Dr. Émile P. Torres Profile picture
Oct 30, 2022 7 tweets 3 min read Read on X
Here's Robin Hanson, a colleague of the longtermist William MacAskill at the Future of Humanity Institute, imagining what a world full of simulated people (or "ems" for "brain emulations") would be like. The word "elite ethnicities" is striking: Today, Jews comprise a disproportionate fraction of extreme
Citing Nick Bostrom, the Father of Longtermism, Hanson adds that biotech may enable us to create super-smart designer babies, who would be good candidates to have their brains scanned and uploaded to computers (to live in a virtual reality world full of ems). It is possible that sometime in the next half-century or so
Indeed, Hanson claims that ems would be highly intelligent, reflecting the entrepreneurial spirit, freedom, etc. of what he describes as the "smarter nations" (you know which ones he's talking about). In our world, achievement rises with intelligence (Kell et a
Many "female" ems might be lesbians, Hanson argues, but "disproportionally few male ems may be gay." You really can't make this stuff up: In our world, gay men earn less than comparable straight men
I could go on, but that's plenty enough for today. These excerpts are from Robin Hanson's "The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth," published by Oxford University Press (@OUPAcademic). The point of the book is to try to picture what a world full of
uploaded minds would look like. It explores, in other words, the "world of digital people" possibility at the top of this image from Holden Karnofsky.

Note that MacAskill says in his book "What We Owe the Future" that Karnofsky's "influence on me is so thoroughgoing that it Karnofsky image indicating that a world of digital people co
permeates every chapter." These people are serious about such a future, and indeed many are eager to bring it about. #longtermism

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More from @xriskology

Apr 5
I've now watched most of this. One thing that's striking is the shear number of assumptions that the authors make--assumptions about extremely complex issues. They also use phrases like "I feel that X" to express some of their conclusions. Reminds me of "The Age of Em," which
an influential AI safety researcher once described to me as having the highest bullshit-to-word ratio of any book he's ever read. In many ways, this report (discussed in the podcast) is worse than theology, although it manages to give one the prima facie impression of rigor.
Like, WHAT IS THIS? How is this serious scholarship? Very bizarre, based on nothing but wild speculation--though I have to admit it's way more grounded than Yudkowsky's claims about the future. Here's the other scenario that the authors discuss (next tweet): Image
Read 4 tweets
Feb 7
This memorandum is GREAT. It is very, very important--so I highly recommend it. However, the analysis is problematic--NOT because it's incorrect but because it's incomplete. Neoreaction could be seen as a roadmap for how to get to a certain destination. But what is that (short🧵)
destination? The answer comes from the TESCREAL worldview, which Dave Troy has written about before (I recommend his article!). The end-goal is a techno-utopian civilization of posthumans spread throughout our entire lightcone. No, I am not kidding--I know this because I used to
be a TESCREAList! This is what Musk wants. It's what Marc Andreessen and Thiel and all the others are after. It's why Musk keeps claiming that we've secured the "future of civilization" by electing Trump president. If you want the full picture, read this:

firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/…Image
Read 7 tweets
Oct 24, 2024
I sent a paper of mine to an Oxford philosophy prof earlier this year, and he *loved it*. Told me I should submit it without edits, and that he'd be citing it in future papers of his. So, I submitted to an ethics journal -- desk rejection. I submitted it to another journal, and
this time it got reviewed: one reviewer liked it, but opted to reject(??), while the other reviewer said, basically, that the paper is complete trash. Since then, I've sent it out to 5 other journals -- all desk rejects. I'm about ready to post it on SSRN so that this Oxford prof
can cite it.

This gets at three overlapping criticisms I have of philosophy journals: (1) they are highly conservative. If you're writing about a genuinely new topic (e.g., the ethics of human extinction -- there's no real tradition or literature on the topic; I'm trying to
Read 10 tweets
Apr 6, 2024
What Musk and Beff Jezos aren't saying is that Silicon Valley is OVERRUN by human-extinctionist ideologies! The dominant visions of our future among the tech elite, espoused by both Musk and Beff, ARE EXTINCTIONIST. A 🧵 on my newest article for @Truthdig: truthdig.com/articles/team-…
Too much of the environmentalist movement has morphed into a human extinctionist movement 5:37 PM · Apr 5, 2024 · 38.7M  Views Replying to @elonmusk  No file chosen Beff Jezos — e/acc ⏩  @BasedBeffJezos · 21h Many such movements... initially noble goal, progressively co-opted by the extinctionist mind virus
This is absolutely crucial for journalists, policymakers, academics, and the general public to understand. Many people in the tech world, especially those working on "AGI," are motivated by a futurological vision in which our species--humanity--has no place. We will either be
marginalized to the periphery by our posthuman AI progeny or eliminated entirely. These people are not pro-humanity! Consider Larry Page, the cofounder of Google, which owns DeepMind: one of the companies explicitly trying to build superintelligent machines: Page has argued that “digital life is the natural and desirable next step in … cosmic evolution and that if we let digital minds be free rather than try to stop or enslave them, the outcome is almost certain to be good.” On this account, you could see human beings as the crucial link between two worlds: the biological world that exists right now, and the digital world run by intelligent machines that will exist in the future. By building these intelligent machines — or digital minds — we are creating our successors, who will inaugurate the next stage in cosmic evolution.  According to Page,...
Read 25 tweets
Feb 25, 2024
Something happened recently that has brought me to tears on several occasions. Basically, person A is struggling with serious health issues, and person B, who is close to person A, has expressed unconditional support for A, no matter how bad things get. This is not normal (!!)—I
don’t mean that normatively (a claim about what ought to be), but statistically (a claim about what is the case). Many, many, MANY people--friends, family, partners, etc.--leave and abandon others in times of need. When I very young, an older relative of mine told me that I
should *never* show vulnerability to friends, family, or partners because, in his words, “You’ll be shocked by how many people will leave if they think you are struggling, sick, or ‘weak.’” I think that was some of the best advice I ever got (because of how true it is),
Read 7 tweets
Jan 5, 2024
Fascinating. Ghosting in a long-term relationship is, I think, one of the most traumatic experiences one can have. It will never not be the case that I moved to a foreign country for someone who ghosted me when I got sick, after *years* of living together. It's changed my entire
worldview, tbh. I wasn't a philosophical pessimist or nihilist when I entered Germany, but--ironically--I left Germany as one. Hard to express how much ghosting has impacted me. Studies, though, suggest that ghosting can harm ghosteres, too. More here: truthdig.com/articles/what-…
Honestly, what affected me the most is that after I got out of the hospital, in which I nearly died, my partner *not once* wrote me to see if I was okay. I now know that, as a matter of fact about our world, you can be with someone for *years* and they can show literally zero
Read 6 tweets

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