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.David Deutsch: "Conventional pessimism is right that civilization has no guaranteed future, nor does our species. The overwhelming majority of civilizations and species that have ever existed are now extinct, including significantly every one of our cousin species, every species that has ever tried to survive by creating knowledge...

14,422 просмотров • 8 месяцев назад •via X (Twitter)

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I think we've been deprived of a lot more than flying cars and Mars colonies. I think civilization is currently burdened by a debilitating pessimism. Not just prophecies of doom, because they've always existed. There's something deeper. The term technological fix has become as pejorative as Luddite used to be. The aspiration for technological solutions is now widely regarded as naive. A fantasy that ignores the inevitability of missteps and side effects. And that naivety is labeled optimism. Because optimism has come to mean something like the assumption that the best will happen, or probably will. And pessimism that the worst will. They're both false as general principles. No one adopts them. They're irrationalities that people accuse each other of having. And everyone classifies themselves as somewhere in the middle. And perhaps admitting to a slight bias in one direction or the other. And therefore admitting to slight irrationality. But in fact, both ends of the spectrum and the middle are predictions of success or failure. Maybe probabilistic. Derived only from an attitude or a principle. Not from explanations of why reality should match them. And prediction without explanation is prophecy. Which is reliance on the supernatural. Which isn't a rational attitude to planning for the future. So what is? Well, here's the bad news. Conventional pessimism is right that civilization has no guaranteed future. Nor does our species. The overwhelming majority of civilizations and species that have ever existed are now extinct. Including significantly every one of our cousin species. Every species that has ever tried to survive by creating knowledge that was not in their genome. New explanatory knowledge. How to make clothes and fire and farming. And to live the new ways of life that that enabled. That is our biological niche. To survive through the exercise of creativity. And we are the last species left in that niche. For such species, stasis is not available. We conquer problems by creating knowledge or they conquer us. So there's nothing new in our situation of all sorts of existential danger. It's undeniable that the worst can happen. Because the very worst has already happened many times. So now for the good news. All those civilizations who believed that their famines and droughts and disasters were divine punishment for their wickedness or whatever. In reality, it was just that they didn't know enough about irrigation, medicine, and so on. If the ancient Athenians had known about antibiotics or just about hygiene, they could have prevented the plague that contributed to the fall of their nascent optimistic society. And if they had, then as Carl Sagan speculated, we might now be at the stars. And technology would be regulating trivialities like the planetary climate. As automatically as it's now regulating the temperature in this room. We know that's possible because of a momentous dichotomy that follows directly from the rejection of the supernatural. Namely, every transformation of physical systems that is not forbidden by laws of physics is achievable given the right knowledge. And hence, the rational attitude to the future is what I call optimism. The principle of optimism, namely that all evils are caused by lack of knowledge. That isn't a prophecy of success. It's an explanation for failure. If we fail at anything that's physically possible, it's because of some knowledge that we fail to create. Admittedly, some of the dangers that we currently foresee are themselves side effects of knowledge creation. But trying to slow that down won't help because what do you slow down? In 1900, no one could possibly have foreseen that research in pure physics into the esoteric properties of the element uranium would within 50 years become the centerpiece of everyone's existential fear. Or that another half century later, the centerpiece would be carbon dioxide. In our future too, the greatest dangers will inevitably be unforeseen. And the only type of knowledge that's capable of dealing with those is fundamental knowledge of universal regularities in nature. Any area of fundamental research could suddenly become essential to our survival. Biology, engineering. In World War II, pure mathematics was. We also need knowledge of how to structure human institutions to retain the miraculous property of keeping civilization stable under rapid change. Traditions of criticism and error correction. And we need wealth, meaning the ability to deploy technology in practice. And there's a final consideration. The world doesn't just contain optimists and pessimists and wise and unwise technology users. It contains enemies of civilization as well. And knowledge is impartial. It can be used for good or evil. But the enemies of civilization all necessarily have one thing in common. They are wrong. And so they fear error correction and truth. And that's why they resist changes in their ideas, which makes them less creative and slower to innovate. So our defense against the existential danger from malevolent uses of technology, the only defense, is speed. The good guys must use their only advantage to stay ahead. David Deutsch

Deutsch Explains

38,220 просмотров • 1 год назад

Have you ever noticed what happens if a wild animal or plant disappears ? Most of us will never know. And even if we do, we rarely realise that our own survival and infact the survival of all life forms on Earth is deeply tied to species diversity. When a species disappears, it shakes this balance in ways we may not immediately see. Global assessments by IUCN Species Survival Commission WWF and UN Environment Programme warn that species are vanishing faster than ever. UNEP notes that nearly one million species are now at risk of extinction, many within decades. This is why species revival programmes matter. We need sustained efforts to rebuild populations of species facing decline before it is too late. In this context, Project Nilgiri Tahr assumes great significance as it aims to restore the population of this endangered iconic species endemic to Western Ghats. We just concluded the four-day population estimation exercise of the Nilgiri Tahr. It was inspiring to walk along with my hardworking TN Forest Department team across the rugged mountains and grasslands that are the Tahr’s abode, alongside Thiru Yash Veer IUCN India & Collector & DM, The Nilgiris. Using the Varudai app, we captured field data with greater precision under Project Nilgiri Tahr, now in its next phase with the Third synchronised survey across 14 divisions, 43 ranges, 124 beats, and 177 blocks, covering over 3,100 km with 800 staff. From 1,031 Tahrs in 2024 to 1,303 Tahrs in 2025, this iconic State Animal of Tamil Nadu is showing great signs of recovery.

Supriya Sahu IAS

11,500 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад

.Naval: You define wealth in a beautiful way. You talk about wealth as a set of physical transformations that we can affect. So as a society it becomes very clear that knowledge leads directly to wealth creation for everybody. A given individual can obviously affect physical transformations proportional to the resources available to them—but much more proportional to the knowledge available to them. Knowledge is a huge force multiplier. You then define resources as the thing that you combine with knowledge to create wealth. New knowledge allows you to use new things as resources and discard old things that maybe we’re running out of. There are lots of examples of how we’ve done that in the past. For example, in energy we’ve gone from wood to coal to oil to nuclear. But then people say, “Now we’re out of ideas. Now we’re caught up. Now we’re done. There aren’t going to be new ideas, and now we have to freeze the frame and conserve what we have.” The counter to that is, “No, we’ll create new knowledge and have new resources. Don’t worry about the old ones.” Well they say, “If you’re going to have new resources, if you can’t think of them now, it’s not real.” This now gets into the realm of people demanding that if you’re going to claim that new knowledge will be created, you have to name that knowledge now. Otherwise it’s not real. But that seems like a Catch-22. David Deutsch: It does, and it’s a bad argument. I don’t want to claim that the knowledge will be created. We’re fallible; we may not create it. We may destroy ourselves. We may miss the solution that’s right under our nose, so that when the snailiens come from another galaxy and look at us, they’ll say, “How can it possibly be that they failed to do so-and-so when it was right in front of them?” That could happen. I can’t prove or argue that it won’t happen. What I always argue, though, is that we have what it takes. We have everything that it takes to achieve that. If we don’t, it’ll be because of bad choices we have made, not because of constraints imposed on us by the planet or the solar system. Naval: It will be by anti-rational memes that restrict the creation of knowledge and the growth of knowledge. David Deutsch: Maybe. Or maybe it’ll be by well-intentioned errors, which nobody could see why they were errors. Again, it doesn’t take malevolence to make mistakes. Mistakes are the normal condition of humans. All we can do is try to find them. Maybe not destroying the means of correcting errors is the heart of morality; because if there is no way of correcting errors, then sooner or later one of those will get us. Naval: Don’t destroy the means of error correction is the base of morality. I love that. I think about places like North Korea where you can’t have elections and a revolution is very difficult because the gang in charge is armed to the teeth and they’ve destroyed the means of political error correction for a long time. That is a case where humanity is trapped in a local minimum, and it’s very hard to climb out of that hole. If too much of the world falls into that mindset, then we as a species may just stagnate because we’ve lost our biggest advantage. We’ve lost our biggest discovery, which was the ability to make new discoveries.

Deutsch Explains

143,913 просмотров • 1 год назад

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman reveals the assumption about superintelligence he thinks the other AI labs have backwards "Some of the other labs are making an assumption that a superintelligence that is smarter than all of us put together is both inevitable and even desirable. And that such a system would probably be very hard to control" "We have to reset that and make the assumption that we should only bring a system like that into the world that we are sure we can control, that operates in a subordinate way to us, that humans remain at the top of the food chain" "These tools, like any other past technology, are designed to enhance human wellbeing and serve humanity. Not exceed humanity" "Some of the things that you hear from Elon often, or even others in the field - they're fixating on a world in 2050 or 2075 when they're going off exploring other universes and conquering resources from other planets. A system like that, it is unclear to me how it would have any time for preserving us as a species" "We have to make a decision as a species to prioritize creating superintelligences that are aligned, that care about humans and want to protect humans. If we just accelerate and cut all those corners, we're taking a massive risk with the future of our species" He calls it humanist superintelligence: build it only if it is provably controllable, subordinate, and pointed at human wellbeing. The uncomfortable part: "provably controllable" is a standard nobody in the industry can verify yet.

Karl Mehta

14,879 просмотров • 13 дней назад