Monthly Archives: February 2015

Alternative Versions of You

CrossroadIn the future we will be able to interact with virtual versions of celebrities, historical figures, and fictional characters. Of course, these virtual people will be sophisticated software programs designed to approximate what their characters are / were / would be like. A useful variation might be to have a chat with virtual alternate versions of yourself.

What if I hadn’t taken that job? What if we had gotten married? What if I had majored in business?

Sit down and talk it over with a virtual version of you who took the road not taken. The projected alternative won’t be in any sense “accurate,” of course, but any reasonable extrapolation on what might have happened would have something to teach you. You might be surprised what you learn.

Eat All You Want and Never Gain a Pound

hamburger with fries and onion ringsOne of the most important applications of full-immersion virtual reality will be virtual eating. Like sex, eating is a pleasurable activity that can be disentangled from its risks and downsides in a virtual environment.

If people could virtually eat any and everything they want, any time, and the physical experience was identical to the real experience of eating — including feelings of fullness and satiety — it would make it much easier for people to eat healthily and moderately when really eating.

But the experience will have to be convincing. The technology to allow for such an experience is still some ways off. Currently the cutting edge of virtual reality has to do with creating an immersive visual and aural experience. That’s great, but it is no substitute for eating…

Existing VR interfaces stimulating the sense of touch are still fairly crude. And if there is any progress being made on VR taste and smell experiences, I haven’t heard about it. Eating will have to provide a highly refined synthesis of all three senses — plus vision and hearing for good measure. Such an interface is more likely to feed directly into the brain than into our various sensory organs.

 

The possibility of unlimited eating may prove to be one of the prime motivators for developing such technology, which may (paradoxically) lead to a big reduction in overeating. In fact, full-immersion virtual eating may lead to the end of overeating altogether.

Wealth Robots

Online Banking SystemsHumans and their machines are doing a fantastic job of making humanity as a whole wealthier through independent initiatives. But what if we deployed, within certain parameters (e.g., concern for the environment), machines focused on a single task: increasing the material well-being of all human beings?

Arguably, the arms race between intelligent trading systems is working on a goal similar to this, although those bots are concerned only with enriching their makers — not everybody.

 

Or go back a step: what if we deployed machines working on creating recursively smarter machines focused on the task of making us all wealthier? Machines can only tell us what they think we should do. They can’t force us. But then, machines who can make us rich could make a pretty good case that they should be in charge.

Virtual Friends for Hire

add as friendOne of the ironies of a more highly connected world is how isolated and lonely some people feel. There are online services whereby you can rent a “friend” for some task or occasion. (Say you have an extra ticket to the game, but no one to go with.) But there is no continuity there.

There are also sites that provide virtual girlfriends. One variety a downloadable AI software who provides some level of girlfriend-like interaction. The other variety relies on real women, but seems to be largely about establishing a paper trail to prove that you actually have a girlfriend.

Why not virtual online friends for the truly lonely? The page for the AI girlfriend linked above claims to be providing that, but I don’t think anyone would much go for it absent the implied sexual component.  Just somebody to talk to and spend some time with. Today they would be pretty crude, but they will only get better. They could make life easier and more enjoyable for a lot of lonely people.

And developing programs just to be friends with people seems like a good step to take towards friendly AI, doesn’t it?

Let’s Enable Failure

Confidence concept.While overconfidence can be an extremely dangerous thing, the lack of confidence is one of the biggest inhibitors of progress that we face. People who try something and fail have done something extraordinary. Most people don’t try much of anything — out of fear of failure.

Tremendous human potential is held back by a lack of confidence. We need a brain hack to make people more confident, to give them the unshakable belief that they can access their own untapped potential. People who overcome their fear of failure can do extraordinary things. If we unleash those possibilities, we will see a lot more failure as well as some amazing successes.

Or do we first need a brain hack to help people behave rationally? There might be some tension there. We don’t want super-confident people trying every stupid, dangerous idea that pops into their heads.

But there is a lot of good stuff that is not being attempted for lack of confidence. That’s a loss we can’t afford.

Post-Scarcity Roadmap

city map with Pin Pointers 3d rendering imageThere is good reason to believe that we are heading towards post-scarcity, a new economy in which, basically, anybody can have anything they want. We’ll all be rich:

Post-scarcity is a theoretical alternative form of economics or social engineering in which goods, services and information are universally accessible.[1] This would require a sophisticated system of resource recycling, in conjunction with technologically advanced automated systems capable of converting raw materials into finished goods.

Here’s the problem. Although we can describe what the enabling technologies for post-scarcity will be (nanotech, biotech, artificial intelligence) and while it is fairly easy to provide a sketch of what a post-scarcity world will look like, the question of how, exactly, we get there from here leads to a lot of hemming and hawing.

We need a roadmap that starts with the technology and economy we have now and that leads us, step-by-step, into post-scarcity. The roadmap needs to include thoughts on how we avoid various pitfalls (that is, scarcity scenarios) that a post-scarcity society might fall into.