Sunday, August 2, 2015

A Walking Meditation

There is a road stretching from here to a future I imagine.

In that future, there are experts of domain-general reasoning, of prediction, and of cognitive boot-strapping toward accuracy and effectiveness. Many of them have explicit knowledge of how to masterfully wield human intelligence, in the way a present-day fencing instructor knows how to wield a foil. The children there can become such masters in a single lifetime (though to be fair, a single lifetime is probably a lot more than 80 years).

What do you think the bricks on that road are made of?

These bubbles represent possible bricks you yourself could lay on the road to the future I imagine - things that might carry you toward it. What happens when you arrange them in order from the smallest, least important brick to the largest, most important brick?

What are the implications of the fact that you have an answer to that question, even if you're not very confident in your answer?

What is the largest brick you could lay right now?

1 comment:

Dan said...

My feeling is that the people interested in multi-generational optimization of thinking patters should reason about it as though they were an intelligence that was creating a successor intelligence.

Given that we currently aren't good at that, it should be the first thing we address. Create a generation that is better at the general task of 'creating generations that have desired qualities' than we are.