Mid-Term Goals

Why not think big? It's better than thinking small as far as I can see.

We are already influencing the long-term trajectory of civilization, regardless of whether we acknowledge it or not.

I say civilization is life. We currently have sciences that are largely defined by their methodologies and institutions with a different science for say organisms, computers and technology. You might then think that life is what biology studies, but it is not so true. Life is also ideas, artifacts, civilization and computers.

Life is the craziest thing in the universe and it just starting. And we have the opportunity to shape the next stage of life, civilization, and intelligence.

There are a few things that fall out of common sense in my opinion, invariants: Suffering and death are bad. Life is good. Progress is good because it allows for more life, creativity, beauty, harmony and joy.

1. This was true in the distant past. It was true when we were Cambrian fish.
2. What is true across the eons is likely to stay true in the coming eons.
3. You really cannot know what amount of beauty and joy lies on the other side of progress. Nobody was foreseeing Bach or The Witcher 3 when the first primates started living in trees.

Mid-term I want to work on a solarpunk utopian future, biasing the outcomes towards human flourishing and ushering in the singularity¹ quicker.

This is a future with many trees and clear skies. In cities full of innovative and harmonious people, gazing at the stars and building great things.

What is techno-optimism, chat gpt?

Techno-optimism is a worldview or attitude that technology can bring about positive outcomes and solving some of the world's most pressing problems. It is the belief that advances in technology will ultimately lead to a better world, and that technological progress will help humanity overcome many of its current challenges, such as poverty, disease, and environmental degradation.

Techno-optimists tend to be enthusiastic about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and renewable energy, and they see these technologies as powerful tools for solving social, economic, and environmental problems. They often believe that technology can enable greater productivity, efficiency, and innovation, and that it can ultimately lead to a more prosperous and sustainable society.

However, techno-optimism is not without its critics. Some argue that it can lead to an overreliance on technology and overlooking important social and ethical issues associated with technological progress. Others point out that technology can exacerbate existing inequalities and that it can also have unintended consequences that are difficult to anticipate.

chat gpt end

Those critics are not seeing the full picture. Maybe civilization optimism would be the better word anyway. Science, reason, and humanism are all part of the story.

The point is to understand how and why civilization and technology are useful for bringing about human flourishing and well-being. And to continue the already made advances. And to realize, historically, how precious our current situation is.

For the inequality thing. This is not at all how mobile phones, the internet and medical advances (penicillin anybody?) turn out to work. By the time technology works well and is cheap to make we can make it available to all humans. Humanism and progress give us the ethical framework to have equal opportunity etc. as a goal.

• Fix aging
• Fix other diseases

This means you get an indefinite biological substrate lifespan. This might be rather low-hanging fruit, see Livespan with Dr. David Sinclair. Consider that fixing aging fixes a lot of diseases at the same time. Being biologically young means you fend off diseases.

Also, the same kind of advances fixes autoimmune diseases, Alzheimer, and cancer. See also the work of Aubrey de Grey for intelligent reasoning on this.

Seriously, most web and mobile software only works so-so nowadays because of bloated software. Everything is bigger and more complicated than it needs to be. Reloading some app because it stops working is the norm. This garbage is not acceptable in my vision of the future.

Software is supposed to be focused, effective and competent.

The price we pay right now for bloated and uninspired software is insanely high. How many mental energy hours go into reloading some app that stops responding⁶? Seriously, this is a global humanitarian issue.

Another issue is something I call mind-suck software now. This is software that is highly designed and explicitly or implicitly informed by behavioral psychology. To draw our attention and suck our time. When I click on an app with a blue icon because it has a red dot in the corner, that is not merely my fault, not only my lack of self restrain. That is also the fault of the people that made this software in the first place. This is an ethical issue. Long term I hope we understand which kind of software is conducive to our well-being and which is sucking our minds. ⁷ Mind-suck software belongs in the trashbin of history.

Existing software that lets me feel the competence of the computer is Unix/Linux, FOSS tools, Git, Emacs, and non-bloated parts of the web like Wikipedia. We can do it right.

The phone is a completely opaque object to me, with virtually no power to reach into it and make it do what I want it to do. Instead, I need to hope app vendors come up with something I find useful.

One of my fears currently is that BCIs will inherit from the current mobile model of software delivery. I think this would delay the singularity by multiple years.

The issues are uninspired practices and a disregard for the wisdom of the early days of computing. Also, the focus on financial incentives breeds less ambitious projects.⁸

Also, if it is FOSS, it tends to become small and focused, if it is proprietory, it tends to become large and bloated.

All user interfaces could be more like Data Rabbit right now. Think of the difference in productivity across the whole world. People would not fight computers anymore but wield great tools of thinking.

For obvious reasons, any of those can help fix things on this list:

• AI, information technology, automation.
• Better computer interfaces (conversational, … ).
• Nanotech, material science.
• Biotech, BCIs, genetics.
• A science and engineering of processes, policy and government ⁹.
• Also infrastructure, networks¹⁰, internet connection, water and goods.

• Cheap, tasty, clean meat.
• Just higher-tech food production.
• Plants. Better plants. More effective plants. And plant-growing buildings.

Why is governmenting not more like engineering? Anyway, it is an unsolved problem for obvious reasons:

• lack of UBI, poverty
• lack of decisive climate safety action
• lack of world peace
• noise pollution
• users citizens need to bother with paperwork, tax stuff is not automated.

For starters something like mind-uploading. Where you have a mind backup inside a fault-tolerant system.

Medium-long-term we need to make sure earth is safe from meteors and gamma rays. Goes into super long-term. By becoming a civilization after the stars are gone, and surviving the death of the universe, a civ might ultimately decide the fate of the universe.

• The Singularity is Near Ray Kurzweil It is a truly seminal book. It makes you appreciate exponential processes and then it maps that to computers and biotechnology. Making you see the logic of how fast technology is growing crazy powerful and tiny.
• Yuval Noah Harari, together with Pinker and others an eminent thinker and proponent of civilization optimism.
• Steven Pinker Enlightenment: Now The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
• Jared Diamond Guns, Germs, and Steel. An eye-opening book about large-scale, big-picture thinking. How civilizations form. Science fiction without being science fiction. It tells you everything could be different.
• David Deutsch The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World Big history, big ideas. Connects scientific inquiry with how evolution works. Explains the power of good ideas, talks about beauty, ethics, the fate of the universe and all that with a red thread going through it. Perspective-creating. A continuation of The Selfish Gene in some ways.
• Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology K. Eric Drexler. Drexler calmly and matter-of-factly explains how you can have a machine the size of a garage printing a car. The only thing needed is some advances in material science, no new physics is required.
• If you enjoy thinking about possible outcomes regarding AI, Max Tegmark, Life 3.0/. If you read nothing else from the book, the first chapter describing the fictional near-future secret group called the /Omegas is extremely thought-provoking. This is the idea of a small group of individuals controlling a super-intelligent AI, taking over the world and biasing for human flourishing.
• Superintelligence: Science or Fiction? | Elon Musk & Other Great Minds
• I don't fully know why but Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene is more than an just eye-opener about how evolution works it is also an eye-opener about the power of thinking and common sense.
• David Sinclair on fixing aging https://www.lifespanpodcast.com/
• Aubrey de Grey, very vocal about how we need to overcome deathism, the idea that death is something to accept.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky has written about the ethics of progress, longevity and more. If anything in this post resonates with you and you have not read Harry Potter And The Methods of Rationality yet, seriously, I can advise doing that. I am not alone in saying this. The book covers topics on morality, fixing death, being a scientist, and the navigation problem of fixing the world.
• Isaac Assimovs The Last Question is somehow a good meme about the big-picture.