Posts

Lifelink™: Freedom for your Child

Note: Fictional! To preempt any unnecessary disappointment and/or fears of dystopia, be aware that this is not a real product, I don’t know of plans to develop it, and it is infeasible in many respects. There are some related products under search terms like “kids GPS smartwatch” and “safety monitor”. Do you want your child to have free rein to wander in nature or explore the town? Are you worried about your child getting lost, or injured, or worse? Have you heard horror stories about CPS? Introducing Lifelink™, the undisputed best-in-class FRC wearable safety link for independent children. Give your child the gift of secure autonomy today. Device FREE with subscription. Features include: Options for necklace, bracelet, pocket, glasses, or anklet wearables. (Check out our multi-wearable packages for savings!) Connectivity and real-time location tracking ANYWHERE through our worldwide affiliate system. Military-grade rugged construction—waterproof, shockproof, fireproof, ...

What potent consumer technologies have long remained inaccessible?

Table of Contents 1 Context 2 The question 3 Some examples 4 Assorted thoughts 1 Context Inequality is a common and legitimate worry that people have about reprogenetic technology. Will rich people have super healthy smart kids, and leave everyone else behind over time? Intuitively, this will not happen. Reprogenetics will likely be similar to most other technologies: At first it will be very expensive (and less effective); then, after an initial period of perhaps a decade or two, it will become much less expensive. While rich people will have earlier access, in the longer run the benefit to the non-rich in aggregate will be far greater than the benefit to the rich in aggregate, as has been the case with plumbing, electricity, cars, computers, phones, and so on. But, is that right? Will reprogenetics stay very expensive, and therefore only be accessible to the very wealthy? Or, under what circumstances will reprogenetics be inaccessible, and how can it be made ac...

HIA and X-risk part 2: Why it hurts

Table of Contents 1 Context 1.1 Questions for the reader 1.2 Caveats 2 What is HIA? 2.1 Vague definitions of intelligence and HIA 2.2 HIA as a general access good 2.3 HIA and reprogenetics 3 AGI X-risk 3.1 Background assumptions 3.2 Red vs. Blue AGI capabilities research 4 An ontology of effects of interventions on world processes 4.1 The meaning of “acceleration” 4.2 Effects of HIA on a single process 4.3 Effects of HIA involving multiple processes 5 Processes 6 Some plausible bad effects of HIA on processes 6.1 Speeding up Blue research 6.2 Speeding up Red research 6.3 Less speeding up legal and social regulation 6.4 Nonlinear / race-condition regulatory escape 6.5 Alignment loses the race anyway 6.6 Intrinsic regulatory escape 6.7 Disrupting regulatory systems 6.8 Social values favor following local incentives 6.9 Less speeding up change towards better values 6.10 Alignment harnesses added brainpower much less effec...

Every point of intervention

Events are already set for catastrophe, they must be steered along some course they would not naturally go. [...] Are you confident in the success of this plan? No, that is the wrong question, we are not limited to a single plan. Are you certain that this plan will be enough, that we need essay no others? Asked in such fashion, the question answers itself. The path leading to disaster must be averted along every possible point of intervention. — Professor Quirrell (competent, despite other issues), HPMOR chapter 92 1. Keeping intervention points in mind 1.1. The vague elephant 1.2. Example: France 1.3. Full-court press 1.4. Multi-stage fal... opportunity! Brief tangent about a conjunction of disjunctions Varied interventions help Sources of correlation indicate deeper intervention points 2. Some takeaways 3. Some biases potentially affecting strategy porfolio balancing 4. A terse opinionated partial list of maybe-underattended points of intervention This post is ...