12 ms·

Wild Ideas

145 points by a3voices 13y ago

LAMike 13y ago
The Occulus Rift is basically the beginning of the Simulation
zarify 13y ago
The idea of living within a simulation is an odd one, assuming awareness and control over resources. Being somewhat defined by our limitations and then taking away limitations like memory, ability to learn new concepts ("Whoa, I know kung fu") doesn't actually sound like a lot of fun. And that's from someone who views life as a largely intellectual pursuit; it'd be super depressing for those who are defined by physical ability like athletes.
6ren 13y ago
Try this: we don't get alien visitors because space travel is prohibitively expensive. But communication is cheap. So you'd expect the sky to be filled with messages, maximally compressed and/or encrypted, and so indistinguishable from noise: background radiation.
- codezero 13y ago
  The only catch here is that such messages would be prohibitively costly (power wise) to transmit uniformly in all directions. They would be point to point to reduce the power, required to transmit, and increase privacy. It's difficult to intercept line of sight communications and it's unlikely we'd fall on the line of sight of two hot spots of intelligent communication in all the vastness of space. Even if they broadcast, I doubt it would be so completely uniform in all directions through long periods of time so as to appear as background.
  - 6ren 13y ago
    They are point to point. There's just so many, billions more than the number of stars (imagine cell phones radiating point to point), and even alien technology can't prevent beam-spread over billions of light years (another assumption).
- jmmcd 13y ago
  I like it, but: I guess you're talking about civilizations deliberately communicating with each other. If they don't already know each other, then maximal compression or encryption would prevent them recognising each other's signals, by your argument. If they do, then how did that happen?
  - 6ren 13y ago
    Nice point! I guess we could posit some trainer-signals amid the mash. A civilisation's technology just has to be advanced enough to work them out...
    - jmmcd 13y ago
      Our technology (ie, information theory) is already advanced enough to test whether the background radiation is noise or not.
clamprecht 13y ago
I have a "science-fictiony" idea that I haven't seen anywhere else yet. The idea is this: If we can see light from planets thousands of light years away, then we can see the past. Once our telescopes are good enough to basically do a "google maps" zoom-in on other planets, we will be able to watche the past on other planets. But then, if we can ever watch our own Earth from a thousand light years away, then we can see what happened in the past. The missing link is for us to be able to travel faster than the speed of light so we can go far enough to view Earth's past. While not "obvious", I still feel like others have probably thought of this idea. It could make a cool science fiction story.
- LukeShu 13y ago
  In Hubbard's Battlefield Earth, they do this with another planet. It was destroyed, and they fly/transport/whatever a camera out so many lightyears from it, so they can see what happened.
- mnutt 13y ago
  Something similar to your idea is the basis for the Arthur C. Clark novel The Light of Other Days.
- mentos 13y ago
  what if we could use the surface of other planets as mirrors to peer back at ours?
- wikiburner 13y ago
  Here's an even crazier version: we develop a quantum computer the size of Jupiter with seemingly infinite computational capacity, and "scan" and simulate the earth. Similar to how a sufficiently advanced AI application today could probably take an overview picture of a pool table at any point in a game, and deduce the past shots that had to be taken in order for it to result in it's current state, you might be able to develop a virtual time machine.
  - goldfeld 13y ago
    That sounds enticing, but I think you could never rewind the state of the Earth without considering the variables external to it. If you couldn't also simulate anything that could alter the course of events, such as exposure to the Sun, I think you'd end up accumulating enough lossy transitions that the simulation would be rendered (ha) worthless in a deterministic sense. If we consider that only simulating the atoms contained within the Earth is enough to have a perfect understanding of it's state across time, by logical conclusion simulating a house would be enough to rewind the history of it's structure.
foxylad 13y ago
Migration to millions of star systems in 10,000 years? Speed of light says NO.
- quink 13y ago
  You don't seem to get what the speed of light is. The speed of light isn't the problem. Acceleration, time dilation and deceleration are. But barring the g-forces and enough of an engine we could travel to Alpha Centauri in less than 4 years, which may surprise you. Although that would be less than 4 spaceship years, not less than 4 Earth years.
  - tlb 13y ago
    At 1G acceleration, you can accelerate to a large fraction of the speed of light in about a year. A suitable rocket engine does not yet exist, but g-forces and human lifespans don't prevent travel to nearby stars.
  - babesh 13y ago
    If you could transmit sentience via light you won't have any issues at all.
- gojomo 13y ago
  Math says YES, assuming out-migration at some fraction of the speed of light (c). This NASA page estimates a star density of 0.120 stars per cubic parsec (CP), where a parsec is 3.26 light years. http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/980123d.html http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/980123d.... Thus that page's estimate of the number of stars within a 100 light year radius of Earth is: = 0.120 stars/CP * 4/3 * π * ((100 LY)/(3.26 parsecs/LY))^3 = around 14,600 stars Recalculating for 1,000 light year diameter: = 0.120 stars/CP * 4/3 * π * ((1000 LY)/(3.26 parsecs/LY))^3 = around 14.5 million stars So given 10,000 years, and out-migration by Hansonian 'ems' (mental-simulations) at just 0.2c, and even starting more than a thousand years from now, many tens of millions of stars would be reachable. Of course, there are many other challenges with that prediction, but the speed of light is not an absolute barrier, as you suggest.
- 13y ago
goldfeld 13y ago
On the Great Filter, there was a discussion here about an excellent essay on the matter by Nick Bostrom, which I summarized in a comment[1] and extended the thinking. Still haven't read the one linked this time. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4842416 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4842416
snitko 13y ago
The author is obviously some kind of crazy anarchist. Private law system? You mean that all of a sudden people would become customers of multiple legal firms instead of subjects of one big system and will be able to choose laws they like while at the same time not interfering directly with others who chose different laws? You mean that all of a sudden majority would lose its power to dictate minorities how to live their lives and gay people all over the world can start marrying each other simply because they are customers of a different firm by their voluntary choice? I say impossible! We need government. Anyone who says we don't is an anarchist and we all know anarchists are bad for ya.
- ricardobeat 13y ago
  It's called Polycentric Law[1] and people who actually think it's a good idea seem to exist in larger than zero quantities. See this entertaining thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5009244 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5009244 [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycentric_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycentric_law
  - eru 13y ago
    snitko actually approves, I guess.
    - ricardobeat 13y ago
      Oh. Momentary sarcasm detector failure. His scenario is a little too bright though... more like minorities getting exterminated by the conservative & powerful.
  - hrvbr 13y ago
    Also http://www.panarchy.org/ http://www.panarchy.org/
- unimpressive 13y ago
  This wasn't funny, please stop.
- 13y ago
aasarava 13y ago
#2, about health insurance, overlooks a big part of the RAND HIE's findings: people who were sick and poor in the study did have worse health outcomes.
- briancaw2 13y ago
  It's just a bad argument in general...saying that because people spend 30% more when stuff is free (without improved results) means they have twice as much as they need. It doesn't follow, at all.
- enginous 13y ago
  Also, his idea of increasing taxes will mean that even if his statement were true ("[if] people only bought half as much, they would be just as healthy"), a flat increase in drug tax would at best make this effect true on average. Due to higher taxation, low-income individuals would have even less access to medicine than today. Keeping people away from drugs with prohibitive taxation means starving entire demographics of this component of health care. So sure, people who have the funds to take excessive amounts of medicine may be "just as healthy." Others would be considerably worse off.
  - frobozz 13y ago
    Only if those low-income individuals have to pay the same for their medicine as those with higher incomes. If the purpose of taxing medicine is to subsidise the provision of medicine to people who couldn't afford it at cost price, then that would give such people greater access.
- tedsanders 13y ago
  To be fair, their outcomes were not much worse.
- ckuehne 13y ago
  The overall result, namely, that at the margin medicine has net-negative effects (i.e., after a certain point more medicine equals worse health) has been replicated many times. See for example this meta-study from 2008 about what happens when health workers go on strike [1]: "[..] mortality either stayed the same or decreased during, and in some cases, after the strike. [No study] found that mortality increased during the weeks of the strikes compared to other time periods." The authors speculate about the reasons: "The paradoxical finding that physician strikes are associated with reduced mortality may be explained by several factors. Most importantly, elective surgeries are curtailed during strikes. Further, hospitals often re-assign scarce staff and emergency care was available during all of the strikes." [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18849101 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18849101 EDIT: clarity
sytelus 13y ago
Yes, wild ideas except for the "2100" part. The scientific and engineering breakthroughs have been slowing down dramatically in past 50 years or so. Science fiction from 60s and 70s is embarrassingly filled with predictions such as we would have colonies in space, computers indistinguishable from humans, flying cars on street, humankind without poverty and end of cancer by 2020. How close are we? If we go back in time to meet all these writers from 60s & 70s, the major breakthroughs we would have to show for are likes of Instagram and Angry Birds. Yes, I'm downplaying all these increase in computing power and better algorithms in search etc but guess what? Moors law is dead as we know it and search is still keywords in a textbox. To me it looks like we probably had 10 fold increase in human productivity during past 50 years but major portion of it goes towards "enhancing shareholder value" or wars rather than advancing science and technology. So unless this changes somehow, all the magic that can happen is still pretty far in distant, probably much beyond 2100.
- derefr 13y ago
  The scientific institution has stopped really paying that much attention to space (or computation, in relative terms), and has started paying attention to biotech and materials science instead. Not a one of those science-fiction authors thought to suggest "get your DNA sequenced for $100" in their wildest flights of fancy. Also, > search is still keywords in a textbox what else would you suggest? The "hard problem" part of search now doesn't seem to be anything to do with indexing information usefully, but rather getting people to be able to clearly communicate (and before even that, clearly decide) what they're looking for.
  - sytelus 13y ago
    Current search would be pretty embarrassing to future generation as much as it is awesome to current generation. Right now you can find a page only if that page contains all keywords in it. In some cases, there are band-aids to include popular synonyms and correlated keywords or remove some keywords or suggest alternative keywords (spell check). If you think of it, this is very primitive, pretty much the same stage as baby tryieng to sit up at 6 months. Let's say you read the book Black List by Brad Thor and you had an awesome memory to remember everything. Your friend won't ask you about this novel by keywords. They will ask you questions like "What is the best way to steal a car?" or "How would you get rid of strangers chasing you?" or "what breed of dogs are very vicious when you signal but very friendly otherwise?". And you would be able to answer those questions, not only by quoting related text but also summarizing and enriching the information. This what the ideal search would look like... pretty much how you can converse with computer on Star Trek. That's why I said current search is just "keywords in a textbox", still a very far thing from making science fiction a reality.
wikiburner 13y ago
Soul Extraction - Assuming that there is a technological singularity at some point in the future, and assuming that time travel is possible[1], but that we've seen no evidence of it because it must be mostly observational in nature in order to prevent disruptions that would create time paradoxes, humanity adopts the practice of extracting the brain/nervous systems (and then replacing w/ equivalent matter) of every human in history at the moment of their death, to live in a post-singularity utopia. [1]: Einstein, Hawking, and many others have speculated that time travel should be possible, but were ultimately skeptical of it because of the "Where are all of the time travelers?" argument. Fear of the creation of time paradoxes could be the reason why there's no evidence of time travel.
- snitko 13y ago
  Extracting all info out of the brains would be impractical. A lot of the things humans do we do because we are humans. Our emotions only make sense because they are mechanisms of survival and passing our genes. They would be quite impractical in a singularity (although, some other emotions, specific to the digital world, may be employed). So in a sense, I can only see one force in a post-singularity utopia, driving post-humans: knowledge and understanding the beauty of it.
  - derefr 13y ago
    All of the things humans do, we do because we are humans. There is no "natural set of universal goals for sentient beings"; we simply like what evolution has made us like. Changing (and especially removing) our terminal goals is the same as creating a new species with no relation to us. Why would we want to do that?
    - gnaritas 13y ago
      Because why would I care if I change species if it keeps my consciousness alive?
      - derefr 13y ago
bumbledraven 13y ago
1. Many times each day, your mind permanently splits into different versions that live in different worlds. True. 2. If medicine were taxed so much that people only bought half as much, they would be just as healthy. False. The "extra" spending in medicine drives innovations so we have better drugs & procedures etc. than we would otherwise. 3. If we keep writing down common sense datums until 2100, we can make computers as smart as people. False. 4. If your head is cryogenically frozen today, you will be alive in 2100. Maybe. 5. By 2100, the vast majority of "people" will be immortal computers running brain simulations. True. 6. There's a five percent chance I live in a "future" computer simulation as I write this. False - to run simulate sentient beings with so much suffering would be cruel. 7. By 2100, world economic growth rates will have increased by over a factor of a hundred. Maybe - progress & growth keep happening faster and faster. 8. The growth of humanity and its descendants will stop forever within a thousand years or so. False - see _The Beginning of Infinity_ by David Deutsch. 9. Our descendants will colonize millions of star systems within ten thousand years or so. True, if we don't fuck up - again, see _The Beginning of Infinity_. 10. The nearest intelligent aliens are many millions of light-years away. True. 11. Billions of years ago, intelligent aliens had a colony near here, but left in a big hurry. False. It's a bad explanation. 12. If we allowed complete freedom of contract, law could be privatized, to our common benefit. Maybe - I don't know about "complete freedom of contract" (can you sell yourself into slavery?) but privatizing law might be a good idea, eventually. 13. If we switched to "futarchy" as a form of government, we would be richer and just as happy. Maybe - if we're going to deviate from tradition, better to do it in the direction of more freedom and less government control - which is known to make people richer. 14. If even a few of us honestly sought truth, we would not disagree with each other. True. For any issue, there is an objective truth of the matter, and if people care enough to find out the truth, they should eventually find a theory/explanation of the issue that no has an issue with, at least for a while. People will keep finding new problems with the latest theory, and they'll have to sort that out, but eventually truth-seeking should lead to plateaus of agreement.
- IvyMike 13y ago
  > False - to run simulate sentient beings with so much suffering would be cruel. I see you've never searched youtube for "The Sims".
ivanbrussik 13y ago
the scariest part of us living in a simulated environment is what happens when the players get bored and decide to turn us off (that thought might have been controlled by one of the players)
- icebraining 13y ago
  Who cares? It's not like we'll notice. The scary part is if their equivalent of 4chan gets a hold of the controls.
  - andrewkreid 13y ago
    There is another theory that states that this has already happened...
gbog 13y ago
Mine: In fifty years ecology will seem as ridicule as we see the middle age crusades now. The only allowed porn will be animal documentaries. Economy will be replaced by something that actually works, the same way alchemy has been replaced with chemistry. High buildings will be considered as dangerous paper castles and cities will be flat. Having to sit on a desk at work will be considered as belonging to the lowest end of the social scale. We will run on highways with special shoes and cars will make us laugh at their utter discomfort.
- wikiburner 13y ago
  Wow, it's like Ed Wood has been reincarnated as an HNer. :)
babesh 13y ago
1. Human cloning 2. Giant solar collectors the size of states 3. Pandemics 4. Self aware computers 5. Tailored assassination drugs to induce swift cancer 6. Colonies on the moon 7. Genetic alteration and enhancement 8. Thought control 9. Man and machine war like the Matrix 1. and 5. are mostly to occur first.
- Houshalter 13y ago
  Is there any practical purpose in human cloning short of cloning specific organs for replacement? As for tailored drugs to induce cancer, that is rather specific. There are a lot of ways to kill people, not sure if that would be the most efficient. And if you have that level of technology, there might also be dangers like custom made viruses that are super-contagious and 100% lethal. Which makes #9 more interesting. A war between man and machines would end very quickly if the AI just designs a super-virus and kills 99% of the population overnight.
  - babesh 13y ago
    The sequel is that the machines then fight against each other which makes a lot of sense. Mr Smith and all. There will probably always be a struggle to replicate and for resources. It's not specific to humans.
chetan51 13y ago
If we keep writing down common sense datums until 2100, we can make computers as smart as people. We learn more about brains and making smart computers, but we seem to have run out of major architectural innovations -- better ones won't make a huge difference. The big stumbling block seems to be how much "common sense" a system knows, like that things tend to fall down when you bump them. One group has been writing these down for fifteen years with moderate success; a century more effort may be plenty. This seems like a really inefficient way to go about it.
pawelwentpawel 13y ago
By 2100 we should be able to scan this info from a frozen brain. If we scan your brain and then build and run a computer simulation of it, someone who remembers being you would wake up and feel alive. Let's say we are actually able to do that by 2100. Somebody is scanning in patterns and current state of my neural activity. He copies that into a simulation - more than once. Which of the simulations will be me? All of them? Also, it reminds me a bit of Swampman problem : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swampman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swampman If we keep writing down common sense datums until 2100, we can make computers as smart as people. Would it make them smart or just filled with hard coded knowledge? I would expect that in this case the goal would be to create a system that is able to acquire common sense knowledge on its own from a given environment and reason from it. What we might consider as common sense in our daily lives might not be fully applicable in different situations.
- Nux 13y ago
  Ahh, the swampman! I always thought of this problem when watching characters in StarTrek using teleportation, didn't know it was an existing, famous problem. IMHO the teleported person ceases to exist at some point and a _new_ , identical person is being "created" by the transporter device. It's more of a gut feeling, hard to explain in words why I feel this way.
  - danabramov 13y ago
    It's kinda intuitive, but I'm pretty sure it's wrong. Imagine you fall in coma and sleep long enough that all your body cells have been changed. Do you wake up a different person? I don't think so. What you perceive as yourself is the experience of being aware of everything you have learned in the world. An identical brain, whether created by teleport or running in simulation, is you just as much. So yes, both simulations will be sure they are you (and in a sense, both will be you—if we allow the simulations, we must abandon the idea of there being only one “you” at the moment). The funny thing, these simulations will immediately diverge by obtaining different experiences, and thus can be thought of “forks” of you.
    - 13y ago
bnegreve 13y ago
If we switched to "futarchy" as a form of government, we would be richer and just as happy. So, what's the point?
utopkara 13y ago
Some of these comments cannot be falsified: - You could be a computer. - There could be a colony on earth millions of years ago. Oh, and he is an economist too! How appropriate. Yep, Dr Hanson, keep up the good work.
- utopkara 13y ago
  Here's another one, I just made up: - Aliens from billions of years into the future with an infinite source of energy and computational power have managed to slice the universe and put us into the solar system as a simulation. Everything coming back beyond the solar system is simulated, matter and energy alike.
- utopkara 13y ago
  Here's another "thought": - If academics kept compiling the knowledge of the world starting at 2000BC, and everybody were taught the knowledge, we'd have reached our current level of science by 1000BC.
opminion 13y ago
I was thinking the other day that I have seldom seen the purpose of mankind discussed in public (beyond religious belief). This list of ideas could be an interesting trigger of such discussion.
cell303 13y ago
why don't we take this discussion over to http://longbets.org/ http://longbets.org/ (and put some money behind it, so eventually people mean what the say)

145 points by a3voices 13y ago

The Occulus Rift is basically the beginning of the Simulation

The idea of living within a simulation is an odd one, assuming awareness and control over resources. Being somewhat defined by our limitations and then taking away limitations like memory, ability to learn new concepts ("Whoa, I know kung fu") doesn't actually sound like a lot of fun. And that's from someone who views life as a largely intellectual pursuit; it'd be super depressing for those who are defined by physical ability like athletes.

6ren 13y ago

Try this: we don't get alien visitors because space travel is prohibitively expensive. But communication is cheap. So you'd expect the sky to be filled with messages, maximally compressed and/or encrypted, and so indistinguishable from noise: background radiation.

codezero 13y ago
The only catch here is that such messages would be prohibitively costly (power wise) to transmit uniformly in all directions. They would be point to point to reduce the power, required to transmit, and increase privacy. It's difficult to intercept line of sight communications and it's unlikely we'd fall on the line of sight of two hot spots of intelligent communication in all the vastness of space. Even if they broadcast, I doubt it would be so completely uniform in all directions through long periods of time so as to appear as background.
- 6ren 13y ago
  They are point to point. There's just so many, billions more than the number of stars (imagine cell phones radiating point to point), and even alien technology can't prevent beam-spread over billions of light years (another assumption).
jmmcd 13y ago
I like it, but: I guess you're talking about civilizations deliberately communicating with each other. If they don't already know each other, then maximal compression or encryption would prevent them recognising each other's signals, by your argument. If they do, then how did that happen?
- 6ren 13y ago
  Nice point! I guess we could posit some trainer-signals amid the mash. A civilisation's technology just has to be advanced enough to work them out...
  - jmmcd 13y ago
    Our technology (ie, information theory) is already advanced enough to test whether the background radiation is noise or not.

clamprecht 13y ago

I have a "science-fictiony" idea that I haven't seen anywhere else yet. The idea is this: If we can see light from planets thousands of light years away, then we can see the past. Once our telescopes are good enough to basically do a "google maps" zoom-in on other planets, we will be able to watche the past on other planets. But then, if we can ever watch our own Earth from a thousand light years away, then we can see what happened in the past. The missing link is for us to be able to travel faster than the speed of light so we can go far enough to view Earth's past. While not "obvious", I still feel like others have probably thought of this idea. It could make a cool science fiction story.

LukeShu 13y ago
In Hubbard's Battlefield Earth, they do this with another planet. It was destroyed, and they fly/transport/whatever a camera out so many lightyears from it, so they can see what happened.
mnutt 13y ago
Something similar to your idea is the basis for the Arthur C. Clark novel The Light of Other Days.
mentos 13y ago
what if we could use the surface of other planets as mirrors to peer back at ours?
wikiburner 13y ago
Here's an even crazier version: we develop a quantum computer the size of Jupiter with seemingly infinite computational capacity, and "scan" and simulate the earth. Similar to how a sufficiently advanced AI application today could probably take an overview picture of a pool table at any point in a game, and deduce the past shots that had to be taken in order for it to result in it's current state, you might be able to develop a virtual time machine.
- goldfeld 13y ago
  That sounds enticing, but I think you could never rewind the state of the Earth without considering the variables external to it. If you couldn't also simulate anything that could alter the course of events, such as exposure to the Sun, I think you'd end up accumulating enough lossy transitions that the simulation would be rendered (ha) worthless in a deterministic sense. If we consider that only simulating the atoms contained within the Earth is enough to have a perfect understanding of it's state across time, by logical conclusion simulating a house would be enough to rewind the history of it's structure.

foxylad 13y ago

Migration to millions of star systems in 10,000 years? Speed of light says NO.

quink 13y ago
You don't seem to get what the speed of light is. The speed of light isn't the problem. Acceleration, time dilation and deceleration are. But barring the g-forces and enough of an engine we could travel to Alpha Centauri in less than 4 years, which may surprise you. Although that would be less than 4 spaceship years, not less than 4 Earth years.
- tlb 13y ago
  At 1G acceleration, you can accelerate to a large fraction of the speed of light in about a year. A suitable rocket engine does not yet exist, but g-forces and human lifespans don't prevent travel to nearby stars.
- babesh 13y ago
  If you could transmit sentience via light you won't have any issues at all.
gojomo 13y ago
Math says YES, assuming out-migration at some fraction of the speed of light (c). This NASA page estimates a star density of 0.120 stars per cubic parsec (CP), where a parsec is 3.26 light years. http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/980123d.html http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/980123d.... Thus that page's estimate of the number of stars within a 100 light year radius of Earth is: = 0.120 stars/CP * 4/3 * π * ((100 LY)/(3.26 parsecs/LY))^3 = around 14,600 stars Recalculating for 1,000 light year diameter: = 0.120 stars/CP * 4/3 * π * ((1000 LY)/(3.26 parsecs/LY))^3 = around 14.5 million stars So given 10,000 years, and out-migration by Hansonian 'ems' (mental-simulations) at just 0.2c, and even starting more than a thousand years from now, many tens of millions of stars would be reachable. Of course, there are many other challenges with that prediction, but the speed of light is not an absolute barrier, as you suggest.
13y ago

goldfeld 13y ago

On the Great Filter, there was a discussion here about an excellent essay on the matter by Nick Bostrom, which I summarized in a comment[1] and extended the thinking. Still haven't read the one linked this time. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4842416 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4842416

snitko 13y ago

The author is obviously some kind of crazy anarchist. Private law system? You mean that all of a sudden people would become customers of multiple legal firms instead of subjects of one big system and will be able to choose laws they like while at the same time not interfering directly with others who chose different laws? You mean that all of a sudden majority would lose its power to dictate minorities how to live their lives and gay people all over the world can start marrying each other simply because they are customers of a different firm by their voluntary choice? I say impossible! We need government. Anyone who says we don't is an anarchist and we all know anarchists are bad for ya.

ricardobeat 13y ago
It's called Polycentric Law[1] and people who actually think it's a good idea seem to exist in larger than zero quantities. See this entertaining thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5009244 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5009244 [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycentric_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycentric_law
- eru 13y ago
  snitko actually approves, I guess.
  - ricardobeat 13y ago
    Oh. Momentary sarcasm detector failure. His scenario is a little too bright though... more like minorities getting exterminated by the conservative & powerful.
- hrvbr 13y ago
  Also http://www.panarchy.org/ http://www.panarchy.org/
unimpressive 13y ago
This wasn't funny, please stop.
13y ago

aasarava 13y ago

#2, about health insurance, overlooks a big part of the RAND HIE's findings: people who were sick and poor in the study did have worse health outcomes.

briancaw2 13y ago
It's just a bad argument in general...saying that because people spend 30% more when stuff is free (without improved results) means they have twice as much as they need. It doesn't follow, at all.
enginous 13y ago
Also, his idea of increasing taxes will mean that even if his statement were true ("[if] people only bought half as much, they would be just as healthy"), a flat increase in drug tax would at best make this effect true on average. Due to higher taxation, low-income individuals would have even less access to medicine than today. Keeping people away from drugs with prohibitive taxation means starving entire demographics of this component of health care. So sure, people who have the funds to take excessive amounts of medicine may be "just as healthy." Others would be considerably worse off.
- frobozz 13y ago
  Only if those low-income individuals have to pay the same for their medicine as those with higher incomes. If the purpose of taxing medicine is to subsidise the provision of medicine to people who couldn't afford it at cost price, then that would give such people greater access.
tedsanders 13y ago
To be fair, their outcomes were not much worse.
ckuehne 13y ago
The overall result, namely, that at the margin medicine has net-negative effects (i.e., after a certain point more medicine equals worse health) has been replicated many times. See for example this meta-study from 2008 about what happens when health workers go on strike [1]: "[..] mortality either stayed the same or decreased during, and in some cases, after the strike. [No study] found that mortality increased during the weeks of the strikes compared to other time periods." The authors speculate about the reasons: "The paradoxical finding that physician strikes are associated with reduced mortality may be explained by several factors. Most importantly, elective surgeries are curtailed during strikes. Further, hospitals often re-assign scarce staff and emergency care was available during all of the strikes." [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18849101 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18849101 EDIT: clarity

sytelus 13y ago

Yes, wild ideas except for the "2100" part. The scientific and engineering breakthroughs have been slowing down dramatically in past 50 years or so. Science fiction from 60s and 70s is embarrassingly filled with predictions such as we would have colonies in space, computers indistinguishable from humans, flying cars on street, humankind without poverty and end of cancer by 2020. How close are we? If we go back in time to meet all these writers from 60s & 70s, the major breakthroughs we would have to show for are likes of Instagram and Angry Birds. Yes, I'm downplaying all these increase in computing power and better algorithms in search etc but guess what? Moors law is dead as we know it and search is still keywords in a textbox. To me it looks like we probably had 10 fold increase in human productivity during past 50 years but major portion of it goes towards "enhancing shareholder value" or wars rather than advancing science and technology. So unless this changes somehow, all the magic that can happen is still pretty far in distant, probably much beyond 2100.

derefr 13y ago
The scientific institution has stopped really paying that much attention to space (or computation, in relative terms), and has started paying attention to biotech and materials science instead. Not a one of those science-fiction authors thought to suggest "get your DNA sequenced for $100" in their wildest flights of fancy. Also, > search is still keywords in a textbox what else would you suggest? The "hard problem" part of search now doesn't seem to be anything to do with indexing information usefully, but rather getting people to be able to clearly communicate (and before even that, clearly decide) what they're looking for.
- sytelus 13y ago
  Current search would be pretty embarrassing to future generation as much as it is awesome to current generation. Right now you can find a page only if that page contains all keywords in it. In some cases, there are band-aids to include popular synonyms and correlated keywords or remove some keywords or suggest alternative keywords (spell check). If you think of it, this is very primitive, pretty much the same stage as baby tryieng to sit up at 6 months. Let's say you read the book Black List by Brad Thor and you had an awesome memory to remember everything. Your friend won't ask you about this novel by keywords. They will ask you questions like "What is the best way to steal a car?" or "How would you get rid of strangers chasing you?" or "what breed of dogs are very vicious when you signal but very friendly otherwise?". And you would be able to answer those questions, not only by quoting related text but also summarizing and enriching the information. This what the ideal search would look like... pretty much how you can converse with computer on Star Trek. That's why I said current search is just "keywords in a textbox", still a very far thing from making science fiction a reality.

wikiburner 13y ago

Soul Extraction - Assuming that there is a technological singularity at some point in the future, and assuming that time travel is possible[1], but that we've seen no evidence of it because it must be mostly observational in nature in order to prevent disruptions that would create time paradoxes, humanity adopts the practice of extracting the brain/nervous systems (and then replacing w/ equivalent matter) of every human in history at the moment of their death, to live in a post-singularity utopia. [1]: Einstein, Hawking, and many others have speculated that time travel should be possible, but were ultimately skeptical of it because of the "Where are all of the time travelers?" argument. Fear of the creation of time paradoxes could be the reason why there's no evidence of time travel.

snitko 13y ago
Extracting all info out of the brains would be impractical. A lot of the things humans do we do because we are humans. Our emotions only make sense because they are mechanisms of survival and passing our genes. They would be quite impractical in a singularity (although, some other emotions, specific to the digital world, may be employed). So in a sense, I can only see one force in a post-singularity utopia, driving post-humans: knowledge and understanding the beauty of it.
- derefr 13y ago
  All of the things humans do, we do because we are humans. There is no "natural set of universal goals for sentient beings"; we simply like what evolution has made us like. Changing (and especially removing) our terminal goals is the same as creating a new species with no relation to us. Why would we want to do that?
  - gnaritas 13y ago
    Because why would I care if I change species if it keeps my consciousness alive?
    - derefr 13y ago

bumbledraven 13y ago

1. Many times each day, your mind permanently splits into different versions that live in different worlds. True. 2. If medicine were taxed so much that people only bought half as much, they would be just as healthy. False. The "extra" spending in medicine drives innovations so we have better drugs & procedures etc. than we would otherwise. 3. If we keep writing down common sense datums until 2100, we can make computers as smart as people. False. 4. If your head is cryogenically frozen today, you will be alive in 2100. Maybe. 5. By 2100, the vast majority of "people" will be immortal computers running brain simulations. True. 6. There's a five percent chance I live in a "future" computer simulation as I write this. False - to run simulate sentient beings with so much suffering would be cruel. 7. By 2100, world economic growth rates will have increased by over a factor of a hundred. Maybe - progress & growth keep happening faster and faster. 8. The growth of humanity and its descendants will stop forever within a thousand years or so. False - see _The Beginning of Infinity_ by David Deutsch. 9. Our descendants will colonize millions of star systems within ten thousand years or so. True, if we don't fuck up - again, see _The Beginning of Infinity_. 10. The nearest intelligent aliens are many millions of light-years away. True. 11. Billions of years ago, intelligent aliens had a colony near here, but left in a big hurry. False. It's a bad explanation. 12. If we allowed complete freedom of contract, law could be privatized, to our common benefit. Maybe - I don't know about "complete freedom of contract" (can you sell yourself into slavery?) but privatizing law might be a good idea, eventually. 13. If we switched to "futarchy" as a form of government, we would be richer and just as happy. Maybe - if we're going to deviate from tradition, better to do it in the direction of more freedom and less government control - which is known to make people richer. 14. If even a few of us honestly sought truth, we would not disagree with each other. True. For any issue, there is an objective truth of the matter, and if people care enough to find out the truth, they should eventually find a theory/explanation of the issue that no has an issue with, at least for a while. People will keep finding new problems with the latest theory, and they'll have to sort that out, but eventually truth-seeking should lead to plateaus of agreement.

IvyMike 13y ago
> False - to run simulate sentient beings with so much suffering would be cruel. I see you've never searched youtube for "The Sims".

ivanbrussik 13y ago

the scariest part of us living in a simulated environment is what happens when the players get bored and decide to turn us off (that thought might have been controlled by one of the players)

icebraining 13y ago
Who cares? It's not like we'll notice. The scary part is if their equivalent of 4chan gets a hold of the controls.
- andrewkreid 13y ago
  There is another theory that states that this has already happened...

gbog 13y ago

Mine: In fifty years ecology will seem as ridicule as we see the middle age crusades now. The only allowed porn will be animal documentaries. Economy will be replaced by something that actually works, the same way alchemy has been replaced with chemistry. High buildings will be considered as dangerous paper castles and cities will be flat. Having to sit on a desk at work will be considered as belonging to the lowest end of the social scale. We will run on highways with special shoes and cars will make us laugh at their utter discomfort.

wikiburner 13y ago
Wow, it's like Ed Wood has been reincarnated as an HNer. :)

babesh 13y ago

1. Human cloning 2. Giant solar collectors the size of states 3. Pandemics 4. Self aware computers 5. Tailored assassination drugs to induce swift cancer 6. Colonies on the moon 7. Genetic alteration and enhancement 8. Thought control 9. Man and machine war like the Matrix 1. and 5. are mostly to occur first.

Houshalter 13y ago
Is there any practical purpose in human cloning short of cloning specific organs for replacement? As for tailored drugs to induce cancer, that is rather specific. There are a lot of ways to kill people, not sure if that would be the most efficient. And if you have that level of technology, there might also be dangers like custom made viruses that are super-contagious and 100% lethal. Which makes #9 more interesting. A war between man and machines would end very quickly if the AI just designs a super-virus and kills 99% of the population overnight.
- babesh 13y ago
  The sequel is that the machines then fight against each other which makes a lot of sense. Mr Smith and all. There will probably always be a struggle to replicate and for resources. It's not specific to humans.

chetan51 13y ago

If we keep writing down common sense datums until 2100, we can make computers as smart as people. We learn more about brains and making smart computers, but we seem to have run out of major architectural innovations -- better ones won't make a huge difference. The big stumbling block seems to be how much "common sense" a system knows, like that things tend to fall down when you bump them. One group has been writing these down for fifteen years with moderate success; a century more effort may be plenty. This seems like a really inefficient way to go about it.

pawelwentpawel 13y ago

By 2100 we should be able to scan this info from a frozen brain. If we scan your brain and then build and run a computer simulation of it, someone who remembers being you would wake up and feel alive. Let's say we are actually able to do that by 2100. Somebody is scanning in patterns and current state of my neural activity. He copies that into a simulation - more than once. Which of the simulations will be me? All of them? Also, it reminds me a bit of Swampman problem : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swampman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swampman If we keep writing down common sense datums until 2100, we can make computers as smart as people. Would it make them smart or just filled with hard coded knowledge? I would expect that in this case the goal would be to create a system that is able to acquire common sense knowledge on its own from a given environment and reason from it. What we might consider as common sense in our daily lives might not be fully applicable in different situations.

Nux 13y ago
Ahh, the swampman! I always thought of this problem when watching characters in StarTrek using teleportation, didn't know it was an existing, famous problem. IMHO the teleported person ceases to exist at some point and a _new_ , identical person is being "created" by the transporter device. It's more of a gut feeling, hard to explain in words why I feel this way.
- danabramov 13y ago
  It's kinda intuitive, but I'm pretty sure it's wrong. Imagine you fall in coma and sleep long enough that all your body cells have been changed. Do you wake up a different person? I don't think so. What you perceive as yourself is the experience of being aware of everything you have learned in the world. An identical brain, whether created by teleport or running in simulation, is you just as much. So yes, both simulations will be sure they are you (and in a sense, both will be you—if we allow the simulations, we must abandon the idea of there being only one “you” at the moment). The funny thing, these simulations will immediately diverge by obtaining different experiences, and thus can be thought of “forks” of you.
  - 13y ago

bnegreve 13y ago

If we switched to "futarchy" as a form of government, we would be richer and just as happy. So, what's the point?

utopkara 13y ago

Some of these comments cannot be falsified: - You could be a computer. - There could be a colony on earth millions of years ago. Oh, and he is an economist too! How appropriate. Yep, Dr Hanson, keep up the good work.

utopkara 13y ago
Here's another one, I just made up: - Aliens from billions of years into the future with an infinite source of energy and computational power have managed to slice the universe and put us into the solar system as a simulation. Everything coming back beyond the solar system is simulated, matter and energy alike.
utopkara 13y ago
Here's another "thought": - If academics kept compiling the knowledge of the world starting at 2000BC, and everybody were taught the knowledge, we'd have reached our current level of science by 1000BC.

opminion 13y ago

I was thinking the other day that I have seldom seen the purpose of mankind discussed in public (beyond religious belief). This list of ideas could be an interesting trigger of such discussion.

cell303 13y ago

why don't we take this discussion over to http://longbets.org/ http://longbets.org/ (and put some money behind it, so eventually people mean what the say)