[ExI] Better Bodies?

[Anders Sandberg]

On 21/03/2013 20:01, Natasha Vita-More wrote:
>
> What resources to you believe as consequential for convincing people 
> that we need better bodies?  So much is written, but not so much forms 
> a solid base of evidence.
>

While academic papers and rigorous arguments only convince a few people, 
here is my and Nick's take on it:
http://www.nickbostrom.com/evolution.pdf

Our argument is that even if evolution were a perfect optimizer, it 
would still fail at (1) giving us the right trade-offs for the modern 
world, (2) evolve things that are hard to do biologically, and (3) 
maximize human values. Given any optimality measure except past 
evolutionary fitness or "status quo is best" we should expect our bodies 
to be suboptimal at least in some respects.

We have later been taken to task by Powell and Buchanan ( 
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21228084 ) for giving evolution too 
much credit :-)




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

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