Comments on Human Cultural Transformation

I’ll start with choices and autonomy, because that’s where you guys seemed to finish up. Whether there is an illusion of choice or not, cannot necessarily be known. All that we know is that a certain system is successful and is thus sufficient (to the lower level agents) by evolution. I’d argue that being content with our levels of knowledge is grounded in something akin to the scientific method. So until we encounter anything contrary to our theory, we’re happy. Unfortunately if a large enough group of people have the same error in reasoning, the error can go on for a long enough time to create painful imbalances. We have errors of incomplete knowledge, lack of logic, emotional/animalistic biases, learned biases, etc… There are plenty of ways to reduce these biases. So my point is that we don’t choose to get into the “Matrix”, we only chose to get out of it by stopping our learning process

Incomplete knowledge - Tyler Cowen has mentioned that anything we know is already on the internet. We just stop searching at some point. The collective knowledge on the internet must be tapped by each and every one of us.

Logic errors, emotional/animalistic/learned biases – Overcoming Bias, and Less Wrong attempt a go at this. I would argue that their knowledge is light year ahead of what 90% of humans could benefit from. So we need to focus on application, not theory. Our errors are so basic and we all learn about them on a regular basis, yet we make them so regularly its amazes me that we’ve achieved this level of complexity! I’m sure I’ve already made at least three errors while writing this. it doesn’t necessarily make the conclusions wrong, because there’ll be other arguments and consequences, but you get the point (hopefully).

I haven’t read much about cingularity, so this is probably already part of the theory, but given all the factors above, we need to outsource anything we can to machines. Data storage and some simple intelligence. Baby steps. Only after taking those will it become apparent how to teach the machines more of what we want them to do. Humans form hypothesis and to the extent the machines can learn to form hypothesis they will win. To the degree we stay a step ahead of them, we will win. Although in a symbiotic relationship with an illusion of choice, it just might not matter. In a world of hamburgers, a steak is always superior as long as we don’t know about lobsters). Except by the time this level of similarity between man and machine is reached, the luxuries available to us will not even be comprehensible to us “simple” folk.

But simply stating that we CAN get to this level of complexity is far from making it happen. We must define the incentives correctly and encourage good ideas, which can only come from the most “complex” of individuals. Integration of various fields is critical. Once again, I suggest that IDEAS are more important than the masses of people who chose to get off the thinking/learning rollercoaster. We have to figure out how to farm good ideas more so than take care of every single living soul.

Gaia evidence - horizontal evolution?
http://kottke.org/10/02/not-your-fathers-evolution