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You pushed almost ALL of my buttons...note that I on every point I almost agree with your points (which of course meant I have to nitpick them:). 1. I agree that it is important to broaden your horizon and not blindly think everything works like software. But IMO, not enough people learn to attack problems like a good hacker.
I'd argue that for understanding and modeling,the fundamental principles that drive hard sciences ( best discussed by Karl Popper and Feynman in my opinion) are as of yet the only methods which have proved themselves. For doing and building
complicated things, (software) engineers have developed a way of zipping between layers of abstractions which is again in this domain of fundamental principles, but less fleshed out. Economics and other "soft" sciences is then (when its done well) about properly applying these principles from hard science and engineering to domains with incredibly scarce data and no real way to do experiments(because, you know, ethics). History and other "exploratory" sciences is then about gathering more data and cleaning it. And finally, philosophy and the arts are about pushing the boundaries of our imagination and to inspire us, so we can apply all of those other tools to new domains and cross fertilize. 2. To AI Risk: I said it before, i say it again, I am incredibly disappointed in the current AI risk movement. There is way to much focus on the vague "tail risk" of a rogue AI (be it by chance of by ill will) and some sort of "paperclip" scenario, and almost no mention of the very real, very right now structural risk of continued wealth concentration, mass surveillance (which is where we agree) and mass unemployment. The tail risk in my opinion is negligible, due to simple physical constraints computing faces right now, and to the fact that we have EMP. An actual AI apocalypse just isn't going to happen. And even if you handwave that with "tail risk"/rogue actors, then I ask: why not go after bioweapons? They are much easier (since we know they can work with our current tech, unlike AI) and about as dangerous.
Now, the structural problems will combine with demographical change, a regress from the brief period of increased equality (and freedom) and other factors. That stuff is happening right now. There are enough resources pointing out how many jobs will simply be made redundant,yet there are only some movements talking about UBI and other schemes to move to this post-work society. Disproportionately more noise is made about the scary death robots. 3. Death: I hope research into immortality, healthy aging (i.e. "dying with a young body at 70" ) and the likes continue. But it is very much a first world problem, nay, a millionaires and above problem. I don't buy the argument of stopping death being infinitively important on account of if making every other intervention more important. A lot of the current problems in the world are artificial (or at least not mandated by the laws of physics) and due to too much power in the hand of too few, without checks and balances. Let us fix that first, then make our overlords immortal. Tangentially, there was a great article+ discussion on HN here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9523231) on the topic of Peter Thiel and his "libertarian future" I apologize for going into rant mode, I hope I managed to make it somewhat congruent |
Likely because they make for better stories.