Pablo, I submit you haven’t thought carefully enough about the nature of the postbiological future. Once humanity has the capacity to preserve and emulate minds, those minds are as impervious to x-risks as is the entire network of backups. Once minds are stored redundantly and both on and off Earth, x-risks themselves become negligible. There is something deeply accelerative and protective of advanced complexity in our universe that is typically ignored by the x-risk community. It doesn’t serve their fundraising and political purposes to see it, and it is truly weird vs. biology’s dependence on planets, suns, etc.. Yet it is apparently (most likely, the default model) how evolutionary development works, on all Earthlikes in our universe. We just need the courage to see and learn from it.
John Smart
Karma: 5
Sharmake, this is an encouraging comment, thank you. Unfortunately I don’t think the EA leaders share your view. They are fundamentally conservative, not willing to fund things that make them look weird. There’s nothing weird about talking about x-risks. It makes you seem noble and foresighted. But it is definitely weird to talk about living on after biological death. It makes a lot of people with alternative beliefs uncomfortable. Sadly, this means EA ignores that small minority who would today advocate that everyone in a better future society should have the option of brain preservation at the end of their lives, whether or not they choose to exercise that option.
Said in another way, almost all the folks and all the leaders that I’ve met in EA seem to position their views on BP in relation to what the majority of people think of death, rather than considering the future of death in an accelerating and information-protective universe. The world is poorer for it, as 150,000 unique, irreplaceable minds and memory sets continue to die daily. I think it is an easy and evidence-based prediction that an increasing fraction of those minds will eventually demand the option to preserve themselves at biological death. I hope some in this community wake up to this knowledge and become advocates for this cause, rather than choosing the psychologically and politically safer option to continue to ignore it or deny its value.