[ExI] hard science

Robin D Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu
Sat May 3 15:47:23 UTC 2014


On May 2, 2014, at 10:21 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki <rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com<mailto:rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com>> wrote:
So we all have the Superman fantasy:  better body, better brain, etc.  Everything I know about psychology says this will happen:  it will become the new normal.  We will adjust to it and be no happier than when we started.

### I don't think this will be the case. The development of uploading technologies, whether by BMI or by destructive scanning, is likely to be associated with gaining an intimate understanding of, and the ability to precisely modify, the motivational and hedonic substructures of minds being uploaded. I do not know if e.g. totally removing the hedonic and aversive components of subjective experience is compatible with survival of a mind in a social milieu but I am convinced that our present human personality repertoire is only a minute subset of all viable mind designs. Therefore, once the technological limitations to deeply modifying minds are gone, there will be an adaptive radiation of mind designs driven by evolutionary pressures within the social computational substrate that will generate a variety of mind types, and few of them will be "normal" by our present human standards.

Eventually uploading will help us understand human mind design, but there could be a substantial delay between the two. So in an early period, minds might be copiable but not usefully modified much except via a limited set of known "tweaks."

For the purpose of using uploads as productive workers, I don't see much advantage to motivational and hedonic hacking. We can already motivate humans to work well and hard, and we've been doing that for millennia. So if there was a substantial chance of messing up their ability to work when you messed with their motives, profit-seeking orgs that manage uploads would probably skip the motive hacking.

Robin Hanson  http://hanson.gmu.edu
Res. Assoc., Future of Humanity Inst., Oxford Univ.
Assoc. Professor, George Mason University
Chief Scientist, Consensus Point
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030
703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323



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