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“Let’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream that you wanted to dream, and that you could, for example, have the power within one night to d
by bamboozled 1y ago
“Let’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream that you wanted to dream, and that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of dreams, or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would, naturally as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights, of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say ‘Well, that was pretty great. But now let’s have a surprise. Let’s have a dream which isn’t under control. Where something is gonna happen to me that I don’t know what it’s gonna be.’ And you would dig that and come out of that and say ‘Wow, that was a close shave, wasn’t it?’. And then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further out gambles as to what you would dream. And finally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today.”
~Alan Watts…
- Loughla 1y agoThe Minds call it Infinite Fun Space. The space of all possible mathematical worlds, free to explore and to play in. It is infinitely more expressive than the boring base reality and much more varied: base reality is after all just a special case. From time to time the Minds have to go back to it to fix some local mess, but their hearts are in Infinite Fun Space. ~Iain Banks But larger than any of this is that if we're dealing with super intelligent AI, we'll have no common frame of reference. It will be the first truly alien intelligence we will interact with. There will be no way to guess its intentions, desires, or decisions. It's smarter, faster, and just do different to us that we might as well be trying to communicate with a sparrow about the sparrow's take on the teachings of Marcus Aurelius. And that's what scares me the most. We literally cannot plan for it. We have to hope for the best. And to be honest, if the open Internet plays a part in any of the training of a super intelligent AI, we're fucked.