Robin Hanson

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“We Cannot Possibly Imagine What It Will Be Like”

June 23, 2017 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

IEEE Spectrum has an interesting article in which a raft of scientists and futurists are questioned about the ETA of conscious machines and their potential impact. Notably, nobody says such a development is impossible nor does anyone suggest pursuit of such has a good chance to extinct us.

Robin Hanson, author The Age of Em, sticks to his previous prognostication that our increasingly technological future may bring us an economy that doubles every month, which might seem inviting to a society in stagnation, but a world that could potentially “turn over” so quickly would be a shock to the system to anyone not gradually eased into it.

Marthine Rothblatt, the Sirius founder turned Transhumanist and developer of “consciousness software,” believes robots will largely be “good,” saying that she’s “confident the computers will be overwhelmingly friendly since they will be selected for in a Darwinian environment that consists of humanity. There is no market for [a] bad robot, no more than there is for a bad car or plane. Of course, there is the inevitability of a DIY bad human-level computer, but that gives me even more reason to welcome human-level cyberintelligence, because just like it takes a [thief to catch a thief], it will take a human-friendly smart computer to catch an antihuman smart computer.”

There’s also no market for terrorism or for genocide, but those things happen. We can’t avoid far stronger tools because of the human capacity to cause chaos, but we have to at least consider the possibility that our own doom is embedded in these advances.

Rodney Brooks is perhaps the most sober of all the participants. In Errol Morris’ 1997 documentary, Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, the roboticist famously says that in tomorrow’s world of intelligent machines, humans might not be necessary. Brooks, who has since backed off that statement (“You can’t expect me to stand by something I said during a long day of filming 20 years ago!”), now mocks what he believes to be reckless conjecture about the future.

An excerpt:

Question:

When will we have computers as capable as the brain?

Rodney Brooks:

Rodney Brooks’s revised question: When will we have computers/robots recognizably as intelligent and as conscious as humans?

Not in our lifetimes, not even in Ray Kurzweil’s lifetime, and despite his fervent wishes, just like the rest of us, he will die within just a few decades. It will be well over 100 years before we see this level in our machines. Maybe many hundred years.

Question:

As intelligent and as conscious as dogs?

Rodney Brooks:

Maybe in 50 to 100 years. But they won’t have noses anywhere near as good as the real thing. They will be olfactorily challenged dogs.

Question:

How will brainlike computers change the world?

Rodney Brooks:

Since we won’t have intelligent computers like humans for well over 100 years, we cannot make any sensible projections about how they will change the world, as we don’t understand what the world will be like at all in 100 years. (For example, imagine reading Turing’s paper on computable numbers in 1936 and trying to pro­ject out how computers would change the world in just 70 or 80 years.) So an equivalent well-grounded question would have to be something simpler, like “How will computers/robots continue to change the world?” Answer: Within 20 years most baby boomers are going to have robotic devices in their homes, helping them maintain their independence as they age in place. This will include Ray Kurzweil, who will still not be immortal.

Question:

Do you have any qualms about a future in which computers have human-level (or greater) intelligence?

Rodney Brooks:

No qualms at all, as the world will have evolved so much in the next 100+ years that we cannot possibly imagine what it will be like, so there is no point in qualming. Qualming in the face of zero facts or understanding is a fun parlor game but generally not useful. And yes, this includes Nick Bostrom.•

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“What Happens If Brain Emulations Get Cheap?”

June 16, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Robin Hanson has identified what he believes to be an alternative to the incremental growth of machine superintelligence through AI with the idea of brain emulations or ems, scanned copies of human brains that are downloaded into computers and then in some cases given robot bodies. You would choose the greatest minds and allow machines to improve their knowledge at a head-spinning clip, intelligence exploding at ahead-spinning clip. Armies of ems could take over all the work, the whole economy, industries could rise and fall in days, output would be increased at heretofore unimaginable speed. Humans wouldn’t need to labor anymore and post-scarcity will have arrived. We’ve moved immensely culturally from foragers to Digital Age denizens with no explosion of intelligence, so the changes to life on Earth with one would be seismic. Hanson believes it all could occur within a century.

I’m not a physicist or economist like Hanson, but I believe his timeframe is wildly aggressive. Let me accept his prediction wholly, however, to ask some questions. What if we don’t wisely choose our brains to emulate? As I posted yesterday, Russian scientists carved the late Vladimir Lenin’s brain into more than 30,000 pieces searching for the secret of his intellectual powers. If the technology was available then, they certainly would have chosen the Bolshevik leader to make millions of ems from. Lenin wouldn’t be my first choice to emulate, but he would be a far better choice than, say, Stalin, who would have been the chosen one for the next generation. Hitler’s brain would have been replicated many times over in the mass delusion of Nazi Germany. In North Korea today, the Dear Leader would be the brain to embody inside of robots. 

Even the best among us have terrible ideas we have yet to admit or realize. For example, the American Founding Fathers allowed for slavery and didn’t permit women to vote. Every age has its sins, from colonialism to wealth inequality, and its only with a wide variety of minds do we come to realize our wrongs, and often those who speak first and loudest about injustices (e.g. Abolitionists) are deemed “undesirables” who would never be selected for “mass production” of their minds. Wouldn’t choosing merely the “best and brightest” be a dicey form of eugenics to the nth degree?

Even further, if ems truly become possible at some point, wouldn’t they also be ripe for destabilization, especially in a future that’s become that technologically adept? Wouldn’t a terrorist organizations be able to create a battalion of like-minded beheaders? Isn’t it possible that a lone wolf who wanted to unloose mayhem could hatch a “start-up” in his garage? You can’t refuse to create all new tools because they can become weapons, but wouldn’t ems be different in a dangerous way on a whole other level?

Excerpts follow from two pieces about Hanson’s new book, The Age of Em: 1) Steven Poole’s Guardian review, and 2) A Q&A with the author by James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute.

Poole’s opening:

In the future, or so some people think, it will become possible to upload your consciousness into a computer. Software emulations of human brains – ems, for short – will then take over the economy and world. This sort of thing happens quite a lot in science fiction, but The Age of Em is a fanatically serious attempt, by an economist and scholar at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, to use economic and social science to forecast in fine detail how this world (if it is even possible) will actually work. The future it portrays is very strange and, in the end, quite horrific for everyone involved.

It is an eschatological vision worthy of Hieronymus Bosch. Trillions of ems live in tall, liquid-cooled skyscrapers in extremely hot cities. Most of them are “very able focused workaholics”, who “respect and trust each other more” than we do.

Some ems will have robotic bodies; others will just live in virtual reality all the time. (Ems who are office workers won’t need bodies.) Some ems will run a thousand times faster than human brains, so having a subjective experience of much-expanded time. (Their bodies will need to be very small: “At this scale, an industry-era city population of a million kilo-ems could fit in an ordinary bottle.”) Others might run very slowly, to save money. Ems will congregate in related “clans” and use “decision markets” to make important commercial and political choices. Ems will work nearly all the time but choose to remember an existence that is nearly all leisure. Some ems will be “open-source lovers”; all will be markedly more religious and also swear more often. The em economy will double every month, and competition will drive nearly all wages down to subsistence levels. Surveillance will be total. Fun, huh?•

From the American Enterprise Institute:

Question:

The book is not about us; it’s about the ems, about their life, their culture. You make a lot of speculations; you draw a lot of conclusion about what the life of these synthetic emulations are like. So how can you do that?

Robin Hanson:

I am taking our standard, accepted theories in a wide variety of areas and apply them to this key scenario: what happens if brain emulations get cheap?

Honestly, most people like the future as a place to set fantasy stories. In the past, we used to have far away places as our favorite place to set strange stories where strange things could happen but then we learned about all the far away places. So then we switched to the future, it was the place we could set strange stories. And because you could say, well no one can show my strange story is wrong about the future because no one can know about the future, so it’s become an axiom to people that the future must be unknowable, therefore we can set strange stories there. But, if we know about the world today and we use theories about the world today to understand the past, those same basic theories can also apply to the future, so my exercise is theory.

I am taking our standard, accepted theories in a wide variety of areas and apply them to this key scenario: what happens if brain emulations get cheap? And if we have reliable theory to help us understand the world around us and to help us understand the past, those same theories should be able to describe the future

Question:

Give a couple examples and how that gives you some insights into what this new world of synthetic emulations would be like for them.

Robin Hanson:

First of all, I’m just using supply and demand to describe how wages change. I use the same supply and demand theory of wages that we use to understand why wages are higher here than in Bangladesh or why wages were low a thousand years ago. That same theory can say why wages would be high in the future.

I also use simple physics: for examples these emulations can run at different speeds, I can use computer science to say if they run twice as fast they should cost twice as much, because they are very parallel programs. I can also use physics to say that if they have bodies to match the speeds of their minds, if their mind runs twice as fast, their body needs to be twice as short in order to feel natural to that mind. So very fast emulations, very small bodies. I can use our standard theory of cities and urban concentrations to think about whether ems concentrate in a few big cities or lots of smaller cities.

Today, our main limitation of having a lot of us in one big city is traffic congestion. The bigger the city the more time people spend in traffic, and that limits our cities. Emulations can interact with each other across a city using virtual reality, which is much cheaper so they face much less traffic congestion, so I use that to predict that they live in a small number of very big, dense cities.

Question:

And we’re not talking about an alien intelligence or a super intelligence, but a synthetic duplication of a regular human brain or human mind, therefore it would work in some sort of predictable manner.

Robin Hanson:

Exactly, so we know a lot of things about humans, when they work they need breaks and they need weekends and they need vacations, so we can say these emulations will work hard because it is a competitive world, but they still will take breaks, and they’ll take the evening off to sleep.

These are all things we know about human productivity; these emulations are still very humans psychologically.

Question:

I was reading a review of the book and someone said, you could have a whole factory of “Elon Musk” workers, all very smart, and those ems would go out after work to a bar or a club and they would see an em of Taylor Swift. So Elon Musk #1,000,400,000 or something could be listening to Taylor Swift # 2,000,100,000. So it’s a duplication of human society but with some rules changed. 

Robin Hanson:

Right, so it’s in the uncanny valley where it’s strange enough to be different but familiar enough to be strange. If it were completely alien, it would just but weird and incomprehensible, but it’s not.

Question:

Is this something you think the science supports and that could happen over the next 100 years or so?

Robin Hanson:

Right.•

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“A Few Places Will Let Ems Go Wild”

June 2, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Currently marching to the end of everything else I’m reading so I can start Robin Hanson’s The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth, which sounds like remarkable science fiction, though the author insists it’s science–or will be soon enough. 

“Em” refers to brain emulations, computer reproductions of top-notch human brains which will provide gray matter for robots. These ems will then grow that intelligence far beyond our abilities. It’s will be something like Moore’s Law for intellect. We can use this method to produce inexpensive armies of ems to handle all the work, with Hanson predicting the world economy could continually increase at a heretofore impossible pace. Or maybe the ems will grow resentful and harm us. Perhaps a little of both.

Here’s a fuller description from the book’s website:

Many think the first truly smart robots will be brain emulations or ems. Scan a human brain, then run a model with the same connections on a fast computer, and you have a robot brain, but recognizably human.

Train an em to do some job and copy it a million times: an army of workers is at your disposal. When they can be made cheaply, within perhaps a century, ems will displace humans in most jobs. In this new economic era, the world economy may double in size every few weeks.•

The writer has a timeframe of roughly a century for when his outré vision can be realized. You know me: I always bet the way, way over when it comes to such dizzying visions. 

Hanson just conducted an AMA at Reddit on this topic and others. A few exchanges follow.

Question:

I understand how brain emulations could make things cheaper by flooding labour markets, but they will still only be as smart as the brains they were emulated from. Won’t scientific progress still be constrained by the upper limits of human intellect? Is there any way for brain emulations to get smarter than humans? I am aware that they could think faster than humans because they run on computers.

In your talks about brain emulations, you say that biological humans will have to buy assets to make money. Since the economy will grow very quickly with lots of emulated workers, it won’t take very many assets to generate a decent income. You also say that brain emulations will not earn very much money because there will be so many of them that wages will fall to the cost of utilities. Why don’t brain emulations buy assets like humans are supposed to in this future economy, and where are humans supposed to get the wealth to buy assets from since they won’t be able to work?

Robin Hanson:

Eventually, ems will find ways to make their brains smarter. But I’m not sure that will make much difference.

Humans need to buy assets before they lose their ability to earn wages. After is too late.

Question:

If and when Em like entities come into existence do you think society will embrace them be against them and actively try to stop them or will it be a case of “ready or not here I come” and they will force themselves upon us as their emergence will be like evolution?

Robin Hanson:

Most places will probably try to go slow, with commissions, reports, small trials, etc. A few places will let ems go wild, perhaps just due to neglect. Those few places can quickly grow to dominate the world economy. This may induce conflict, but eventually places allowing ems will win. Ems may resent and even retaliate against the places that tried to prevent them or hold them back.

Question:

So in this new economy humans wont actually be getting anymore “stuff” as all the growth will come from demand created by these Em?

Robin Hanson:

Humans will own a big % of the em economy, and use it to buy lots of “stuff” from ems.

Question:

Will we live in a utopia in 100 years?

Robin Hanson:

I don’t think humans are capable of seeing any world, no matter how nice, as “utopia”. We raise our standards and compete for relative status.•

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“You Scan Their Brains And You Get Robots That To All Intents And Purposes Are Indivisible From The Humans”

May 24, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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My near-term concerns about Labor have nothing to do with jobs being handed over to robots powered by brain scans of the greatest geniuses among our species. It may seem thin gruel by comparison, but Weak AI (driverless cars, delivery drones, robot bellhops, etc.) can do plenty to destabilize society. Not only are jobs traditionally filled by humans to disappear but entire industries will rise and fall with dizzying speed. In the aggregate, this transition could be a good thing, with the resulting challenge being we need to find an answer not for scarcity but distribution. 

The futuristic scenario I presented at the opening comes from the pages of The Age of Ems: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth, a speculative book by Robin Hanson, who often seems to be mid-chug on a sci-fi bender at Chalmun’s Cantina. The author feels AI is evolving too slowly in its march toward intelligent machines but his scanning scheme is close to reality. Whatever scenario is realized to bring about superintelligence, however, Hanson believes the sea change is coming very soon and everyone will be caught in its waves. In the very long run, anything is possible, but I’m not too anxious over his theory, though I plan on reading the title.

Pivoting off Hanson’s new volume, Zoe Williams has written a thoughtful Guardian piece about fashioning a stable and fair society if work is offloaded to Ems, AIs or WTFs. An excerpt:

Robin Hanson thinks the robot takeover, when it comes, will be in the form of emulations. In his new book, The Age of Em, the economist explains: you take the best and brightest 200 human beings on the planet, you scan their brains and you get robots that to all intents and purposes are indivisible from the humans on which they are based, except a thousand times faster and better.

For some reason, conversationally, Hanson repeatedly calls these 200 human prototypes “the billionaires”, even though having a billion in any currency would be strong evidence against your being the brightest, since you have no sense of how much is enough. But that’s just a natural difference of opinion between an economist and a mediocre person who is now afraid of the future.

These Ems, being superior at everything and having no material needs that couldn’t be satisfied virtually, will undercut humans in the labour market, and render us totally unnecessary. We will all effectively be retired. Whether or not we are put out to a pleasant pasture or brutally exterminated will depend upon how we behave towards the Ems at their incipience.

When Hanson presents his forecast in public, one question always comes up: what’s to stop the Ems killing us off? “Well, why don’t we exterminate retirees at the moment?” he asks, rhetorically, before answering: some combination of gratitude, empathy and affection between individuals, which the Ems, being modelled on us precisely, will share (unless we use real billionaires for the model).•

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“Are We Nearing A Dramatic Moment In Economic History?”

November 1, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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In the big picture, I’m with the FT‘s Tim Harford on the issue of “economic singularity,” meaning that while I believe things may change more quickly going forward, I don’t believe scarcity will be solved immediately or soon thereafter. Not today and not tomorrow, unless we’re defining that latter term very broadly. 3D printers will be a tremendous boon in terms of material goods (though they will also bring new dangers), but the world isn’t on the verge of unbridled material wealth. That just doesn’t happen overnight.

In his latest column, Harford is skeptical that the moment of unthinkably great production has (almost) arrived, as prophesied by the messiahs of machine utopia: Robin Hanson, whom I mostly know from a rather kooky, sci-fi Ted Talk; and Ray Kurzweil, a brilliant inventor who has reinvented himself as a sage of increasingly outré near-term predictions.

Harford’s opening:

Are we nearing a dramatic moment in economic history? Before humans developed agriculture, the world population — and thus the world economy — doubled in size roughly every 250,000 years. After acquiring the power of agriculture, the world economy doubled in size roughly every 900 years. After the industrial revolution, growth accelerated again, and since the second world war the world economy has been doubling in size roughly every 15 years. These numbers have been collated by Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University in Virginia; they are based on educated guesses by various economic historians.

If another step change of a similar scale were to happen, the world economy would double in size between now and Christmas. That is hard to imagine but, before the industrial revolution happened, it too would have been hard to imagine. And a small band of believers, not short on imagination, look forward to an economic “singularity”. Hanson is one of them, and the computer scientist Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity Is Near, is perhaps the most famous.

The singularity would be a point at which, rather than humans developing new technologies, the new technologies developed themselves. They would do so at a rate far beyond our comprehension. After the singularity, our civilisation would be in the hands of cyborgs, or brains uploaded into the cloud, or genetically enhanced superbeings, or something else able to make itself smarter at a tremendous rate. The future economy might consist of rapid interactions between artificial intelligences. The idea that it might double in size every few weeks no longer seems quite so unimaginable.

But it is one thing to imagine such a future. It is another thing to have confidence that it is approaching.•

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“We Remain A Very Long Way From Being Able To Automate All Jobs”

November 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

While I don’t believe technological unemployment is coming for all jobs in the near future, I certainly think the transition could increasingly gain steam (or electricity or what have you). Economist Robin Hansen doesn’t agree, believing there will be merely a gradual replacement of human labor by machinery, no different now in the AI era than it’s been for centuries. From “This Time Isn’t Different” at Overcoming Bias:

“In each boom many loudly declare high expectations and concern regarding rapid near-term progress in automation. ‘The machines are finally going to soon put everyone out of work!’ Which of course they don’t. We’ve instead seen a pretty slow & steady rate of humans displaced by machines on jobs.

Today we are in another such boom. For example, David Brooks recently parroted Kevin Kelley saying this time is different because now we have cheaper hardware, better algorithms, and more data. But those facts were also true in most of the previous booms; nothing has fundamentally changed! In truth, we remain a very long way from being able to automate all jobs, and we should expect the slow steady rate of job displacement to long continue.

One way to understand this is in terms of the distribution over human jobs of how good machines need to be to displace humans. If this parameter is distributed somewhat evenly over many orders of magnitude, then continued steady exponential progress in machine abilities should continue to translate into only slow incremental displacement of human jobs. Yes machines are vastly better than they were before, but they must get far more vastly better to displace most human workers.”

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“Before The Late 18th Century There Were No Real Nation States”

October 2, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the Overcoming Bias post in which economist Robin Hansen comments on Debora MacKenzie’s New Scientist article “The End of Nations,” a piece which wonders about, among other things, whether states in the modern sense predated the Industrial Revolution:

“An interesting claim: the nation-state didn’t exist before, and was caused by, the industrial revolution. Oh there were empires before, but most people didn’t identify much with empires, or see empires as much influencing their lives. In contrast people identify with nation-states, which they see as greatly influencing their lives. More:

Before the late 18th century there were no real nation states. … If you travelled across Europe, no one asked for your passport at borders; neither passports nor borders as we know them existed. People had ethnic and cultural identities, but these didn’t really define the political entity they lived in. …

Agrarian societies required little actual governing. Nine people in 10 were peasants who had to farm or starve, so were largely self-organising. Government intervened to take its cut, enforce basic criminal law and keep the peace within its undisputed territories. Otherwise its main role was to fight to keep those territories, or acquire more. … Many eastern European immigrants arriving in the US in the 19th century could say what village they came from, but not what country: it didn’t matter to them. … Ancient empires are coloured on modern maps as if they had firm borders, but they didn’t. Moreover, people and territories often came under different jurisdictions for different purposes.

Such loose control, says Bar-Yam, meant pre-modern political units were only capable of scaling up a few simple actions such as growing food, fighting battles, collecting tribute and keeping order. …

The industrial revolution … demanded a different kind of government. … ‘In 1800 almost nobody in France thought of themselves as French. By 1900 they all did.’ … Unlike farming, industry needs steel, coal and other resources which are not uniformly distributed, so many micro-states were no longer viable. Meanwhile, empires became unwieldy as they industrialised and needed more actual governing. So in 19th-century Europe, micro-states fused and empires split.

These new nation states were justified not merely as economically efficient, but as the fulfilment of their inhabitants’ national destiny. A succession of historians has nonetheless concluded that it was the states that defined their respective nations, and not the other way around.”

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“Their Preferred Solution: A Complete Totalitarian Takeover Of The World, And Maybe The Universe, By A New Super-Intelligent Computer”

August 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Reddit pointed me to a post at economist Robin Hansen’s blog, in which he engages in some extreme speculation. Hansen looks at how the trends of longer lifespans and accelerated social change may lead to a multi-generational disconnect, which has encouraged some futurists to suggest governance by totalitarian computer, or Fascism by algorithm. They think it inevitable anyway, so they want to try to commandeer this brave new world to some extent. I don’t think we get that option should the computer apocalypse occur. An excerpt:

“In history we have seen change not only in technology and environments, but also in habits, cultures, attitudes, and preferences. New generations often act not just like the same people thrust into new situations, but like new kinds of people with new attitudes and preferences. This has often intensified intergenerational conflicts; generations have argued not only about who should consume and control what, but also about which generational values should dominate.

So far, this sort of intergenerational value conflict has been limited due to the relatively mild value changes that have so far appeared within individual lifetimes. But at least two robust trends suggest the future will have more value change, and thus more conflict:

  1. Longer lifespans – Holding other things constant, the longer people live the more generations will overlap at any one time, and the more different will be their values.
  2. Faster change – Holding other things constant, a faster rate of economic and social change will likely induce values to change faster as people adapt to these social changes.
  3. Value plasticity – It may become easier for our descendants to change their values, all else equal. This might be via stronger ads and schools, or direct brain rewiring. (This trend seems less robust.)

These trends robustly suggest that toward the end of their lives future folk will more often look with disapproval at the attitudes and behaviors of younger generations, even as these older generations have a smaller proportional influence on the world. There will be more ‘Get off my lawn! Damn kids got no respect.’

The futurists who most worry about this problem tend to assume a worst possible case. (Supporting quotes below.) That is, without a regulatory solution we face the prospect of quickly sharing the world with daemon spawn of titanic power who share almost none of our values. Not only might they not like our kind of music, they might not like music. They might not even be conscious. One standard example is that they might want only to fill the universe with paperclips, and rip us apart to make more paperclip materials. Futurists’ key argument: the space of possible values is vast, with most points far from us.

This increased intergenerational conflict is the new problem that tempts some futurists today to consider a new regulatory solution. And their preferred solution: a complete totalitarian takeover of the world, and maybe the universe, by a new super-intelligent computer.

You heard that right.”

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“We Mostly Don’t Consciously And Deliberately Choose To Change Civilization According To Our Preferences”

April 15, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From “Civilization Vs. Human Desire,” a post at the Overcoming Bias blog, Robin Hanson explains why our wants drive the future better than planning ever could:

“So, if we could, we’d pick futures that transfer to us, honor us, preserve our ways, and act warm and moral by our standards. But we don’t get what we’d want. That is, we mostly don’t consciously and deliberately choose to change civilization according to our preferences. Instead, changes are mostly side effects of our each trying to get what we want now. Civilizations change as cultures and technologies are selected for being more militarily, rhetorically, economically, etc. powerful, and for giving people what they now want. This is mostly out of anyone’s control, and yes it could end very badly.

And yet, it is our unique willingness and ability to let our civilization change and be selected by forces out of our control, and then to tell us that we like it, that has let our species dominate the Earth, and gives us a good chance to dominate the galaxy and more. While our descendants may be somewhat less happy than us, or than our distant ancestors, there may be trillions of trillions or more of them. I more fear a serious attempt by overall humanity to coordinate to dictate its future, than I fear this out of control process.”

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“People Hardly Care At All About Future Poverty, Freedom, Suicide, Terrorism, Crime, Poverty, Homelessness, Disease, Skills, Laziness, Or Sci/Tech Progress”

April 2, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Speaking of future matters, Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias examines a survey that tried to gauge what aspects of tomorrow people of today care about. An excerpt:

“In fact, most people can hardly be bothered to care about the distant future world as a whole, and to the extent they do care, a recent study suggests that the main thing they care about from the above list is how warm and moral future folks will be. That is, people hardly care at all about future poverty, freedom, suicide, terrorism, crime, poverty, homelessness, disease, skills, laziness, or sci/tech progress. They care a bit more about self-enhancement (e.g., success, pleasure, wealth). But mostly they care about benevolence (warmth & morality, e.g., honesty, sincerity, caring, and friendliness).”

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“Today, Hospitals Perform Autopsies On Only About 5 Percent Of Patients Who Die, Down From Roughly 50 Percent In The 1960s”

May 19, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Excellent new post by Robin Hanson on the Overcoming Bias site explaining why autopsies are conducted so rarely as opposed to a few decades ago. Problems can’t be fixed if they’re disappeared, and our squeamishness on the topic probably allows hospitals to get away with the practice. An excerpt:

“What if the airline industry lobbied to end the practice of routinely investigating the cause of each airline crash? After all, if there is no investigation, it will be hard to show an airline was at fault. You might imagine there’d be a public outcry. But in 1970 the US medical profession did essentially the same thing, and few complained:

Today, hospitals perform autopsies on only about 5 percent of patients who die, down from roughly 50 percent in the 1960s. … Autopsies play a critical role in helping to advance understanding of the progress of a disease and the effectiveness of various treatments. At the same time, they may identify medical conditions that clinicians and high-tech imaging miss or misdiagnose. …

In 1998 the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that autopsy results showed that clinicians misdiagnosed the cause of death up to 40 percent of the time. … Until 1970, hospitals had to autopsy at least 20 percent of their patients in order to remain accredited. Once that requirement was dropped, autopsy rates began to fall, due to lack of direct funding, fear of litigation and increasing reliance on technology as a diagnostic tool, among other reasons. … Today, about 40 percent of hospitals don’t perform autopsies at all.” (Thanks Marginal Revolution.)

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