This partially falls under cognitive enhancement, but what about other forms of consciousness research besides increasing intelligence, such as what QRI is doing? Hedonic set-point enhancement, i.e. making the brain more suffering-resistant and research into creating David Pearce’s idea of “biohappiness”, is arguably just as important as intelligence enhancement. Having a better understanding of valence could also potentially make future AIs safer. Magnus Vinding also wrote this post on personality traits that may be desirable from an effective altruist perspective, so research into cognitive enhancement could also include figuring out how to increase these traits in the population.
Thanks for raising this point. I agree that such category could include enhancements not strictly limited to “being smarter”. I think this is a legitimate cause area, but I’m not sure if I would include Magnus’s excellent post. I just don’t feel he is proposing this as a cause area. . . Anyway, the real reason I didn’t include it was far more trivial: It was published in April and this update is supposed to cover up to March. I’m thinking about ways of extending the limit and keeping this up to date on a regular basis.
Added. Thanks!
This partially falls under cognitive enhancement, but what about other forms of consciousness research besides increasing intelligence, such as what QRI is doing? Hedonic set-point enhancement, i.e. making the brain more suffering-resistant and research into creating David Pearce’s idea of “biohappiness”, is arguably just as important as intelligence enhancement. Having a better understanding of valence could also potentially make future AIs safer. Magnus Vinding also wrote this post on personality traits that may be desirable from an effective altruist perspective, so research into cognitive enhancement could also include figuring out how to increase these traits in the population.
Thanks for raising this point. I agree that such category could include enhancements not strictly limited to “being smarter”. I think this is a legitimate cause area, but I’m not sure if I would include Magnus’s excellent post. I just don’t feel he is proposing this as a cause area. . . Anyway, the real reason I didn’t include it was far more trivial: It was published in April and this update is supposed to cover up to March. I’m thinking about ways of extending the limit and keeping this up to date on a regular basis.