Hey there,
Robert here 👾
Here’s your weekly dose of treats 💌
Some things I thought were worth sharing this week!
Follow the white rabbit 🐇
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🎶 Something to listen while reading
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📝 Reading Nick Bostrom’s latest paper:
Sharing The World with Digital Minds
Abstract:
The minds of biological creatures occupy a small corner of a much larger space of possible minds that could be created once we master the technology of artificial intelligence. Yet many of our moral intuitions and practices are based on assumptions about human nature that need not hold for digital minds. This points to the need for moral reflection as we approach the era of advanced machine intelligence. Here we focus on one set of issues, which arise from the prospect of digital “utility monsters”. These may be mass-produced minds with moral statuses and interests similar to those of human beings or other morally considerable animals, so that collectively their moral claims outweigh those of the incumbent populations. Alternatively it may become easy to create individual digital minds with much stronger individual interests and claims to resources than humans. Disrespecting these could produce a moral catastrophe of immense proportions, while a naive way of respecting them could be disastrous for humanity. A sensible approach requires reforms of our moral norms and institutions along with advance planning regarding what kinds of digital minds we bring into existence.
As a reminder, Nick Bostrom is a Swedish-born philosopher and polymath with a background in theoretical physics, computational neuroscience, logic, and artificial intelligence, as well as philosophy. He is a Professor at Oxford University, where he leads the Future of Humanity Institute as its founding director & he is very much well-known for propagating the Simulation Theory, along with mythical figures such as René Descartes, and later by Hans Moravec.
The end of the American internet
For its first two decades, the consumer internet was American - American companies, products, attitudes and laws set the agenda. That’s not so true anymore - there are more smartphones in China than in the USA and Western Europe combined. Software creation and company creation is diffusing, and attitudes are fragmenting.
Short & Neat 🧨
Immersion in fictional worlds allows us to own our dark side
Telephone therapy is convenient and it works. Let’s use it more.
Effective altruism is logical, but too unnatural to catch on
James Magee Has Been Working on His Masterpiece for Decades, but Completion Isn’t the Point
Reasons Revealed for the Brain’s Elastic Sense of Time
The Gamification of Games. When play becomes chiefly about data collection
Amanda Goetz Doesn't Believe in Balance; The VP of Marketing at the Knot Talks About Blending Rather Than Balancing Work and Life
New Raindrop.io 5.0: All-in-one bookmark manager [appy]
👽 My latest YouTube video essay
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Why More Choice Makes You Unhappy
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In case you missed it: Apple Stream
Very cool presentation-wise. Reimagining remote work. Nothing extra-new to the table. The new iPhone looks cool, though. I’ve always been an SE1 fan.
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🧠 Tweets for thought
The fast pace of change in the modern world can encourage us to demand instant results. Companies’ advertising campaigns prey on this desire and offer us shortcuts to success, get-rich-quick schemes and other instant fixes.
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That’s it! 👋
Thanks for reading!
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💌 My Favorite Links: articles I've enjoyed, podcasts, tech, software, ideas, and personal philosophies.
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That said, how’re you and yours doing this week? Any major changes to your status quo, or are things fairly locked-in and predictable at the moment?
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Have a great day ahead!