transhumanists
Article
transhumanists is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between June 15, 2021 and May 15, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “people who do too much LSD become transhumanists”; “the hobbyhorse of a few weird transhumanists in the early 2000s”; “I think some people hear transhumanists talk about an “AI race”“. It most often appears alongside GPT-3, LSD, superintelligent AI.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 5
- Issue count: 5
- First seen: June 15, 2021
- Last seen: May 15, 2024
Appears In
- Carhart-Harris On Serotonin
- Practically-A-Book Review: Yudkowsky Contra Ngo On Agents
- Most Technologies Aren’t Races
- Highlights From The Comments On Social Model Of Disability
- Profile: The Far Out Initiative
Related Pages
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- GPT-3 (2 shared issues)
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- LSD (2 shared issues)
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- superintelligent AI (2 shared issues)
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- 1992 Presidential debate (1 shared issues)
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- 5-HT1A (1 shared issues)
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- 5-HT2A (1 shared issues)
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- @the_megabase (1 shared issues)
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- A Pan-Species Welfare State (1 shared issues)
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- ABA (1 shared issues)
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- active inference (1 shared issues)
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- ACX Grantees (1 shared issues)
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- ACX MEETUP (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
5-HT2A receptors are (to vastly oversimplify) the main target of psychedelics. The more strongly it's stimulated, the more active your inference gets. George argues that this means psychedelics are more likely to get you to try to solve your problems. But is this really true? The average person on shrooms doesn't spend their trip contacting HR and reporting their abusive boss, they spend it staring at a flower marveling at how delicate the petals are or something. What problem is this solving? I think Carhart-Harris, Nutt, and maybe George think that this "active coping" isn't necessarily physical action per se, it's rejiggering your world model on a deeper level so that it's more creative and risky in generating strategies. It's a bias towards thinking of problems as solveable. This could potentially fit with the thing where people who do too much LSD become yogis or transhumanists or whatever; they're biased towards believing *all* problems are solveable, even the tough ones like suffering and mortality.
The story thus far: AI safety, which started as the hobbyhorse of a few weird transhumanists in the early 2000s, has grown into a medium-sized respectable field. OpenAI, the people responsible for GPT-3 and other marvels, have a safety team. So do DeepMind, the people responsible for AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and AlphaWorldConquest (last one as yet unreleased). So do Stanford, Cambridge, UC Berkeley, etc, etc. Thanks to donations from people like Elon Musk and Dustin Moskowitz, everyone involved is contentedly flush with cash. They all report making slow but encouraging progress.
Eliezer Yudkowsky, one of the original weird transhumanists, is having none of this. He says the problem is harder than everyone else thinks. Their clever solutions will fail. He's been flitting around for the past few years, Cassandra-like, insisting that their plans will explode and they are doomed.
I think some people hear transhumanists talk about an “AI race” and mindlessly repeat it, without asking what assumptions it commits them to. Transhumanists talk about winning an AI “race” for two reasons:
Second, because some transhumanists think AI could cause a technological singularity that speedruns the next several millennia worth of advances in a few years. This probably only happens if superintelligent AI can figure out ways to improve its own intelligence in a critical feedback loop. I’m pretty skeptical of these scenarios in the current AI paradigm where compute is often the limiting resource, but other people disagree. In a fast takeoff, it could be that you go to sleep with China six months ahead of the US, and wake up the next morning with China having fusion, nanotech, and starships,.
If all humans were deaf, we would likely consider the inability to hear a simple "part of the human condition", not a problem. (Maybe we'd invent artificial ears; maybe some transhumanists would dream of a future where we would be genetically enhanced to have sound-perceiving senses; but society probably wouldn't prioritize this very urgently.) Some all-deaf communities are already living in this context, where people can go through life without encountering situations where the fact that they can't hear presents itself as particularly frustrating or unfortunate.
Turn-of-the-21st-century Oxford was an exciting place. Derek Parfit was leading a renaissance in utilitarian thought. New technologies like the personal computer, the Internet, and the Human Genome Project were inspiring a new generation of transhumanists. Out of this milieu, philosophers like Nick Bostrom, Will MacAskill, and Toby Ord were laying the groundwork for what would become the rationalist and effective altruist movements. Utilitarians, they argued, were charged with relieving the suffering of the world as quickly and effectively as possible. Technology offered new opportunities to do this at scale. This could be ending poverty and curing diseases (if you were well-grounded in the present moment) or creating a superintelligence to lead us to a post-scarcity future (if you were feeling more ambitious).