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613Long-Term Trajectories of Human CivilizationForesight 21 (1): 53-83. 2019.Purpose This paper aims to formalize long-term trajectories of human civilization as a scientific and ethical field of study. The long-term trajectory of human civilization can be defined as the path that human civilization takes during the entire future time period in which human civilization could continue to exist. Design/methodology/approach This paper focuses on four types of trajectories: status quo trajectories, in which human civilization persists in a state broadly similar to its curren…Read more
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291How to live in a simulationJournal of Evolution and Technology 7 (1). 2001.If you might be living in a simulation then all else equal you should care less about others, live more for today, make your world look more likely to become rich, expect to and try more to participate in pivotal events, be more entertaining and praiseworthy, and keep the famous people around you happier and more interested in you.
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227When Worlds Collide: Quantum Probability from Observer Selection? (review)Foundations of Physics 33 (7): 1129-1150. 2003.In Everett's many worlds interpretation, quantum measurements are considered to be decoherence events. If so, then inexact decoherence may allow large worlds to mangle the memory of observers in small worlds, creating a cutoff in observable world size. Smaller world are mangled and so not observed. If this cutoff is much closer to the median measure size than to the median world size, the distribution of outcomes seen in unmangled worlds follows the Born rule. Thus deviations from exact decohere…Read more
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135Uncommon priors require origin disputesTheory and Decision 61 (4): 319-328. 2006.In standard belief models, priors are always common knowledge. This prevents such models from representing agents’ probabilistic beliefs about the origins of their priors. By embedding standard models in a larger standard model, however, pre-priors can describe such beliefs. When an agent’s prior and pre-prior are mutually consistent, he must believe that his prior would only have been different in situations where relevant event chances were different, but that variations in other agents’ priors …Read more
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115Shall We Vote on Values, But Bet on Beliefs?Journal of Political Philosophy 21 (2): 151-178. 2013.Policy disputes arise at all scales of governance: in clubs, non-profits, firms, nations, and alliances of nations. Both the means and ends of policy are disputed. While many, perhaps most, policy disputes arise from conflicting ends, important disputes also arise from differing beliefs on how to achieve shared ends. In fact, according to many experts in economics and development, governments often choose policies that are “inefficient” in the sense that most everyone could expect to gain from o…Read more
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108For Bayesian Wannabes, Are Disagreements Not About Information?Theory and Decision 54 (2): 105-123. 2003.Consider two agents who want to be Bayesians with a common prior, but who cannot due to computational limitations. If these agents agree that their estimates are consistent with certain easy-to-compute consistency constraints, then they can agree to disagree about any random variable only if they also agree to disagree, to a similar degree and in a stronger sense, about an average error. Yet average error is a state-independent random variable, and one agent's estimate of it is also agreed to be…Read more
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103Consensus By Identifying ExtremistsTheory and Decision 44 (3): 293-301. 1998.Given a finite state space and common priors, common knowledge of the identity of an agent with the minimal (or maximal) expectation of a random variable implies ‘consensus’, i.e., common knowledge of common expectations. This ‘extremist’ statistic induces consensus when repeatedly announced, and yet, with n agents, requires at most log2 n bits to broadcast
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68Why health is not special: Errors in evolved bioethics intuitionsSocial Philosophy and Policy 19 (2): 153-179. 2002.There is a widespread feeling that health is special; the rules that are usually used in other policy areas are not applied in health policy. Health economists, for example, tend to be reluctant to offer economists’ usual prescription of competition and consumer choice, even though they have largely failed to justify this reluctance by showing that health economics involves special features such as public goods, externalities, adverse selection, poor consumer information, or unusually severe con…Read more
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60Enhancing our truth orientationIn Julian Savulescu & Nick Bostrom (eds.), Human Enhancement, Oxford University Press. pp. 357--372. 2009.
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36Are you fascinated by some basic questions about science, technology, and our future? Questions like: Is cryonics technically feasible? When will nanoassemblers be feasible and how quickly will resulting changes come? Does a larger population help or hinder the world environment and economy? Will uploading be possible, and if so when? When can I live in space? Where will I be able to live free from tyranny? When will A.I.s be bucking for my job? Is there intelligent life beyond earth? If you are…Read more
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35We are economists with a long-standing interest in evolutionary psychology, who recently came to appreciate the rich collections of relevant data cultural anthropologists have spent decades collecting on the social environments of a wide range of human societies. While we found some systematic collections of these observations, we could not find a systematic summary of the social environment of the subsample of societies that most resemble the social environment where most human psychology seems…Read more
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30Compared with non-union workers, union workers take more of their compensation in the form of insurance. This may be because unions choose democratically, and democratic choice mitigates adverse selection in group insurance. Relative to individually-purchased insurance, we show that group insurance chosen by an ideal profit-maximizing employer can be worse for every employee, while group insurance chosen democratically can be much better. The reason is that democracy can fail to represent the pre…Read more
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25The Hanson-Hughes debate on “The Crack of a Future Dawn.”Journal of Evolution and Technology 16 (1): 99-126. 2007.
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9Meet the new conflict, same as the old conflictJournal of Consciousness Studies 19 (1-2): 1-2. 2012.Chalmers is right: we should expect our civilization to, within centuries, have vastly increasedmental capacities, surely in total and probably also for individual creatures and devices.We should also expect to see the conflicts he describes between creatures and devices with more versus less capacity. But Chalmers' main prediction follows simply by extrapolating historical trends, and the conflicts he identifies are common between differing generations. There is value in highlighting these issu…Read more
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8The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life When Robots Rule the EarthOxford University Press. 2016.Many thinkers believe that the next transformational change in human organisation will be the onset of human-level artificial intelligence, and that the most likely method of achieving this will come through brain emulations or "ems": the ability to scan human brains and program their connections into ever faster computers. Taking this as his starting point, Hanson describes what a world dominated by these ems will be like.
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7Why Health Is Not Special: Errors In Evolved Bioethics IntuitionsSocial Philosophy and Policy 19 (2): 153-179. 2002.There is a widespread feeling that health is special; the rules that are usually used in other policy areas are not applied in health policy. Health economists, for example, tend to be reluctant to offer economists' usual prescription of competition and consumer choice, even though they have largely failed to justify this reluctance by showing that health economics involves special features such as public goods, externalities, adverse selection, poor consumer information, or unusually severe con…Read more
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5The ability to inject dopant atoms with high spatial resolution, flexibility in dopant species, and high single ion detection fidelity opens opportunities for the study of dopant fluctuation effects and the development of devices in which function is based on the manipulation of quantum states in single atoms, such as proposed quantum computers. The authors describe a single atom injector, in which the imaging and alignment capabilities of a scanning force microscope are integrated with ion beam…Read more
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4A Critical Discussion of Vinge's Singularity ConceptIn Max More & Natasha Vita‐More (eds.), The Transhumanist Reader, Wiley. 2013.Vernor Vinge's “singularity” is a worthy contribution to the long tradition of contemplations about human transcendence. Throughout history, most of these musings have dwelled upon the spiritual – the notion that human beings can achieve a higher state through prayer, moral behavior, or mental discipline.
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3Idea FuturesIn Max More & Natasha Vita‐More (eds.), The Transhumanist Reader, Wiley. 2013.Are you fascinated by some basic questions about science, technology, and our future? Questions like: Is cryonics technically feasible? When will nano‐assemblers be feasible and how quickly will resulting changes come? Does a larger population help or hinder the world environment and economy? Will uploading be possible, and if so when? When can I live in space? Where will I be able to live free from tyranny? When will AIs be bucking for my job? Is there intelligent life beyond earth? If you are …Read more
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2What Will It Be Like To Be an Emulation?In Russell Blackford & Damien Broderick (eds.), Intelligence Unbound, Wiley. 2014.This chapter assesses realistic social implications of emulation (em). It takes the somewhat unusual approach of using basic social theory, in addition to common sense and trend projection, to forecast future societies. Em cities are likely toxic to ordinary humans, who, controlling most of the rest of the Earth, mostly live comfortably on their em‐economy investments. Em's extended lifespans induce greater wealth inequality among ems. Ems focus their identity less on individual personalities an…Read more