From: Michael Anissimov (michaelanissimov@gmail.com)
Date: Wed Aug 23 2006 - 02:41:50 MDT
On 8/23/06, Michael Vassar <michaelvassar@hotmail.com> wrote:
> No-one is trying to organize society along the lines which will minimize the
> path distance towards the singularity. If anything, anthropic selection may
> be extending the path beyond its probable length.
This is a very important statement. What Michael is saying is that we
are living in a timeline where many many humans are born before they
destroy themselves with UFAI or move into another reference class.
(If I'm translating the idea correctly.)
Given that our probability of being born into any given being in our
reference class is roughly equivalent, it is likely that we will find
ourselves in the universe where many us-beings exist. That is, where
they make babies the most before dying or transcending.
A tremendous number of persons are being born today. Every year
increment that time extends before the Singularity occurs, that number
increases exponentially. So there is an anthropic selection effect
favoring our finding ourselves in worlds where time is maximally
prolonged before the Singularity occurs, while still preserving
physical laws.
This may be why the education system is so amazingly poor. I often
found myself in elementary, middle, and high school thinking "why is
this so amazingly awful?" In fact I printed out and read most of
KurzweilAI.net while ignoring my teachers in high school classes.
For this reason, as Michael says, the time from now until the
Singularity will likely be measured in terms of its maximum probable
length. This could be anywhere between a few months and thirty years,
we don't know.
That's the funny thing about anthropic inference. It seems like
"cheating", but when you think about it, it doesn't actually give us
theories with much more predictive validity than we already had to
begin with.
-- Michael Anissimov Lifeboat Foundation http://lifeboat.com http://acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog
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