluidity and minimizing inequality of both opportunity and outcomes.

It might be a good idea to deliberate open critical periods or rapid 
re-learning. Both in brains and in institutions. (As Hayek would have 
pointed out, there is not much difference - both are adaptive systems)


> Oh, and the folks who keep banging on about "freedom" (meaning personal freedom) are going to have a fun time adjusting their strategies to come to terms with the number of iterations in their Prisoner's Dilemma scenario tending towards infinity ...

Well, the meek reciprocal cooperators shall inherit the Earth. In the 
long run. On average.

There have been some interesting claims in an economics report I read 
that longer lifespans tend to make people more green (you get to live 
with your consequences). There is also some data showing that smart 
people are more long-term and cooperative. I suspect that the smarts 
aspect is quicker to update as life extension arrives than the pure 
learning: shortly after the transition smart first immortals will go 
very green/cooperative, while the non-smart first immortals will remain 
roughly normal. In the long run they will learn too, but there might be 
interesting effects of the transition - that first immortal cohort is 
going to be a rather curious wave over about a millennium, changing as 
it "ages".



-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Faculty of Philosophy
Oxford University