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More than a penchant for suffering, and more than a need to challenge ourselves, humans are a species that can adapt. In times of flux and epochal change, there’s often a peculiar strain of natural law among nervous, conservative minds — the “natural” way of man is right, so don’t meddle with it. This strain was there when we developed immunization... See more

Jonny Thomson • Philosopher Nick Bostrom's predictions on life in an AI utopia

the imagination is a neurological reality, that it is lodged in specific parts of the brain, that it consists of an identifiable set of components and processes, that these components and processes have adaptive functions, and that in fulfilling its functions imagination has been a major causal factor in making Homo sapiens the dominant species on ... See more

Joseph Carroll • Imagination, the Brain’s Default Mode Network, and Imaginative Verbal Artifacts

Information is increasingly seen by many philosophers and biologists, and even by some physicists, as the most basic building block of reality, more elementary than matter and energy.[1]

Yuval Noah Harari • Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

Ben-Nun Bloom indicates that popular measures of values and morality have a common genetic basis.

Oxford University Press • The Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology (OXFORD HANDBOOKS SERIES)

The Repugnant Conclusion: Imagine a world with a vast population living lives barely worth living. Now compare it to a world with a much smaller population enjoying very high quality of life. Which world is better? This experiment, posed by philosopher Derek Parfit, challenges our intuitions about the nature of a good society and the importance we ... See more

Although timelines for these capabilities vary widely, Bostrom’s book presents surveys of AI researchers, giving a median prediction of 2040 for the creation of AGI, with…

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Kai-Fu Lee • AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

It comes down to your metaphysical assumptions. If you are a computational functionalist, if you assume that computations, carried out on digital computers, are sufficient for consciousness, then sooner or later, computers will imitate all human functions, including consciousness. If not today, then soon. If, on the other hand, you assume that cons

Christof Koch • Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It

- Complexity and entropy in civilisational systems

- Any law should be short enough that anyone can read them

- Should be easier to get rid of a late than make them

ELON MUSK: "Birthrate might be the biggest threat to the future of human civilization“

This is how I see the story of life and intelligence—as a story of improbably good designs being produced by optimization processes. The “improbability” here is improbability relative to a random selection from the design space, not improbability in an absolute sense—if you have an optimization process around, then “improbably” good designs become