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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2837 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 12, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Even if AGI only improved modestly, what do you think the implications of having an entity capable of doing knowledge work for far less than minimum wage 24/7 are? Mass unemployment, and probably a lot of economic growth.

Side point: have you come around to expecting universal basic income, then?

We could start work on a Dyson Swarm today.

Sure, but this is exactly the issue with what you say when you say:

We understand telomere attrition, mitochondrial dysfunction, cellular senescence, stem cell exhaustion, and epigenetic alterations. What we lack isn't theoretical understanding - it's the engineering capability to intervene effectively at scale.

“We understand the basics of how to terraform Mars to make it habitable to humans, and have done since the 1950s, probably before. What we lack isn’t theoretical understanding, it’s the engineering capability to intervene effectively at scale” is indeed a statement that makes complete sense. We don’t know yet, but reversing aging could easily be a ‘terraform Mars’ level problem.

Side point: have you come around to expecting universal basic income, then?

Expecting it if the Powers That Be are benevolent enough to want to maintain or improve the standard of living of the billions of people made obsolete? It seems like a necessity, since I consider it unlikely that baseline humans can be augmented to be be competitive with AGI without massive subsidies, and the end result will likely be indistinguishable (I don't necessarily consider this a bad outcome).

Probably true, but not reliably so, and there might well be a period of severe pain along the way. It's well worth preparing for the worst case scenario that isn't just instant death.

“We understand the basics of how to terraform Mars to make it habitable to humans, and have done since the 1950s, probably before. What we lack isn’t theoretical understanding, it’s the engineering capability to intervene effectively at scale” is indeed a statement that makes complete sense. We don’t know yet, but reversing aging could easily be a ‘terraform Mars’ level problem.

"Extremely difficult problems" encompasses a range of difficulties that extend all the way till literally impossible. I think solving aging is a $200 billion and twenty years problem (give or take a hundred billion or a decade) whereas terraforming Mars is, by most estimates, a $several trillion and a century problem.

I would be rather surprised if we didn't end up with anti-aging by 2050, and the majority of the probability mass I'd expect to assign would be in things like WW3, societal collapse or AI x-risk. In other words, I expect that dying from old age is unlikely for us, and if we do die, it's because something else got us first.

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