Problem with this reality is that even if you achieve everything you wanted and more, you are still subject to the "Fours Fs of Humanity":

• Foolish
• Flawed
• Fragile
• Finite

Most of us live in a form for (un)blissful existence. Once you realize those four, you come to understand Christianity's emphasis on salvation - and I finally came to agree myself, this place is something you need to be rescued from, and our best bet is technology.

Weighted average so far, with 312 votes, is 6.78 years. I did the same poll on the machine learning sub and the weighted average there wa 8.19 years with 487 votes, but the post was removed by the mods.

Both measures consider "Never!" as 20 years. I am too mathematically illiterate to come up with a better fix.

Carmack on AGI, from the Lex Friedman podcast.

i said a
couple years ago is a 50 chance that
somewhere there will be signs of life of
agi in 2030 and i've probably increased
that slightly i may be at 55 60 now
because i do think there's a little
sense of acceleration there

The Metaculus definition will already cause massive waves of disruption. I would consider it indeed a "weak AGI", but this is just more or less fruitless categorization.

In any case, try Nectome, if you don't think you will reach it.

Only if we have another breakthroug until the end of 2023. I don't think LLMs in their current paradigm can reach AGI.

This sub is really more about technology than it is about the future. I believe r/singularity is a better futurology sub than r/futurology.

Much simpler to just isolate the brain and discard the body. You only have one point of failure now. A pig brain has been kept alive for hours after death in 2019.

I believe the first FDVR implementations might be some brain implant that doesn't attempt to preserve your body in any particular way, maybe from Neuralink or one of its competitors.

The second implementation might be a ship of Theseus kind of thing, in which nanotechnology gradually replaces biological tissue throughout your whole body, including your brain. These new components might allow for controlling emotional states and sensorial imput.

If this second implementation fails to materialize in the next 10 to 20 years, then the brain isolation pathway might gain early adopters and start being explored in the meantime.

If the gradual replacement via nanotech proves to be particularly difficult, it might even be the case that entire generations of humans will exists as isolated brains, with artificial forms of reproduction to keep the population levels.

Yes, our clones would technically be even more related to us than our own children. So if you would desire mind uploading for your offspring based on relatedness, you should logically desire it even more for a clone of yourself.

Here is the company’s own article.

Their key innovation is using glutaraldehyde for brain preservation. The article is worth reading. They argue that long term memory is made possible not by the electrical pattern of the brain, or any individual neuron, molecule, or synapse, but rather by the overall structure that these constituents form. From the Nectome’s article:

>Glutaraldehyde reacts rapidly with tissue to form a densely crosslinked, stable gel-like form which can withstand major changes in pH, temperature, osmotic stress, and other ordinarily destructive insults. Virtually all proteins and mRNAs can be labeled and analyzed after aldehyde fixation. (…) Taken together, clinical, neuroscientific, and biochemical evidence suggests that glutaraldehyde fixation comprehensively preserves the information that encodes an organism’s long-term memories. (…) Glutaraldehyde fixation is so comprehensive that it allows differentiation between even slight differences in mRNA, protein distribution and nano structural changes at a single synapse, or changes in gene expression in a single neuron. These minor differences are far below the level of physical changes which would be behaviorally observable in a living organism [, and still not interfere with memory preservation, such as ischemia, deep hypothermic circulatory arrest, concussions, anesthetic, MRI scans]. In summary, the signal the nervous system employs to create a long-term memory (robust self-perpetuating biochemical changes at multiple synapses) is greater than the noise introduced by glutaraldehyde fixation (which can preserve even functionally irrelevant changes at a single synapse).

Everyone will have their own instance of social media in their own virtual world, where all of their comments and posts are upvoted by philosophical zombies, or NPCs, if you will, and we are going to be the universally beloved supreme leaders of our own worlds.

It would be a criminal offense not to worship the supreme leader as the most perfect human ever, laugh of all of their jokes, and agree with all of their ideologies. We will all degenerate into 5 year old narcisistic tyrants. And this will be a good thing.

Was wandering the same thing. We have several positives and several negatives weighting against each other when it comes to market performance in the coming decades:

Positives:

• AI advancements in particular.
• Several streaks of technological advancement in general.
• Accelerating returns speeding up the innovation cycle.

Negatives:

• IQ decline due to dysgenics. Smarter people are having less children since the Industrial Revolution.
• IQ decline due to changing ethnic proportions. Headcount in the north is diminishing.
• IQ decline due to aging population.
• Declining health and fertility due to dysgenics and lifestyle.
• Low fertility leading to stagnation in headcount.
• Decline in productivity due to aging population.
• COVID-induced hysteria causing economic turmoil.
• Geopolitical instability.

If for some reason technological progress stalls in the coming decades, we will have an aging, dwindling, sicker and dumber population towards the end of the century, by some estimates falling to 85 average IQ, from today's 100 standard. Some infrastructure and nation states will have collapsed and balkanized into tribes led by warlords. Huge uptake in religiousness and conservatism as well. I find this scenario highly unlikely.

If I had to guess, the positives will outweigh the negatives, though we could easily see a flat decade ahead in the markets due to COVID-induced mass hysteria and the war in Ukraine. My personal strategy would be to invest about 40% in broad market ETFs, 40% in tech heavy ones, and 20% in resilient assets, such as farmland and gold. The S&P 500 has historically doubled every ~10 years in real returns, inflation adjusted. I would be surprised if the rate of doubling diminished, despite some recent pessimistic projections, as they tend to completely disregard accelerating returns in tech and science, and simply project from what happened in the past decades.

As a side note, if you invest in the stock market and elect not to have children, you are a free rider, in my estimation, as generational expansion is half of the growth equation. So have lots of them.

On the plus side, a lot of resources are being poured of late on AI and Longevity research.

If I had a magic wand to control the global economy, my research priorities would be:

1. Artificial intelligence

2. Keeping isolated brains alive

3. BCI via nerve interception

4. Large scale genetic data gathering

5. Longevity

6. Artificial wombs

7. Cell to egg conversion

8. Non-invasive embrio selection

On the other hand, we've got furries now, so not everything improved.

Take the vestibular sense, for example:

Step 1: Intercept nerve signals to projection pathways via implant.

Step 2: Put human on motion capture suit.

Step 3: Run human through a variety of motions and positions.

Step 4: Correlate motion capture data with nerve signals.

Don't think encoding is going to be all that difficult. Once we figure out how to record signals traveling through nerves non-invasively, all we would have to do is install the tech on a few dozens of people, then run them through stimulus sets, logging the correlations. Machine learning would do the rest.

I will make the argument here that left wing ideology is, in a holistic sense, a form of revolt against the natural predicament of the human species, whereas right wing ideology is a form of conciliation with it.

Whenever environmental circumstances become relatively amenable to life and prosperity, left wing ideas start to develop and spread, as there is more room for cultural experimentation and deviancy from the biological norms.

On the other hand, whenever humans become burdened by war, pestilence, famine, and generally difficult conditions, right wing ideology settles back in as the moral matrix that needs to be advocated for us to survive the evolutionary game at the individual and at the group level.

The very concept of left and right, not tied to the French Revolution, but rather as a fundamental psychological inclination, did not even manifest for most of human history, as everyone was simply struggling to survive and, hence, would have naturally adopted views mostly similar to modern day right wing ones: hierarchy, patriarchy, tribalism, theocracy, strict gender roles, and etc. Those attitudes were not an option, you either adopted them, or you were wiped out by those that did.

The unprecedented level of prosperity bought to us by the numerous technological advances created a uniquely positive environment in the last few hundred years. Expectedly, we are also more left leaning now than any other time in history, holding beliefs that would have been though insane by just about any group of people from just a century ago.

I will make the case that there are scarse other subs where this topic is possible, as most of those interested in the singularity do have a strong political opinion, but most of those that have strong political opinions barely know what the singularity is. Hence there is no other sub to discuss this.

Problem with your analysis is that you don't need anything resembling human or mammal intelligence to reach AGI in the sense of outperforming humans. This is akin to thinking that you need to simulate bird flight with flapping wings in order to fly an airplane.

Even if AGI does require massive breakthroughs, proto-AGI and TAI would already dramatically change the human experience, including economic and political landscapes. They would also speed up the scientific discovery cycles, further compounding into higher chances of AGI.

We already have Oriol Vinyals on record expecting AGI in 5 to 10 years, Andrej Karpathy predicting that soon we will produce blockbuster movies, such as Avatar, talking to our phones, and John Carmack predicting 55 to 60% chance of AGI by 2030.

FDVR via isolated brains only requires three relatively low tech things:

1. An artificial vascular system feeding the brain nutrients and essential chemicals. Has already been done in pig brains kept alive 36h in 2019, if I am not misremembering.
2. Connection with sensory nerves that send and receive signals. There are already rudimentary technologies around this, mostly targeting prosthesis control and sensory implants.
3. AI world generators. They don't even need to be fully realistic for being sufficiently immersive. Think of how many hours people dedicate to playing utterly unrealistic games.

Mind uploading, on the other hand, may require advanced nanotechnology or who knows what else.

On the philosophical side of the analysis, if we inspect human behavior, you will see that a large portion of us are essentialy pleasure seeking machines. We create entire colossal industries dedicated to nothing but mindless entertainment: games, anime, porn, film, and psychoactive drugs just to name the biggest ones.

For every person with complex long term aspirations, there are hoards that would be content with repetitive mindless pleasure within a synthetic reality. Comparing the most charming, endearing, heroic and romantinc real human lives with a fate of artificial pleasure as a plugged up brain ignores the vast swarths of humanity living mundane, gruesome, sickened, stressful, and humiliating existences. Maybe for the most fortuituous of us, switching to an artificial realm of being would be a downgrade in experience, but for most it will be the best thing that ever happened to them.

You could say there are 5 major categories of external senses, technically exteroceptors, and many subcategories. Touch, for example, technically somatosensory, could be subdivided into pressure, vibration, light touch, tickle, itch, temperature, pain, kinesthesia, etc. Then there are other numerous internal senses, technically interoceptors, such as hunger, the vestibular and proprioception systems, etc.

In any case, once nerves are successfuly intercepted for send and receive operations, all this information becomes nothing more than electrical signals, so even if we had thousands of senses, it does not seem to be an obstacle to the generation of a convincing reality. You could just plug an AI world generator to send signals through your nerves and fully emulate an entire reality, from vision and touch, to balance and speed.

Correct me if I am wrong, but everything we feel is either an electrical signal coming from a nerve and interpreted by the brain, or a chemical interacting directly with receptors in the brain.

I always thought the best argument for why we are not living in a simulation is that it would have been a senselessly gruesome and suboptimal one, with an abundance of negative emotion.

You just made me think that maybe our current world is a first run of the simulation just after we are born, so that we fully develop and mature into functioning adults, before being revealed that, in fact, we are isolated brains kept on artificial support machines.

Just imagine that when you reach 50 years old or whatever, you go to sleep one day and wake up in a white room full of people looking at you, and one of them speaks:

- Welcome, anon, you concluded your maturation successfuly, now you will be introduced to the real world.

Everyone around us is just either a simulated philosophical zombie, or other humans in the maturation run, and everyone above 50 or so is an NPC acting as a placeholder for somebody tha already matured and left the first simulation.

>full dive VR requires molecular nanotechnology

I don't think so. FDVR only requires three things:

1. Isolated brain kept alive via artificial vascular system feeding it nutrients and essential chemicals. Has already been done in pig brains kept alive 36h in 2019, if I am not misremembering.
2. Connection with sensory nerves that send and receive signals. There are already rudimentary technologies around this, mostly targeting prosthesis control and sensory implants.
3. AI world generators.

Molecular nanotech will make it easier, but is not strictly necessary.

The ever improving hardware and ever more efficient algorithms make me believe that localized systems will already be capable of generating an interactive and realistic world for an individual. Don't forget that our entire reality is generated from 5 sensory systems and a 1.4 kg brain consuming 20 watts of power per day. Our current computer technology is vastly inefficient in comparison.

A shared world will exist, but a sizeable portion of people will inhabit their own realms.

For a digital existence to be possible, you either would need an isolated brain, for which the body has been discarded, or a fully uploaded mind, in which we left the organic substrate altogether in favor of a synthetic one. A virtual world in which your body is kept around and taken care by a support machine does not seem feasible to me, as there are too many points of failure, from diseases, to aging, and muscular atrophy. A single isolated brain connected to an artificial support, on the other hand, seems far more feasible.

For there to be an UBI, there needs to be scarcity of basic needs. In all likelihood, there won't be anything truly essential and scarse that one or a group of humans can offer to others in exchange for money, considering all brains will already be able to generate whatever they want and imagine on their own system. However, assuming there still is a differential in intelligence, the most capable minds will congregate to advance the technological dependencies that everyone relies on, such as the world generators, brain support machines, artificial reproduction pipelines, exowombs, energy supplies, longevity treatments, molecule builders, etc. They will be compensated by their efforts via having access to the latest technologies first, whereas everyone else will simply wait until it is made available for them. Only a minority of highly gifted brains will participate in the economy and be producers of technology, whereas everyone else will simply be consumers.

This is assuming we achieve brain isolation after AGI, but before ASI, which is not necessarily going to be the case. If we reach ASI first, then there will be no human producers in the first place and, if mind upload is possible, it will be readily achievable by the ASI. An independent and well aligned ASI will likely make the whole notion of a market economy obsolete. Everyone will simply live in their own worlds or cross over to other people’s worlds and public realms. Some will fully retreat and never interact with other humans again, whereas others will constantly congregate with their previous family and friends.

I don’t know much about neurobiology, but I believe there are limitations to how much pleasure an individual can induce before reaching several forms of neurological damage and intrinsic limits. So it might be the case that simply bombarding yourself with pleasure chemicals is not going to work, and a more natural distribution of positive and negative emotion, resembling our present reality, will still be necessary for self-preservation. Even though isolated brains won’t be able to have endless chemically induced orgasms and serotonin overloads, the lows of poverty, disease, anxiety and depression will just cease to exist.