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Fuck me sideways, I wrote a massive essay and had it gobbled up into the ether when I received a phone call. @ZorbaTHut, is it too much to ask for text entered into a comment to be temporarily saved for a little while even if not posted? It would be a lifesaver on mobile.
Sigh, I'll rewrite it:
I think this is an excellent post, and it largely aligns with my view.
That being said:
It strikes me as deeply misguided if not outright pathological to extend modern intuitions about the need for "responsibility" to a distant future where the universe is plausibly dominated by entities akin to Matrioshka Brains or computationally oriented Dyson Swarms that monopolize the resources of entire star systems each. That's fetishizing responsibility for the love of responsibility, entirely divorced from whether it's needed for other terminal goals.
Such entities are robustly self-sufficient and powerful in their domain to a degree that the modern mind finds hard to comprehend.
Our intuitions about responsibilities have been built up over a lengthy evolutionary period where no man was an island to himself (the closest that ever was to being feasible was hunter gatherer times and even then it was deeply suboptimal).
We currently need each other to live fulfilling lives, and not even the wealthiest billionaire can setup a system that lets them divorce themselves from the rest of humanity.
This will be categorically untrue in the future, because interstellar trade, to the extent it exists, will be primarily of information and not physical goods.
It seems to me that there is very little that such an entity can't make entirely by itself, be it through normal resource collection, transmutation of matter, or direct energy to matter conversion.
Further, the absolutely colossal distances between star systems makes trade of anything that is not extremely high value economically infeasible, at least if you want to receive the goods in non-astronomical time frames.
I refuse to shackle such beings with our norms, and the maximal set of things we recognize today as "responsibilities" that I expect them to adhere to are:
A commitment to avoiding coercion when positive sum trade is available. Don't violate the NAP in short, since you're already a largely post-scarcity entity (even if scarcity is unlikely to be obviated entirely over cosmological timespans unless we invent literally infinite energy sources).
Don't trash the cosmic commons, say by throwing relativistic debris about that could plausibly ruin someone else's day as an RKV. Further, entities should avoid being wasteful where possible, for a very relaxed notion of waste, and when they ruin their cosmic endowment they should not expect others to bail them out without cause.
Drawing on the above, they ought to avoid intentionally creating negative externalities in general, such as creating unaligned superintelligences that they can't control, though such a task is unlikely to be difficult to a being superintelligent itself. Nobody wants a nasty case of a Hegemonizing Swarm even if it's unlikely to be a real threat, at least don't let them burn pristine star systems.
Such entities simply do not need much from each other, albeit they are capable of wanting a great deal.
Further, they are sovereign, to a degree that exceeds the fevered dreams of modern nation states and their leaders. You will have a very bad time getting them to do things they don't voluntarily want to do.
They're also almost certainly strongly godlike, beyond the ken of most conceptions of godliness we have today. Zeus's lighting bolts have nothing on a Nicoll-Dyson beam or an RKV. Sure, not omnipotent, but as close as physically feasible.
I myself wish to become such a Peer of the Universe, such that no worm turns or sparrow falls without my consent within my domain.
Now, if lesser beings still share the cosmos, they might find our conceptions of responsibility to be of some utility, and once we have actually robust means of memetic engineering, unlike the paltry and inadequate systems of schooling and cultural indoctrination we have today, I expect them to be used right until they're no longer needed.
At any rate, such gods might nod approvingly at Von Neumann when he says:
And like it or not, they shall control a great deal indeed..
Biggest unintended loophole since the Commerce Clause? Today people trade, so the Copenhagen Theory of Ethics kicks in, and then we feel we have carte blanche to coercively micromanage the results. In the future people trade, so they get to the Pareto frontier and the "no more positive sum trade is available" condition kicks in, and then we explicitly can coercively micromanage the results...
I'd have been more rigorous if I thought a comment made today actually served as a constitutional document for entities living thousands if not millions of years im the future haha
(Founding Fathers of America, I feel your pain!)
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I'm not sure if you're simply reiterating your disagreement here, or if the view that I was describing is so foreign to your own thinking that it does not even appear to you as a view; instead it appears as a non-view, as nonsense.
To take an accounting of all your commitments and goals, to reflect on which ones are "needed" and which aren't, to have the freedom to add or remove values and rearrange their relative priority: all this is, obviously, to still remain within the logic of consequentialism. I am raising the question of something that is outside of consequentialism altogether.
The response to the accusation that this view loves responsibility for its own sake is simply yes_chad.jpg. It's not an objection; it's just a restatement of the view itself. You are free to call this "fetishization" if you want. I don't view that term in any way as disparaging. We all have our fetishes, after all (such as your fascination with vast timescales and regions of space, for example).
I try not to attribute disagreement to fundamental values differences unless I can no longer help it. If that's the case, we either all agree to live and let live, or there will inevitably be bloodshed.
Mostly the former as far as I can gauge. I recognize it as a view at the very least, but I don't think it's really reflective of a fundamental underlying difference for the majority who espouse it. They simply don't have horizons as broad as mine, and have never stopped to really think of the ramifications of that approach when extended out of the circumstances that are mundane to us today.
After all, if I was asked whether inculcating certain kinds of responsibility today is something I endorse, I'd say yes. I'm not against the concept, I'm just against thoughtlessly extending it to where the intuitions underpinning it become irrelevant.
And I (probably) wouldn't have discussed the extremal case of utter atomization that a galactic scale civilization involves if you hadn't invoked the kind of thinking that leads to it or hints at it. Namely:
In my eyes: Superhuman AI - - > Space Colonization of some description is a link so robust that I struggle to think of anyone accumulating evidence to persuade me otherwise.
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I actually don't know of any way to implement it easily, as far as I know we'd have to be doing frequent callbacks to update some saved serverside field. Can you name any websites that do this? I can at least take a look at how they're doing it.
(this is honestly a thing web browsers should be doing, but they aren't)
You can save drafts client side, via the local storage API.
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Can't you use local storage for this?
If anything I would think storing everything you enter into fields server side is bad for a whole host of reasons.
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Beat's me! The closest I can think of is something like Google Docs that automatically saves your text as you go, and I don't know how taxing that will be to either implement for dev-time or resource reasons.
To spitball from a position of ignorance, perhaps have a "draft" feature someone can enable, which preserves text input server-side for a short duration? I can't imagine even an OOM more saved text will be taxing on the servers, but I could be wrong.
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Store it in cookies, or local storage. If the Storage variable is not empty, paste it into the comment form. Clear the variable on sucessful send.
They sort of do. If you lose your post because you clicked a link, you can usually recover it just with the "back" button.
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