[ExI] nick's book being sold by fox news

[Anders Sandberg]

spike <spike66 at att.net> , 27/10/2014 7:49 PM:


 

>… On Behalf Of Asdd Marget
Subject: Re: [ExI] nick's book being sold by fox news

 

>… we should be working harder on concepts like Yudkowsky's Coherent Extrapolated Volition (https://intelligence.org/files/CEV.pdf) to ensure we aren't simply ending our species so early in our life cycle.

 

Asdd, how do we know it is so early in our life cycle?
Of course, "life cycle" presupposes a definite, closed cycle - it might be more reasonable to say "early in our lifespan". It is pretty likely that we can have an openended evolution.
I think the Doomsday argument is the best argument that we are *not* early in our span, but whether it is valid is of course very controversial. 
My own argument for why we are early is that if we can learn to survive in space we have an essentially open ended niche that is not critically dependent on any single planet or solar system, and hence likely to allow indefinite growth. And since we know the resources will last for a *long* time, we can estimate that this could continue for an inconceivable span of time.
Great Filter arguments suggest that either the the Filter is behind or ahead of us. If one thinks it is behind us, there is no reason to think we will have a short span. If it is ahead it is reasonable to say that we may have a long span if we survives (unless the explanation if some form of iterated future filter). 


Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20141027/5b129bd1/attachment.html>