Understanding heavy-tailed distributions are important to assessing likelihoods and impact scales when thinking about possible disasters – especially relevant to xRisk and Global Catastrophic Risk analysis. How likely is civilization to be devastated by a large scale disaster or even go extinct? Anders discusses how heavy-tailed distributions account for more than our intuitions tell us….
Dr Randal Koene covers the motivation for human technological augmentation and reasons to go beyond biological life extension. Competition is an inescapable occurrence in the animate and even in the inanimate universe. To give our minds the flexibility to transfer and to operate in different substrates bestows upon our species the most important competitive advantage.”…
A transcription of Sam Harris’ discussion on the Implications of Strong AI during recent appearance on the Ruben Report. Sam contrasts narrow AI with strong AI, AI Safety, the possibility of rapid AI self-improvement, the idea of AI superintelligence may seem alien to us, and he also brings up the idea that it is important…
Projects at SENS Foundation Sens Foundation has a lot of projects that were working on all at the same time. There are 3 projects that we are working on at our research center in California and then there are a whole bunch of others that we support at university laboratories around the world – mostly…
The Quantified Self movement is usefully encouraging loads of people to record metrics about their personal health – the resulting big data will be useful to mine in doing research on how food and lifestyle impact health. There are also some ethical issues around privacy if personal metrics are used inappropriately. Here is an interview…
Suffering is generally bad – Peter Singer (who is a Hedonistic Utilitarian), and most Effective Altruists would agree with this. Though in addressing the need for suffering today Peter acknowledges that, as we are presently constituted, suffering is useful as a warning sign (e.g. against further injury). But what about the future? What if we…
It is non-trivial for a couple of reasons:a) the pursuit of this vision of happiness is not trivial – it is likely to be a very challenging endeavor (though totally worthy of the effort)b) the aim is to achieve non-trivial modes of happiness, kinds of information-sensitive gradients of bliss (as opposed to being stuck in…
‘Wake Enhancement’: Is sleep better than medicine? Are well rested people happier and more productive people? Generally anecdotal feedback from grinders, transhumanists and futurists that I have met with often get into the habit of loosing sleep, and depending on coffee or other nutropics like modafinil to get through the day – while this can…
Why are some people so skeptical of the possibility of Super-intelligent Machines, while others take it quite seriously? Hugo de Garis addresses both ‘Singularity Skepticism’ and advocacy – reasons for believing machine intelligence is not only possible but quite probable! The Singularity will likely be an unprecedentedly huge issue that we will need to face…
Sundance describes particle physics and covers two grand unifying theories: super string theory and quantum loop gravity, then discusses the distribution of beliefs among experts on grand unifying theories and concludes by emphasisng the need for a wider research program in physics (and science in general) – as well as the funding to back it…
