Just to be clear: we mostly don’t argue for the desirability or likelihood of lock-in, just its technological feasibility. Am I correctly interpreting your comment to be cautionary, questioning the desirability of lock-in given the apparent difficulty of doing so while maintaining sufficiently flexibility to handle unforeseen philosophical arguments?
To take a step back, I’m not sure it makes sense to talk about “technological feasibility” of lock-in, as opposed to say its expected cost, because suppose the only feasible method of lock-in causes you to lose 99% of the potential value of the universe, that seems like a more important piece of information than “it’s technologically feasible”.
(On second thought, maybe I’m being unfair in this criticism, because feasibility of lock-in is already pretty clear to me, at least if one is willing to assume extreme costs, so I’m more interested in the question of “but can it be done at more acceptable costs”, but perhaps this isn’t true of others.)
That aside, I guess I’m trying to understand what you’re envisioning when you say “An extreme version of this would be to prevent all reasoning that could plausibly lead to value-drift, halting progress in philosophy.” What kind of mechanism do you have in mind for doing this? Also, you distinguish between stopping philosophical progress vs stopping technological progress, but since technological progress often requires solving philosophical questions (e.g., related to how to safely use the new technology), do you really see much distinction between the two?
Just to be clear: we mostly don’t argue for the desirability or likelihood of lock-in, just its technological feasibility. Am I correctly interpreting your comment to be cautionary, questioning the desirability of lock-in given the apparent difficulty of doing so while maintaining sufficiently flexibility to handle unforeseen philosophical arguments?
To take a step back, I’m not sure it makes sense to talk about “technological feasibility” of lock-in, as opposed to say its expected cost, because suppose the only feasible method of lock-in causes you to lose 99% of the potential value of the universe, that seems like a more important piece of information than “it’s technologically feasible”.
(On second thought, maybe I’m being unfair in this criticism, because feasibility of lock-in is already pretty clear to me, at least if one is willing to assume extreme costs, so I’m more interested in the question of “but can it be done at more acceptable costs”, but perhaps this isn’t true of others.)
That aside, I guess I’m trying to understand what you’re envisioning when you say “An extreme version of this would be to prevent all reasoning that could plausibly lead to value-drift, halting progress in philosophy.” What kind of mechanism do you have in mind for doing this? Also, you distinguish between stopping philosophical progress vs stopping technological progress, but since technological progress often requires solving philosophical questions (e.g., related to how to safely use the new technology), do you really see much distinction between the two?