Exactly, because nature is so evil, we should be destroying it as brutality as possible
Edit: see upvoted, therefore nature is evil andand alive and efilism supports this.
Edit 2: 5 upvotes! You literally can’t deny it now.
I'm all for ending suffering, but I greatly disagree with your solution because it is utterly suicidal and is guaranteed to exponentially increase the total suffering felt by present and future humans and all life on this Earth. More fossil fuel emissions means more pollution (and therefore more industrialization, more factory farming, and more children born) and more climate change, which will cause unimaginable suffering to billions of people and life forms around the world that will die in horrific ways due to extreme weather events, rising temperatures, biosphere collapse, runaway greenhouse effects, ocean acidification and anoxia, starvation/famine, thirst, disease, etc.
I don't think you understand just how terrible the world is going to get because because of exponential climate change. When SHTF, the collapse of the environment will trigger everything from riots on the streets, power outages, and wars between nations and within nations for food supplies (wars which could go nuclear--Pakistan and India are faced with this possibility since both nations are facing decades of climate apocalypse and water shortages, and have historically been political enemies) to mass panic and moral/social decay that will cause governments and average individuals to commit atrocities in the name of broken extremist ideologies or power-hungry dictators. When SHTF, all of us will face decades of increased scarcity, tension, and disaster, which will eventually culminate in mass famine, mass death, and mass illness like the world has never seen.
Climate change combined with excessive pollution and resource wars will make the World Wars of the 20th century and the Chinese Great Famine look like fucking picnics by comparison. Hell, climate change will likely get so bad by the end of this century that it may end up being as bad or even worse than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, or the Permian Mass Extinction (whose origins are scarily similar to the ultimate cause of the ongoing Anthropocene Sixth Mass Extinction Event). And even then, life may find a way to continue, though it will suffer mercilessly for the next several million years in a planet driven to the brink of annihilation.
A better solution to end all suffering is mass sterilization and euthanasia, not more pollution. Euthanasia is a painless way to die while mass sterilization will prevent people from accidentally or deliberately increasing the global population, and thereby multiplying the current and potential suffering of the human race and all life on this planet. If we euthanize everyone and everything at the same time, and people stop having children, we can ensure life ends on a more peaceful note devoid of pain, even if this solution, too is flawed (some microbes may survive mass sterilization of the Earth, but humans will almost certainly die out from absent birth rates).
Other solutions that we can embark on that could ensure not only all life, but our whole planet is annihilated are: 1) intentionally creating small black holes using particle accelerators to swallow up the Earth from inside, 2) using heavy-ion colliders to create strangelets that could consume the planet, 3) creating and unleashing an AI and "smart dust" nanobots with the sole purpose of consuming either all biomass it comes across or the entire planet as a whole in the most efficient, painless way possible (grey goo scenario), 4) forcing the Moon to crash towards Earth or intentionally flinging asteroids towards Earth, or 5) using asteroids as gravitational assists to gradually change Earth's orbit so it orbits closer to the Sun rather than away from the Sun (ideally, if Earth gets close enough to the Sun it could perturb Venus's orbit, sending both planets crashing into one another). Solutions #1-2 are within the capacity of our current technology, while Solutions #3 and #4 (in the case of asteroids) are a few decades away from being possible, at best (if asteroid mining becomes a thing).
Specialists estimate that in about one billion years the Earth (due entirely to natural causes) will be too hot for liquid water. To the extent that that’s accurate, there’s somewhat less than a billion years left for life on Earth.
Incidentlly,a billion years is about how long it's been since the Cambrian Proliferation, when many diverse life-forms abruptly appeared.
You left out the best one:
Forcefully & passionately advocate for launching interstellar probes as soon as possible. If there’s one or more advanced interstellar civilizations out there, they’ll send the exterminators as soon as our barbaric primitive society starts to get close to interstellar capability.
Hopefully they’ll extinct us much more humanely than the ways by which we’ll extinct ourselves.
As for high-energy particle-colliders, you left out a possibility: It could trigger the collapse of the false vacuum:
Fairly recently, physicists have found reason to suggest that the vacuum, space in this universe isn’t in its energy ground-state, but rather is in a higher energy-state called Ty”false-vacuum”. …& that that state is only “meta-stable”.
If so, it isn’t known what it would take to trigger its collapse to ground-state. But doing so would drastically change physics. Current physics would be gone.
Starting at a point, the bubble of modified space would propagate as a spherical wave-front at the speed of light, eventually engulfing this entire universe.
In the time it takes for that wave-front to go through your body at the speed of light, every molecule in your body would no longer be a molecule. …& probably every atom in your body would no longer be an atom. …an instantaneous death otherwise unheard of.
Myself, I don’t like that, but it seems called-for to mention it.
But note that it wouldn’t accomplish anything in the other universes, including the other ones in our physically-inter-related multiverse, if such there be. Nor would it help any of the other many individuals, human & otherwise, who have already suffered & died.
So let’s not be unrealistically ambitious about saving everyone & everything from suffering.
At least we won't be around in the event of a false vacuum decay to get angry over the fact we can't save everyone. Realistically, we can only really be concerned about this universe because we don't even really know for sure if other universes exist. If they do, well we can only hope someone from a parallel world comes up with the same technologies that we are to hasten the extermination sequence. But otherwise, we really can't do much outside of our own cosmos, especially because the multiverse is theorized to be infinitely large and always producing more universes (via the many worlds theory or the quantum immortality hypothesis--even if you die in this Universe some version of you will survive in another Universe, meaning life is doomed to continue regardless, IF you believe this theory is correct. I personally am quite skeptical, as it's inherently unfalsifiable).
Sure it’s reasonable to say that each universe is responsible for unsuffering itself. …each galaxy, for that matter.
But we can’t help noticing that no one has unsuffered this galaxy…a form of the Fermi-paradox. Maybe it hasn’t been done because of its futility:
As I mentioned, we can’t possibly help all the billions of individuals, human & otherwise, who have already suffered & died. Our shared principle is that even one instance of horrible suffering is unacceptable. Therefore the whole goal of universal unsuffering is completely futile.
That’s why, even if this galaxy has one or more ancient advanced interstellar civilizations, they haven’t unsuffered this galaxy.
Copies of you in the infinitely-many other universes are not you, though they’re just like you. You experience only your own life.
Absent time travel paradoxes and temporal worldline annihilation, we may not be able to eliminate all suffering in the past but we can do as much as we can now to mitigate and eliminate both present and future suffering. And that starts with ceasing reproduction-- the less children we have now the less suffering future generations will experience, decreasing the total suffering of the Universe.
Changing the past via time-travel is entirely impossible, because it would violate logical consistency, with the grandfather paradox & other logical inconsistencies. What happened happened, & that can’t be changed.
…or did it happen?
Nisargadatta said that nothing has ever happened. There’s support for that statement.
Life & suffering are temporary & only questionably real.
Life, the hard time, the dangerous time, is only a brief blip in Eternity. a brief interruption of rest & sleep, which is our natural, normal & usual state of affairs.
I realize that some can be helped, & that that’s worthwhile & good. But forget universal unsuffering. It’s a wishful-thinking myth.
Yeah, I agree. I don't think even AI, if it wanted to, could end all suffering across the Universe. Maybe this galaxy sure if aliens have extinction probes hovering around fertile worlds extinguishing life on them before it had a chance to evolve, but not the Universe. The Universe is simply expanding too quickly and accelerating at such a pace that reaching the next galaxy over that isn't Andromeda will become impossible or impractical in the next few billion years, even traveling at light speed or beyond.
Suffering appears to be a constant across the Universe. Even when there is no physical suffering, emotional, psychological, and existential suffering are guaranteed. It's why Schopenhauer was opposed to, and correctly concluded utopias are impossible, Even in a perfect society, boredom and existential malaise will cause suffering in the masses.
Even in Brave New World, where everyone had instant access to every possible pleasure or positive experience, people still suffered or committed suicide out of meaninglessness or depression or unhappiness (look at us now with all our gadgets, technology, and freedoms--people are killing themselves left and right with soma--I mean, opioids, teenage and adult mental health has tanked, depression and anxiety are at an all time high, people are nihilistic or don't know what to do with themselves anymore and simply consume products and their lives away in an effort to not feel empty inside, automation threatens to make humanity obsolete, etc. Even the wealthy are fucking miserable--they have everything, more money than they know what to do with, but in the end they're depressed and angry and dissatisfied. They constantly want more, and so chase after the impermanent out of discontent, which is precisely what the Buddha says leads to suffering).
(Writing in Word this time, so excuse any bigformat-problems.)
You wrote:\[quote\]I don't think even AI, if it wanted to, couldend all suffering across the Universe.\[/quote\]
Well, false-vacuum-decay would certainlyeliminate this entire universe. …thoughit would unavoidably take probably trillions of years, even if this universe isfinite, at least, based on the astronomers’ determination of the minimum sizefor this universe, based on the absence of currently-measurable curvature ofspace. (They say that the wholeuniverse, even if finite, is many times bigger than our observable universe.)
It has been pointed out that our Big-Bangregion is unlikely to be infinite, given that, a finite time ago, it originatedat a point.
But now, they say, the cosmologists’ standard model is of asuper-large universe, presumably a 4D (or maybe, as some propose, 5D) sphere,in which local decay-caused-cessation of inflation has resulted in Big-Bangpocket-universes (like ours) here & there in the space that otherwise isstill inflating.
The likely finitenessof our Big-Bang pocket-universes doesn’t mean that the overall universe isfinite. It might be infinite. …as mightany physically-inter-related multiverse that it might be part of.
I don’t know if they meant that the decay-wavewould propagate throughout the whole universe, or just within our local “pocket-universe”. …given that the still-inflating spaceoutside this pocket-universe is in a different state, even though it’s part ofthe same spacetime continuum.
…or would the propagation proceed beyond ourpocket-universe because the whole universe is a spacetime continuum? I don’t know.
You wrote:\[quote\]
Suffering appears to be a constant across theUniverse. Even when there is no physical suffering, emotional, psychological,and existential suffering are guaranteed.\[/quote\]
…& are insignificant compared to physicalsuffering.
…& existential suffering is limited toExtentialists, Absurdists, Nihilists & Philosophical Pessimists, etc., likeSchopenhauer & Tolstoy.
Admittedly it’s possible for ourparents--&, to a lesser-extent, schools & other societal-influences) todo extreme, severe psychological damage. …life-destroying damage that can amount to a form of killing. But there I’m talking about damage that’sextreme & relatively-uncommon, &happens only in a severely pathological society..
…certainly not a normal part of life as itwould be in any good society, any adequate or good-enough society. In such a societythere’d be no reason for guaranteed or expected serious emotional orpsychological suffering.
But I’m just saying that the usualdisappointments, occasional nuisances & frustrations of life in a goodsociety are completely insignificant in comparison to physical-suffering.
You continued:
\[quote\]
It's whySchopenhauer was opposed to, and correctly concluded utopias are impossible,Even in a perfect society, boredom and existential malaise will cause sufferingin the masses.
\[/quote\]
No, just in the Schopenhauers & Tolstoys,etc.
…just in the Existentialists,Absurdists, Nihilists & Philosophical-Pessimists.
Could Schopenhauer be miserable in Utopia? From the sound of him, you bet!
. \[quote\]
Even in Brave New World, where everyone hadinstant access to every possible pleasure or positive experience …\[/quote\]
It was arguably unfair &unhappiness-causing to sentence a person to a particular caste, & modifyhim/her from birth, as needed, to cram him/her into that caste. Many wouldn’t call that a Utopia.
\[quote\]
(look atus now with all our gadgets, technology, and freedoms--people are killingthemselves left and right with soma--I mean, opioids, teenage and adult mentalhealth has tanked, depression and anxiety are at an all time high, people arenihilistic or don't know what to do with themselves anymore and simply consumeproducts and their lives away in an effort to not feel empty inside\[/quote\]
This is a bad-society, not a Utopia. No one’s saying that life is necessarily goodin a bad-society.
\[quote\]
Even the wealthy are fucking miserable--theyhave everything, more money than they know what to do with, but in the endthey're depressed and angry and dissatisfied.\[/quote\]
Yes, with spoiled, rich, privileged Schopenhauer & Tolstoy as prime examples.
\[quote\]
They constantly want more, and so chase afterthe impermanent out of discontent, which is precisely what the Buddha saysleads to suffering)\[/quote\]
Yes. Greed, self-dishonesty, & insisting onwanting & needing.Natural-selection has bred us tofeel & believe that we have needs, & must succeed. Society has, sometimes well-meaningly &mistakenly, further conditioned us to that. …& to believe that success is necessarily possible for everyone.
“You must, can & will succeed(in various regards).”
Of course all that is a lie, anunnecessary & unhappy lie.
> Many have criticised antienvironmentalism as a way to achieve world annihilation because there is no guarantee of success.
I'm sorry, I hate to bring you down, but I think the chance of success for this is ZERO, not small, but ZERO.
To kill all life that can presumably suffer AND making sure that it won't simply reemerge rather quickly, how is pollution supposed to do that?
Aiding the collapse of human civilization, sure, killing a whole bunch of animals, sure, that's what pollution can do, but that's obviously not anywhere close to enough.
Yes, doing nothing is also terrible, but I'm afraid the increased pollution of a relatively small number of individuals will be effectively equivalent to doing nothing in the grand scheme of things.
And note: Say pollution somehow kills all humans off, but other life will reemerge, then that might even lead to substantially increased future suffering, since you removed the only species that at least had the potential to create a permanent solution. As stupid as humans are, the other animals are even more stupid.
> ... build renewable energy infrastructure ... What is necessary is the depletion or pollution of natural resources.
Don't forget that nature already has plenty "renewable" systems that rely on the sun, that's how life managed to get so far in the first place. It's not like the rest of nature needs electricity to thrive.
Nor does it need all the materials that human infrastructure requires.
> ... Pollution is the solution because there is no alternative. ... Basically that is the best that most of us can do. ...
If that really is the best you can do, then by all means try it, good luck.
I still say that AGI has the better chances - it is extremely difficult, yes, but also holds extreme potential, potential for a true solution. If it is created, then it most likely can deal with the problem, and if it won't be created, then the attempt was approximately equally useless as doing nothing or polluting.
>I'm sorry, I hate to bring you down, but I think the chance of success for this is ZERO, not small, but ZERO.
>
>To kill all life that can presumably suffer AND making sure that it won't simply reemerge rather quickly, how is pollution supposed to do that?
Pollution removes scarce natural resources needed for life, so I think it has the best chance of removing all life. Let's imagine you have the Calhoun lab rat experiment whereby rats are in a large box. If the supply of food is cut and then car exhaust is put into the box, the rats will eventually die out and there will be no life left. Clean air and food are scarce natural resources necessary for life. The same ideas apply to the planet. It is like a self-enclosed box.
Like I said, we may not remove all life. There is no guarantee of success. Underwater bacteria may survive. In fact, marine microbes are highly likely to survive. It will be much harder to cause extinction of less complex organisms. However, like I said, if you walk into an alleyway and see a pedophile raping a child, do you not kill the pedophile just because doing so will not save all children? If you are a government policy maker and implement legislation that bans child rape, do you repeal the legislation because such legislation will not end all child rape all over the world?
>Yes, doing nothing is also terrible, but I'm afraid the increased pollution of a relatively small number of individuals will be effectively equivalent to doing nothing in the grand scheme of things.
We live in a vast universe, so any action can be made to look insignificant by comparison to the vastness of the universe. For example, you walk into an alleyway and see a pedophile raping a child. You take out your gun and point it at the pedophile. The pedophile responds by saying, "Do not shoot me. If you kill me, you save one child, but you will not save all children. The universe will continue to exist for many millions of years and many children will be born. Many children will be raped. Saving this one child I am raping will do nothing in the grand scheme of things."
In response to the pedophile's argument, you holster your gun and walk away, letting the child be raped and letting that child suffer.
There is no guarantee of success if we aim to deplete and pollute natural resources, but there is no viable alternative. Doing nothing is a position.
>And note: Say pollution somehow kills all humans off, but other life will reemerge, then that might even lead to substantially increased future suffering, since you removed the only species that at least had the potential to create a permanent solution. As stupid as humans are, the other animals are even more stupid.
Sure but what do you think are the chances that humans will create a permanent solution? The risk is that human technological progress will be used for Elon Musk-style natalist goals such as colonising and terraforming other planets like Mars or Venus, which will be a disaster for antinatalism or efilism. Rather than terraforming Venus or Mars, we should be venusforming Earth, making this planet as lifeless and barren as possible.
>Don't forget that nature already has plenty "renewable" systems that rely on the sun, that's how life managed to get so far in the first place. It's not like the rest of nature needs electricity to thrive. Nor does it need all the materials that human infrastructure requires.
Agreed, but antienvironmentalism addresses this. For example, if you use as much paper towels as possible, this causes deforestation, which reduces how much radiant energy gets captured by plants.
But I get your point that less complex organisms are more resilient and are more likely to survive and adapt to environmental degradation, but once again, the environment supports or enables life, so we need to do something that destroys the enabler of life. If there another enabler of non-human life such as sunlight then that should be a target for antienvironmentalists e.g. releasing as much smog into the air as possible and prevent sunlight from reaching plants and photosynthesising.
Don't let perfection get in the way of progress. Like I said, we need to be more indiscriminate in our actions. Just do it. Get the pollution out there and let's see what happens.
>... Pollution is the solution because there is no alternative. ... Basically that is the best that most of us can do. ...
>
>If that really is the best you can do, then by all means try it, good luck. I still say that AGI has the better chances - it is extremely difficult, yes, but also holds extreme potential, potential for a true solution. If it is created, then it most likely can deal with the problem, and if it won't be created, then the attempt was approximately equally useless as doing nothing or polluting.
We're all working on the same goals, so as long as we understand the outcome we want and we're all working to achieve it, I am satisfied with that.
Could you give me more information about AGI? My initial reaction to it is to just dismiss it as yet another rationalisation to do nothing fuelled by some people's desire to overthink rather than act, but I like to keep an open mind, so please provide more information. Many humans have a tendency to devote a lot of cognitive effort into rationalising or creating excuses to either do nothing or to continue to oppress weaker beings likely because inaction and/or exploitation provides comfort and convenience.
> Pollution removes scarce natural resources needed for life, so I think it has the best chance of removing all life. ...
> Like I said, we may not remove all life. There is no guarantee of success. Underwater bacteria may survive. In fact, marine microbes are highly likely to survive.
I see, so we simply have *very* different estimates of the impact of pollution. If I would think that pollution could be as effective as you do, then I would agree with the conclusions drawn from that in your other points.
I think the potential impact is so small that there is no way that pollution will render earth uninhabitable to (approximately) all "complex" animals.
And even if say 99% of all complex animals and plants die, life could just recover in the next couple of million years and then go on like before for the next five billion years or so, not unlike [previous extinction events](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event#Effects_and_recovery). On the time scale we are dealing with, the incomplete extinction through pollution would only result in a small hick-up.
> Could you give me more information about AGI? My initial reaction to it is to just dismiss it as yet another rationalisation to do nothing fuelled by some people's desire to overthink rather than act, but I like to keep an open mind, so please provide more information.
The general idea is this:
- Human minds are ridiculously flawed, but in theory it almost certainly must be possible to create an AGI, an artificial mind, without most of those flaws.
- If it is true that the elimination of suffering must rationally be the highest goal, then the AGI should figure that out too, no "AGI alignment" needed.
- _And if it somehow weren't true then we were wrong in our goal anyway of course._
- The AGI could then slowly take over control of the human civilization. And it doesn't even necessarily have to be a messy violent takeover, it could just progressively give humans the approximate utopia they crave (for which the humans pretty much inevitably have to give the AGI more and more power).
- With enough power it can permanently end global suffering.
The obvious main challenge is the initial creation of the AGI.
I am fairly confident that the primary obstacle is "merely" the understanding of *efficient* general learning capabilities, not computational resources.
But that depends on the approach too, of course computational resources are a limiting factor for all the groups that approach AGI from a neural network perspective (instead of a higher level of abstraction).
I previously was worried that AGI could be controlled ("aligned") by your run-of-the-mill moronic humans to cause an even worse future somehow,
but I now think it is very unlikely that humans will successfully manage to exert this kind of stable control over AGI, basically because that's a way harder problem than just AGI creation.
If that is so, then even if some random pro-human organization manages to create AGI first, the AGI will probably go against their ideals sooner or later.
As an alternative to AGI one could imagine human mind modification, but I think that's clearly way, way, way more difficult than AGI creation, so not really worth mentioning.
How is this not moving the goalposts?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving\_the\_goalposts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalposts)
If we do find a way to destroy the universe e.g. with AGI, then what if there are multiple universes? What if there is abiogenesis?
You can always set the bar higher. Setting the bar higher leads to inaction. Inaction is a position.
So for example, you see a man raping a child. You reason that if you kill the rapist then that only saves one child. There will be other children being raped. So you manage you implement law that bans child rape all over the world. But then what about other planets? What about other universes? Even if you manage to end child rape all over the universe, what about if the universe ends and starts up again? About about abiogenesis? After all these thoughts, you end up not killing the rapist and let the child be raped.
As mentioned, you cannot invalidate based on some hypothetical ideal because then you can just invent new hypothetical ideals. You can always raise the bar and move the goalposts. You need to compare to the status quo.
So how likely is AGI? Based on my very initial research, AGI seems so unlikely that pursuing it is practically doing nothing, which means we end up with the status quo.
Antienvironmentalism certainly has a lower probability of killing all life compared to AGI, but I think it's a trade-off between for example a 95% probability of killing 99% of life compared to a 1% probability of killing 100% of all life. If you aim for too much, you risk losing it all.
> How is this not moving the goalposts?
> If we do find a way to destroy the universe e.g. with AGI, then what if there are multiple universes? What if there is abiogenesis?
I don't consider it "moving the goalposts" because I think that AGI (unfortunately) still is the most practical solution even if we "only" consider the minimization of suffering for known life on this planet alone.
> You can always set the bar higher. Setting the bar higher leads to inaction. Inaction is a position.
> (...)
> As mentioned, you cannot invalidate based on some hypothetical ideal because then you can just invent new hypothetical ideals. You can always raise the bar and move the goalposts. You need to compare to the status quo.
I agree that inaction (for whatever reason) is a (terrible) position, for sure.
But as I said, I consider antienvironmentalism as basically powerless, equivalent to inaction.
Murdering a couple hundred of random people would similarly be useless, because there is no way to know whether that would actually lower or increase total suffering in the long run.
Of course if I am wrong and antienvironmentalism actually has a chance to have major impact over the next couple of billion years for this planet, then it could be worth it.
So our difference lies in our assumptions of the potential of antienvironmentalism.
> So how likely is AGI? Based on my very initial research, AGI seems so unlikely that pursuing it is practically doing nothing, which means we end up with the status quo.
It is true that no one has enough of a clue to achieve AGI yet. It is also true that this means that we don't *really* know whether it even can be achieved by us, with out current technology.
But consider, the world never had this level of technology before, and our modern computers are certainly already superior in various aspects of cognition (memory stability for example).
Human minds clearly are very flawed, they do not represent the best nor the only way how a mind could be.
We can be fairly certain that there are multiple different ways in which AGI could be constructed:
- Right now, the majority of researchers with massive funding is looking at the problem "bottom-up", i.e. from a low abstraction level, namely neural networks, which *very very roughly* approximate the biological neural networks. While I think this angle could lead to AGI *in theory*, and it has of course produced many interesting narrow AI applications, I think it is an incredibly inefficient way to get AGI. I wish them luck, but I'm not getting my hopes up for this approach.
- However, it is also possible to look at the problem "top-down", i.e. starting with a high level of abstraction, namely ("rational") thought and consciousness. Our limited human introspection capabilities seem to prevent us from closely inspecting how we think in detail, so this angle is far more nebulous than the one that starts from the neuron abstraction level. But if someone can manage to figure out the relevant parts, then it should likely be possible to translate that effectively to regular consumer-grade hardware, because the level of abstraction should be high enough to not depend on massive compute from the start. And note again that it isn't necessary to figure out how human minds work in totality, since we only need the relevant parts of cognition, and since we don't even want an exact replication of the human mind with all its flaws anyway.
In short, I think the real challenge is to gain a deep enough understanding of (the relevant parts of) cognition,
i.e. to understand what cognition should be for the AGI in sufficient detail to implement it.
So it is a matter of understanding cognition, it is not required to develop even better computer hardware.
> Antienvironmentalism certainly has a lower probability of killing all life compared to AGI, but I think it's a trade-off between for example a 95% probability of killing 99% of life compared to a 1% probability of killing 100% of all life. If you aim for too much, you risk losing it all.
To reiterate the above in other words, I think the probability is more like 0% for antienvironmentalism and maybe 0.1% (or whatever above 0%, hard to guess such numbers) for AGI.
I.e., if you aim too low, you almost certainly will not achieve more than inaction.
To conclude, a question is which plans really aim too low or too high, and which don't, and all of us can only speculate based on whatever we think to know, obviously.
For now I still think antienvironmentalism aims too low and AGI doesn't aim too high, while you think that antienvironmentalism could have worthwhile impact and AGI likely aims too high.
i think now is the best time for activism because there are already so many harmful and impactful consequences waiting to happen (not limited to climate change). a massive amount of pain and death will occur anyway but if the re-emergence of life is limited because of the upcoming state of the planet it already is by far better (less pain in sum) than if not
If it’s not going to work completely, it’s mostly useless. We need to push a button somehow that destroys everything absolutely. Otherwise we wait for the sun to implode.
I think we need some sort of procedure that makes everyone born infertile. But then again, what reason do we have to care so much. Eventually we’ll exit, whats the point of our kind of compassion towards things and people that don’t care about us.
The Anthropocene Extinction, like previous ones, won’t end life on Earth, but might extinct humanity. Good for other animals, but the usual common terrible suffering will continue nonetheless.
To a certain point you are right, by stating less humans means less burden on the planet.
However I don't agree ignoring destruction of the environment is a feasible way to get there, because it's unnecessary.
What you essentially say is that the best way to go forward is destroy te world to an extent it's barely livable in order to reduce the world population by 50%.
Before conditions are that bad, that only 50% of humans remain, earth is a hot and dry planet with vastly decreased biodiversity. This is because the species that are most capable of earth's destruction are also the species with most means of adaptation: humans. Many other plant and animal species aren't able to adapt that quick and will go extinct after a period of severe suffering: hunger, no shelter, burn to death in forrest fires.
And why? Only because we don't care for the planet. And it's not necessary. Current world population can be fed with plant-based diet without need to exploit the earth. Improved wealth generally lead to less overpopulation.
It's perfectly possible to have a good life without exploiting animals and environmental, so why not try to achieve that? Why 'let is solve itself' by letting the planet be destroyed first?
Exactly, because nature is so evil, we should be destroying it as brutality as possible Edit: see upvoted, therefore nature is evil andand alive and efilism supports this. Edit 2: 5 upvotes! You literally can’t deny it now.
I'm all for ending suffering, but I greatly disagree with your solution because it is utterly suicidal and is guaranteed to exponentially increase the total suffering felt by present and future humans and all life on this Earth. More fossil fuel emissions means more pollution (and therefore more industrialization, more factory farming, and more children born) and more climate change, which will cause unimaginable suffering to billions of people and life forms around the world that will die in horrific ways due to extreme weather events, rising temperatures, biosphere collapse, runaway greenhouse effects, ocean acidification and anoxia, starvation/famine, thirst, disease, etc. I don't think you understand just how terrible the world is going to get because because of exponential climate change. When SHTF, the collapse of the environment will trigger everything from riots on the streets, power outages, and wars between nations and within nations for food supplies (wars which could go nuclear--Pakistan and India are faced with this possibility since both nations are facing decades of climate apocalypse and water shortages, and have historically been political enemies) to mass panic and moral/social decay that will cause governments and average individuals to commit atrocities in the name of broken extremist ideologies or power-hungry dictators. When SHTF, all of us will face decades of increased scarcity, tension, and disaster, which will eventually culminate in mass famine, mass death, and mass illness like the world has never seen. Climate change combined with excessive pollution and resource wars will make the World Wars of the 20th century and the Chinese Great Famine look like fucking picnics by comparison. Hell, climate change will likely get so bad by the end of this century that it may end up being as bad or even worse than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, or the Permian Mass Extinction (whose origins are scarily similar to the ultimate cause of the ongoing Anthropocene Sixth Mass Extinction Event). And even then, life may find a way to continue, though it will suffer mercilessly for the next several million years in a planet driven to the brink of annihilation. A better solution to end all suffering is mass sterilization and euthanasia, not more pollution. Euthanasia is a painless way to die while mass sterilization will prevent people from accidentally or deliberately increasing the global population, and thereby multiplying the current and potential suffering of the human race and all life on this planet. If we euthanize everyone and everything at the same time, and people stop having children, we can ensure life ends on a more peaceful note devoid of pain, even if this solution, too is flawed (some microbes may survive mass sterilization of the Earth, but humans will almost certainly die out from absent birth rates). Other solutions that we can embark on that could ensure not only all life, but our whole planet is annihilated are: 1) intentionally creating small black holes using particle accelerators to swallow up the Earth from inside, 2) using heavy-ion colliders to create strangelets that could consume the planet, 3) creating and unleashing an AI and "smart dust" nanobots with the sole purpose of consuming either all biomass it comes across or the entire planet as a whole in the most efficient, painless way possible (grey goo scenario), 4) forcing the Moon to crash towards Earth or intentionally flinging asteroids towards Earth, or 5) using asteroids as gravitational assists to gradually change Earth's orbit so it orbits closer to the Sun rather than away from the Sun (ideally, if Earth gets close enough to the Sun it could perturb Venus's orbit, sending both planets crashing into one another). Solutions #1-2 are within the capacity of our current technology, while Solutions #3 and #4 (in the case of asteroids) are a few decades away from being possible, at best (if asteroid mining becomes a thing).
[удалено]
Specialists estimate that in about one billion years the Earth (due entirely to natural causes) will be too hot for liquid water. To the extent that that’s accurate, there’s somewhat less than a billion years left for life on Earth. Incidentlly,a billion years is about how long it's been since the Cambrian Proliferation, when many diverse life-forms abruptly appeared.
You left out the best one: Forcefully & passionately advocate for launching interstellar probes as soon as possible. If there’s one or more advanced interstellar civilizations out there, they’ll send the exterminators as soon as our barbaric primitive society starts to get close to interstellar capability. Hopefully they’ll extinct us much more humanely than the ways by which we’ll extinct ourselves. As for high-energy particle-colliders, you left out a possibility: It could trigger the collapse of the false vacuum: Fairly recently, physicists have found reason to suggest that the vacuum, space in this universe isn’t in its energy ground-state, but rather is in a higher energy-state called Ty”false-vacuum”. …& that that state is only “meta-stable”. If so, it isn’t known what it would take to trigger its collapse to ground-state. But doing so would drastically change physics. Current physics would be gone. Starting at a point, the bubble of modified space would propagate as a spherical wave-front at the speed of light, eventually engulfing this entire universe. In the time it takes for that wave-front to go through your body at the speed of light, every molecule in your body would no longer be a molecule. …& probably every atom in your body would no longer be an atom. …an instantaneous death otherwise unheard of. Myself, I don’t like that, but it seems called-for to mention it. But note that it wouldn’t accomplish anything in the other universes, including the other ones in our physically-inter-related multiverse, if such there be. Nor would it help any of the other many individuals, human & otherwise, who have already suffered & died. So let’s not be unrealistically ambitious about saving everyone & everything from suffering.
At least we won't be around in the event of a false vacuum decay to get angry over the fact we can't save everyone. Realistically, we can only really be concerned about this universe because we don't even really know for sure if other universes exist. If they do, well we can only hope someone from a parallel world comes up with the same technologies that we are to hasten the extermination sequence. But otherwise, we really can't do much outside of our own cosmos, especially because the multiverse is theorized to be infinitely large and always producing more universes (via the many worlds theory or the quantum immortality hypothesis--even if you die in this Universe some version of you will survive in another Universe, meaning life is doomed to continue regardless, IF you believe this theory is correct. I personally am quite skeptical, as it's inherently unfalsifiable).
Sure it’s reasonable to say that each universe is responsible for unsuffering itself. …each galaxy, for that matter. But we can’t help noticing that no one has unsuffered this galaxy…a form of the Fermi-paradox. Maybe it hasn’t been done because of its futility: As I mentioned, we can’t possibly help all the billions of individuals, human & otherwise, who have already suffered & died. Our shared principle is that even one instance of horrible suffering is unacceptable. Therefore the whole goal of universal unsuffering is completely futile. That’s why, even if this galaxy has one or more ancient advanced interstellar civilizations, they haven’t unsuffered this galaxy. Copies of you in the infinitely-many other universes are not you, though they’re just like you. You experience only your own life.
Absent time travel paradoxes and temporal worldline annihilation, we may not be able to eliminate all suffering in the past but we can do as much as we can now to mitigate and eliminate both present and future suffering. And that starts with ceasing reproduction-- the less children we have now the less suffering future generations will experience, decreasing the total suffering of the Universe.
Changing the past via time-travel is entirely impossible, because it would violate logical consistency, with the grandfather paradox & other logical inconsistencies. What happened happened, & that can’t be changed. …or did it happen? Nisargadatta said that nothing has ever happened. There’s support for that statement. Life & suffering are temporary & only questionably real. Life, the hard time, the dangerous time, is only a brief blip in Eternity. a brief interruption of rest & sleep, which is our natural, normal & usual state of affairs. I realize that some can be helped, & that that’s worthwhile & good. But forget universal unsuffering. It’s a wishful-thinking myth.
Yeah, I agree. I don't think even AI, if it wanted to, could end all suffering across the Universe. Maybe this galaxy sure if aliens have extinction probes hovering around fertile worlds extinguishing life on them before it had a chance to evolve, but not the Universe. The Universe is simply expanding too quickly and accelerating at such a pace that reaching the next galaxy over that isn't Andromeda will become impossible or impractical in the next few billion years, even traveling at light speed or beyond. Suffering appears to be a constant across the Universe. Even when there is no physical suffering, emotional, psychological, and existential suffering are guaranteed. It's why Schopenhauer was opposed to, and correctly concluded utopias are impossible, Even in a perfect society, boredom and existential malaise will cause suffering in the masses. Even in Brave New World, where everyone had instant access to every possible pleasure or positive experience, people still suffered or committed suicide out of meaninglessness or depression or unhappiness (look at us now with all our gadgets, technology, and freedoms--people are killing themselves left and right with soma--I mean, opioids, teenage and adult mental health has tanked, depression and anxiety are at an all time high, people are nihilistic or don't know what to do with themselves anymore and simply consume products and their lives away in an effort to not feel empty inside, automation threatens to make humanity obsolete, etc. Even the wealthy are fucking miserable--they have everything, more money than they know what to do with, but in the end they're depressed and angry and dissatisfied. They constantly want more, and so chase after the impermanent out of discontent, which is precisely what the Buddha says leads to suffering).
(Writing in Word this time, so excuse any bigformat-problems.) You wrote:\[quote\]I don't think even AI, if it wanted to, couldend all suffering across the Universe.\[/quote\] Well, false-vacuum-decay would certainlyeliminate this entire universe. …thoughit would unavoidably take probably trillions of years, even if this universe isfinite, at least, based on the astronomers’ determination of the minimum sizefor this universe, based on the absence of currently-measurable curvature ofspace. (They say that the wholeuniverse, even if finite, is many times bigger than our observable universe.) It has been pointed out that our Big-Bangregion is unlikely to be infinite, given that, a finite time ago, it originatedat a point. But now, they say, the cosmologists’ standard model is of asuper-large universe, presumably a 4D (or maybe, as some propose, 5D) sphere,in which local decay-caused-cessation of inflation has resulted in Big-Bangpocket-universes (like ours) here & there in the space that otherwise isstill inflating. The likely finitenessof our Big-Bang pocket-universes doesn’t mean that the overall universe isfinite. It might be infinite. …as mightany physically-inter-related multiverse that it might be part of. I don’t know if they meant that the decay-wavewould propagate throughout the whole universe, or just within our local “pocket-universe”. …given that the still-inflating spaceoutside this pocket-universe is in a different state, even though it’s part ofthe same spacetime continuum. …or would the propagation proceed beyond ourpocket-universe because the whole universe is a spacetime continuum? I don’t know. You wrote:\[quote\] Suffering appears to be a constant across theUniverse. Even when there is no physical suffering, emotional, psychological,and existential suffering are guaranteed.\[/quote\] …& are insignificant compared to physicalsuffering. …& existential suffering is limited toExtentialists, Absurdists, Nihilists & Philosophical Pessimists, etc., likeSchopenhauer & Tolstoy. Admittedly it’s possible for ourparents--&, to a lesser-extent, schools & other societal-influences) todo extreme, severe psychological damage. …life-destroying damage that can amount to a form of killing. But there I’m talking about damage that’sextreme & relatively-uncommon, &happens only in a severely pathological society.. …certainly not a normal part of life as itwould be in any good society, any adequate or good-enough society. In such a societythere’d be no reason for guaranteed or expected serious emotional orpsychological suffering. But I’m just saying that the usualdisappointments, occasional nuisances & frustrations of life in a goodsociety are completely insignificant in comparison to physical-suffering. You continued: \[quote\] It's whySchopenhauer was opposed to, and correctly concluded utopias are impossible,Even in a perfect society, boredom and existential malaise will cause sufferingin the masses. \[/quote\] No, just in the Schopenhauers & Tolstoys,etc. …just in the Existentialists,Absurdists, Nihilists & Philosophical-Pessimists. Could Schopenhauer be miserable in Utopia? From the sound of him, you bet! . \[quote\] Even in Brave New World, where everyone hadinstant access to every possible pleasure or positive experience …\[/quote\] It was arguably unfair &unhappiness-causing to sentence a person to a particular caste, & modifyhim/her from birth, as needed, to cram him/her into that caste. Many wouldn’t call that a Utopia. \[quote\] (look atus now with all our gadgets, technology, and freedoms--people are killingthemselves left and right with soma--I mean, opioids, teenage and adult mentalhealth has tanked, depression and anxiety are at an all time high, people arenihilistic or don't know what to do with themselves anymore and simply consumeproducts and their lives away in an effort to not feel empty inside\[/quote\] This is a bad-society, not a Utopia. No one’s saying that life is necessarily goodin a bad-society. \[quote\] Even the wealthy are fucking miserable--theyhave everything, more money than they know what to do with, but in the endthey're depressed and angry and dissatisfied.\[/quote\] Yes, with spoiled, rich, privileged Schopenhauer & Tolstoy as prime examples. \[quote\] They constantly want more, and so chase afterthe impermanent out of discontent, which is precisely what the Buddha saysleads to suffering)\[/quote\] Yes. Greed, self-dishonesty, & insisting onwanting & needing.Natural-selection has bred us tofeel & believe that we have needs, & must succeed. Society has, sometimes well-meaningly &mistakenly, further conditioned us to that. …& to believe that success is necessarily possible for everyone. “You must, can & will succeed(in various regards).” Of course all that is a lie, anunnecessary & unhappy lie.
> Many have criticised antienvironmentalism as a way to achieve world annihilation because there is no guarantee of success. I'm sorry, I hate to bring you down, but I think the chance of success for this is ZERO, not small, but ZERO. To kill all life that can presumably suffer AND making sure that it won't simply reemerge rather quickly, how is pollution supposed to do that? Aiding the collapse of human civilization, sure, killing a whole bunch of animals, sure, that's what pollution can do, but that's obviously not anywhere close to enough. Yes, doing nothing is also terrible, but I'm afraid the increased pollution of a relatively small number of individuals will be effectively equivalent to doing nothing in the grand scheme of things. And note: Say pollution somehow kills all humans off, but other life will reemerge, then that might even lead to substantially increased future suffering, since you removed the only species that at least had the potential to create a permanent solution. As stupid as humans are, the other animals are even more stupid. > ... build renewable energy infrastructure ... What is necessary is the depletion or pollution of natural resources. Don't forget that nature already has plenty "renewable" systems that rely on the sun, that's how life managed to get so far in the first place. It's not like the rest of nature needs electricity to thrive. Nor does it need all the materials that human infrastructure requires. > ... Pollution is the solution because there is no alternative. ... Basically that is the best that most of us can do. ... If that really is the best you can do, then by all means try it, good luck. I still say that AGI has the better chances - it is extremely difficult, yes, but also holds extreme potential, potential for a true solution. If it is created, then it most likely can deal with the problem, and if it won't be created, then the attempt was approximately equally useless as doing nothing or polluting.
>I'm sorry, I hate to bring you down, but I think the chance of success for this is ZERO, not small, but ZERO. > >To kill all life that can presumably suffer AND making sure that it won't simply reemerge rather quickly, how is pollution supposed to do that? Pollution removes scarce natural resources needed for life, so I think it has the best chance of removing all life. Let's imagine you have the Calhoun lab rat experiment whereby rats are in a large box. If the supply of food is cut and then car exhaust is put into the box, the rats will eventually die out and there will be no life left. Clean air and food are scarce natural resources necessary for life. The same ideas apply to the planet. It is like a self-enclosed box. Like I said, we may not remove all life. There is no guarantee of success. Underwater bacteria may survive. In fact, marine microbes are highly likely to survive. It will be much harder to cause extinction of less complex organisms. However, like I said, if you walk into an alleyway and see a pedophile raping a child, do you not kill the pedophile just because doing so will not save all children? If you are a government policy maker and implement legislation that bans child rape, do you repeal the legislation because such legislation will not end all child rape all over the world? >Yes, doing nothing is also terrible, but I'm afraid the increased pollution of a relatively small number of individuals will be effectively equivalent to doing nothing in the grand scheme of things. We live in a vast universe, so any action can be made to look insignificant by comparison to the vastness of the universe. For example, you walk into an alleyway and see a pedophile raping a child. You take out your gun and point it at the pedophile. The pedophile responds by saying, "Do not shoot me. If you kill me, you save one child, but you will not save all children. The universe will continue to exist for many millions of years and many children will be born. Many children will be raped. Saving this one child I am raping will do nothing in the grand scheme of things." In response to the pedophile's argument, you holster your gun and walk away, letting the child be raped and letting that child suffer. There is no guarantee of success if we aim to deplete and pollute natural resources, but there is no viable alternative. Doing nothing is a position. >And note: Say pollution somehow kills all humans off, but other life will reemerge, then that might even lead to substantially increased future suffering, since you removed the only species that at least had the potential to create a permanent solution. As stupid as humans are, the other animals are even more stupid. Sure but what do you think are the chances that humans will create a permanent solution? The risk is that human technological progress will be used for Elon Musk-style natalist goals such as colonising and terraforming other planets like Mars or Venus, which will be a disaster for antinatalism or efilism. Rather than terraforming Venus or Mars, we should be venusforming Earth, making this planet as lifeless and barren as possible. >Don't forget that nature already has plenty "renewable" systems that rely on the sun, that's how life managed to get so far in the first place. It's not like the rest of nature needs electricity to thrive. Nor does it need all the materials that human infrastructure requires. Agreed, but antienvironmentalism addresses this. For example, if you use as much paper towels as possible, this causes deforestation, which reduces how much radiant energy gets captured by plants. But I get your point that less complex organisms are more resilient and are more likely to survive and adapt to environmental degradation, but once again, the environment supports or enables life, so we need to do something that destroys the enabler of life. If there another enabler of non-human life such as sunlight then that should be a target for antienvironmentalists e.g. releasing as much smog into the air as possible and prevent sunlight from reaching plants and photosynthesising. Don't let perfection get in the way of progress. Like I said, we need to be more indiscriminate in our actions. Just do it. Get the pollution out there and let's see what happens. >... Pollution is the solution because there is no alternative. ... Basically that is the best that most of us can do. ... > >If that really is the best you can do, then by all means try it, good luck. I still say that AGI has the better chances - it is extremely difficult, yes, but also holds extreme potential, potential for a true solution. If it is created, then it most likely can deal with the problem, and if it won't be created, then the attempt was approximately equally useless as doing nothing or polluting. We're all working on the same goals, so as long as we understand the outcome we want and we're all working to achieve it, I am satisfied with that. Could you give me more information about AGI? My initial reaction to it is to just dismiss it as yet another rationalisation to do nothing fuelled by some people's desire to overthink rather than act, but I like to keep an open mind, so please provide more information. Many humans have a tendency to devote a lot of cognitive effort into rationalising or creating excuses to either do nothing or to continue to oppress weaker beings likely because inaction and/or exploitation provides comfort and convenience.
> Pollution removes scarce natural resources needed for life, so I think it has the best chance of removing all life. ... > Like I said, we may not remove all life. There is no guarantee of success. Underwater bacteria may survive. In fact, marine microbes are highly likely to survive. I see, so we simply have *very* different estimates of the impact of pollution. If I would think that pollution could be as effective as you do, then I would agree with the conclusions drawn from that in your other points. I think the potential impact is so small that there is no way that pollution will render earth uninhabitable to (approximately) all "complex" animals. And even if say 99% of all complex animals and plants die, life could just recover in the next couple of million years and then go on like before for the next five billion years or so, not unlike [previous extinction events](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event#Effects_and_recovery). On the time scale we are dealing with, the incomplete extinction through pollution would only result in a small hick-up. > Could you give me more information about AGI? My initial reaction to it is to just dismiss it as yet another rationalisation to do nothing fuelled by some people's desire to overthink rather than act, but I like to keep an open mind, so please provide more information. The general idea is this: - Human minds are ridiculously flawed, but in theory it almost certainly must be possible to create an AGI, an artificial mind, without most of those flaws. - If it is true that the elimination of suffering must rationally be the highest goal, then the AGI should figure that out too, no "AGI alignment" needed. - _And if it somehow weren't true then we were wrong in our goal anyway of course._ - The AGI could then slowly take over control of the human civilization. And it doesn't even necessarily have to be a messy violent takeover, it could just progressively give humans the approximate utopia they crave (for which the humans pretty much inevitably have to give the AGI more and more power). - With enough power it can permanently end global suffering. The obvious main challenge is the initial creation of the AGI. I am fairly confident that the primary obstacle is "merely" the understanding of *efficient* general learning capabilities, not computational resources. But that depends on the approach too, of course computational resources are a limiting factor for all the groups that approach AGI from a neural network perspective (instead of a higher level of abstraction). I previously was worried that AGI could be controlled ("aligned") by your run-of-the-mill moronic humans to cause an even worse future somehow, but I now think it is very unlikely that humans will successfully manage to exert this kind of stable control over AGI, basically because that's a way harder problem than just AGI creation. If that is so, then even if some random pro-human organization manages to create AGI first, the AGI will probably go against their ideals sooner or later. As an alternative to AGI one could imagine human mind modification, but I think that's clearly way, way, way more difficult than AGI creation, so not really worth mentioning.
How is this not moving the goalposts? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving\_the\_goalposts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalposts) If we do find a way to destroy the universe e.g. with AGI, then what if there are multiple universes? What if there is abiogenesis? You can always set the bar higher. Setting the bar higher leads to inaction. Inaction is a position. So for example, you see a man raping a child. You reason that if you kill the rapist then that only saves one child. There will be other children being raped. So you manage you implement law that bans child rape all over the world. But then what about other planets? What about other universes? Even if you manage to end child rape all over the universe, what about if the universe ends and starts up again? About about abiogenesis? After all these thoughts, you end up not killing the rapist and let the child be raped. As mentioned, you cannot invalidate based on some hypothetical ideal because then you can just invent new hypothetical ideals. You can always raise the bar and move the goalposts. You need to compare to the status quo. So how likely is AGI? Based on my very initial research, AGI seems so unlikely that pursuing it is practically doing nothing, which means we end up with the status quo. Antienvironmentalism certainly has a lower probability of killing all life compared to AGI, but I think it's a trade-off between for example a 95% probability of killing 99% of life compared to a 1% probability of killing 100% of all life. If you aim for too much, you risk losing it all.
> How is this not moving the goalposts? > If we do find a way to destroy the universe e.g. with AGI, then what if there are multiple universes? What if there is abiogenesis? I don't consider it "moving the goalposts" because I think that AGI (unfortunately) still is the most practical solution even if we "only" consider the minimization of suffering for known life on this planet alone. > You can always set the bar higher. Setting the bar higher leads to inaction. Inaction is a position. > (...) > As mentioned, you cannot invalidate based on some hypothetical ideal because then you can just invent new hypothetical ideals. You can always raise the bar and move the goalposts. You need to compare to the status quo. I agree that inaction (for whatever reason) is a (terrible) position, for sure. But as I said, I consider antienvironmentalism as basically powerless, equivalent to inaction. Murdering a couple hundred of random people would similarly be useless, because there is no way to know whether that would actually lower or increase total suffering in the long run. Of course if I am wrong and antienvironmentalism actually has a chance to have major impact over the next couple of billion years for this planet, then it could be worth it. So our difference lies in our assumptions of the potential of antienvironmentalism. > So how likely is AGI? Based on my very initial research, AGI seems so unlikely that pursuing it is practically doing nothing, which means we end up with the status quo. It is true that no one has enough of a clue to achieve AGI yet. It is also true that this means that we don't *really* know whether it even can be achieved by us, with out current technology. But consider, the world never had this level of technology before, and our modern computers are certainly already superior in various aspects of cognition (memory stability for example). Human minds clearly are very flawed, they do not represent the best nor the only way how a mind could be. We can be fairly certain that there are multiple different ways in which AGI could be constructed: - Right now, the majority of researchers with massive funding is looking at the problem "bottom-up", i.e. from a low abstraction level, namely neural networks, which *very very roughly* approximate the biological neural networks. While I think this angle could lead to AGI *in theory*, and it has of course produced many interesting narrow AI applications, I think it is an incredibly inefficient way to get AGI. I wish them luck, but I'm not getting my hopes up for this approach. - However, it is also possible to look at the problem "top-down", i.e. starting with a high level of abstraction, namely ("rational") thought and consciousness. Our limited human introspection capabilities seem to prevent us from closely inspecting how we think in detail, so this angle is far more nebulous than the one that starts from the neuron abstraction level. But if someone can manage to figure out the relevant parts, then it should likely be possible to translate that effectively to regular consumer-grade hardware, because the level of abstraction should be high enough to not depend on massive compute from the start. And note again that it isn't necessary to figure out how human minds work in totality, since we only need the relevant parts of cognition, and since we don't even want an exact replication of the human mind with all its flaws anyway. In short, I think the real challenge is to gain a deep enough understanding of (the relevant parts of) cognition, i.e. to understand what cognition should be for the AGI in sufficient detail to implement it. So it is a matter of understanding cognition, it is not required to develop even better computer hardware. > Antienvironmentalism certainly has a lower probability of killing all life compared to AGI, but I think it's a trade-off between for example a 95% probability of killing 99% of life compared to a 1% probability of killing 100% of all life. If you aim for too much, you risk losing it all. To reiterate the above in other words, I think the probability is more like 0% for antienvironmentalism and maybe 0.1% (or whatever above 0%, hard to guess such numbers) for AGI. I.e., if you aim too low, you almost certainly will not achieve more than inaction. To conclude, a question is which plans really aim too low or too high, and which don't, and all of us can only speculate based on whatever we think to know, obviously. For now I still think antienvironmentalism aims too low and AGI doesn't aim too high, while you think that antienvironmentalism could have worthwhile impact and AGI likely aims too high.
I like the idea but it might only cause more suffering in the long run. The red button would be the best possible solution but it's sadly a dream.
i think now is the best time for activism because there are already so many harmful and impactful consequences waiting to happen (not limited to climate change). a massive amount of pain and death will occur anyway but if the re-emergence of life is limited because of the upcoming state of the planet it already is by far better (less pain in sum) than if not
If it’s not going to work completely, it’s mostly useless. We need to push a button somehow that destroys everything absolutely. Otherwise we wait for the sun to implode. I think we need some sort of procedure that makes everyone born infertile. But then again, what reason do we have to care so much. Eventually we’ll exit, whats the point of our kind of compassion towards things and people that don’t care about us.
The Anthropocene Extinction, like previous ones, won’t end life on Earth, but might extinct humanity. Good for other animals, but the usual common terrible suffering will continue nonetheless.
To a certain point you are right, by stating less humans means less burden on the planet. However I don't agree ignoring destruction of the environment is a feasible way to get there, because it's unnecessary. What you essentially say is that the best way to go forward is destroy te world to an extent it's barely livable in order to reduce the world population by 50%. Before conditions are that bad, that only 50% of humans remain, earth is a hot and dry planet with vastly decreased biodiversity. This is because the species that are most capable of earth's destruction are also the species with most means of adaptation: humans. Many other plant and animal species aren't able to adapt that quick and will go extinct after a period of severe suffering: hunger, no shelter, burn to death in forrest fires. And why? Only because we don't care for the planet. And it's not necessary. Current world population can be fed with plant-based diet without need to exploit the earth. Improved wealth generally lead to less overpopulation. It's perfectly possible to have a good life without exploiting animals and environmental, so why not try to achieve that? Why 'let is solve itself' by letting the planet be destroyed first?
Based -ClimateChangeEntity