About
Rewritten June 2009.
Over the last decade or so, a group of responsible scientists has formed to address “existential risks”: risks that the universe will end in a way that almost everyone would consider bad. One way the universe might end badly, for example, is for a team of irresponsible scientists to create a human-unfriendly AI that will kill us all.
I spend most of my time and energy on my personal concerns. Specifically, I have a chronic illness and define my main responsibility in life as protecting my health. In contrast, the existential-risks activists (the responsible scientists I refer to above) spend most of their time and energy on global concerns. So I have to explain why I affiliate with the existential-risks activists. Well, first, since they are doing extremely important work, I want to help out as much as I responsibly can help out, even though for the forseeable future, I responsibly can help out only to a very limited extent. But more importantly, my participating in the community centered on the existential-risks activists is how I like to step back every now and then and take a broader view of things.
It seems to be beneficial for a human being to take a step back periodically from his or her personal struggles and from immediately practical considerations to contemplate the bigger picture. This is one function, for example, of the sabbath day in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Well, viewing things from a scientific perspective and from the perspective of existential risks is how I prefer to “observe the sabbath”, that is, how I step back and take a broader view. Moreover, I want personal relationships with people whose broader view is similar to mine. Towards this end I attend meetings attended by the existential-risks activists and frequent web sites frequented by them. For example, I have commented and posted on Hacker News, Less Wrong and Overcoming Bias and a few other blogs.
This community centered on the existential-risks activists probably has a better grasp on reality broadly speaking than any other community I know of. I expect that my engagement with them with will make me more rational, more ethical and less selfish.
I used to advocate a particular system of valuing things, but have resolved to stop. If you see me slip back into my former role of an advocate, point it out to me so that I will kick the habit faster. In my advocacy days, I described this blog as follows: “Part of a public conversation started in the 1990s by Eliezer Yudkowsky about building a superintelligence by building a self-modifying artificial intelligence, i.e., a seed AI. Read an introduction to Richard Hollerith’s perspective on it.”
This blog will cover personal and practical subjects, too, not only existential risks and the far future of the universe.
I am in my late 40s, live a few miles north of San Francisco, majored in computing in college, have had a life-long very strong interest in science, and started reading existential-risks activists in 2000.
Note that I am not an AI researcher and am too old to become competitive at that game. (Since it depends so heavily on fluid intelligence, anyone over 40 who does not already have many years of experience in the game is almost certainly to old to become competitive at that game.)
There is a body of knowledge that was created largely by AI researchers but which has wide applicability that I want to learn, and one of the attractions of the existential-risks community is that it is an excellent place to learn it. (I refer to the Bayesian stance in statistics, the work of AI researcher Judea Pearl and his colleagues, Solomonoff induction and the universal prior, etc, all of which add up to a technical or mathematical epistemology, which in my humble opinion should be a part of the education of most young people with a very strong interest in science.)
I would be interested in talking to anyone about how to apply this “technical epistemology” I have just described to the problem of chronic illness.
If you suspect that you and I might work well enough together and come to trust one another enough to start a software company or an internet company together one day, then now would be a good time for us to start talking.
