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Robin Hanson – Attitudes to the Future – Future Day Discussion 2015

Robin-Hanson-200x200Topics covered: Attitudes to the future, Prediction Markets, SciCast, Blockchain currency, Quadratic Voting, Artificial Intelligence Development etc.

Notes on interview:
People are engaged in extreme futures – heaven or hell scenarios – are people’s attraction towards, or engagement with certain futures informed by evolved biases?

Prediction Markets in contrast to narratives about the future informed by Moralising Tales – whatever is likely to happen is probably a muddled up mix, a mixture of heaven and hell, not just one or the other – Moralising Tale, ignores statistics – it will all be terrible or fantastic, nothing in between…

Could the world do with futurists in industry? Hard to tell. Sometimes firms (i.e. google) are tied to a particular image – google have the image of innovation – google gets attention for projects like calico – pie in the sky moonshot projects are a compliment to their image. Employees are more likely to want to work for google because of its sexiness…

Justin Rattner (former CTO of Intel) spoke about the singularity quite a bit.. but not many CEOs/CTOs bring it up – with the exception of a few… though this could change.

Updates blockchain currency (bitcoin, etherium) – opportunities / risks

Futurists are often eager for big change – enthusiastic – people who are itching for big change often focus on scenarios for the future where there is big change.

Robin-Hanson-Oxford-Adam-Ford-Interview-1Why is there little interest in quadratic voting compared to small iterations in gadgetry (which seems to get a lot of press)?
There is a lot of new and inventive gadgets, and ideas in physics that have huge communities of interest – but social technologies, ways we organise meetings, for instance Quadratic Voting… Many voting systems don’t do a good job at weighing different votes based on how much you care about the issue. QV pays for votes in proportion to the square of the number of votes – can produce outcomes that weigh votes based on how much the voters care about the issue. People can be given votes as a point system, and they can choose to distribute their points based on how much they care about certain issues.
QV: http://www.law.uchicago.edu/node/16996

AI Dev – what are the big improvements? Whole new trend? Or progress in existing ideas?

Omens! There was always the new thing, the omen that promised this and that, cries in the wilderness – what kinds of omens should we be listening to? well… don’t follow individual news events, listen to aggregates – for instance there was a whole data series of terrorist attacks – don’t make a decision on one terrorist event.

Prediction Markets / Strategic forecasting – SciCast https://scicast.org/

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