Yup, I think there’s a lot of very valuable research / brainstorming / planning that EA (and humanity overall) hasn’t yet done to better map out the space of ways that we could create moral value far greater than anything we’ve seen in history so far.
In EA / rationalist circles, discussion of “flourishing futures” often focuses on “transhumanist goods”, like:
extreme human longevity / immortality through super-advanced medical science
intelligence amplification
reducing suffering, and perhaps creating new kinds of extremely powerful positive emotions
you also hear a bit about AI welfare, and the idea that maybe we could create AI minds experiencing new forms of valuable subjective experience
But there are perhaps a lot of other directions worth exploring:
various sorts of spiritual attainment that might be possible with advanced technology / digital minds / etc
things that are totally out of left field to us because we can’t yet imagine them, like how the value of consciousness would be a bolt from the blue to a planet that only had plants & lower life forms.
instantiating various values, like beauty or cultural sophistication or ecological richness, to extreme degrees
On a more practical note, the Forum does support markdown headings if you enable the “activate markdown editor” feature on the EA Forum profile settings! This would turn all your ##headings into a much more beautiful, readable structure (and it would create a little outline in a sidebar, for people to jump around to different sections).
Yup, I think there’s a lot of very valuable research / brainstorming / planning that EA (and humanity overall) hasn’t yet done to better map out the space of ways that we could create moral value far greater than anything we’ve seen in history so far.
In EA / rationalist circles, discussion of “flourishing futures” often focuses on “transhumanist goods”, like:
extreme human longevity / immortality through super-advanced medical science
intelligence amplification
reducing suffering, and perhaps creating new kinds of extremely powerful positive emotions
you also hear a bit about AI welfare, and the idea that maybe we could create AI minds experiencing new forms of valuable subjective experience
But there are perhaps a lot of other directions worth exploring:
various sorts of spiritual attainment that might be possible with advanced technology / digital minds / etc
things that are totally out of left field to us because we can’t yet imagine them, like how the value of consciousness would be a bolt from the blue to a planet that only had plants & lower life forms.
instantiating various values, like beauty or cultural sophistication or ecological richness, to extreme degrees
On a more practical note, the Forum does support markdown headings if you enable the “activate markdown editor” feature on the EA Forum profile settings! This would turn all your ##headings into a much more beautiful, readable structure (and it would create a little outline in a sidebar, for people to jump around to different sections).
Thanks, I was wondering why my markdown want working.