[ExI] Will ems have two genders?

Robin D Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu
Mon May 16 09:08:18 UTC 2016


On May 16, 2016, at 10:05 AM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se<mailto:anders at aleph.se>> wrote:

On 2016-05-16 08:16, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
On Mon, May 16, 2016 at 12:14 AM, Will Steinberg <<mailto:steinberg.will at gmail.com>steinberg.will at gmail.com<mailto:steinberg.will at gmail.com>> wrote:

But this stuff to me is so foreign, not worth talking about--or, worth talking about, but as a very very non-serious thought experiment.  Like people in 3000 BC talking about the future.  And I bet they had lots of ideas we've forgotten today, being closer to the dawn of self-consciousness and state-of-nature and all that.  Take some LSD and wonder about this stuff again.

### I find the ems world absolutely fascinating. I see it as the only way for me to hitch a ride into the future after superhuman AI comes online, which with every day that passes is closer by one day.

Robin's book is a pretty fascinating take on ems, since he develops the social side of the scenario in deep detail. We may of course want to work a lot on the tech side, but he is first in trying to see what our knowledge in the "soft sciences" actually makes likely.

A key thing in thinking about uncertain future developments is to realize that a high likeliehood of being wrong is not a reason not to try it, in many circumstances. If your models cause you to take actions that are maximally reasonable then it does not matter that there is a lot of noise.

Yes, surely ExI chat list is exactly the sort of place where readers would be open to considering what purports to be a careful analysis of the future. It is hard to know just how far you can get with analysis of a topic until you try. So you might as well just look at any given proposed analysis to see how well it works. If you think my analysis fails, please do tell me, and explain where and how you think it fails.

Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu<mailto:rhanson at gmu.edu>
Future of Humanity Inst., Oxford University
Assoc. Prof. Economics, George Mason University
See my new book: http://ageofem.com









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