+]
+
+The old vision was nine men in a brain in a box in a basement. (He didn't say _men_.)
+
+Subject: "I give up, I think" 28 January 2013
+> You know, I'm starting to suspect I should just "assume" (choose actions conditional on the hypothesis that) that our species is "already" dead, and we're "mostly" just here because Friendly AI is humanly impossible and we're living in an unFriendly AI's ancestor simulation and/or some form of the anthropic doomsday argument goes through. This, because the only other alternatives I can think of right now are (A) arbitrarily rejecting some part of the "superintelligence is plausible and human values are arbitrary" thesis even though there seem to be extremely strong arguments for it, or (B) embracing a style of thought that caused me an unsustainable amount of emotional distress the other day: specifically, I lost most of a night's sleep being mildly terrified of "near-miss attempted Friendly AIs" that pay attention to humans but aren't actually nice, wondering under what conditions it would be appropriate to commit suicide in advance of being captured by one. Of course, the mere fact that I can't contemplate a hypothesis while remaining emotionally stable shouldn't make it less likely to be true out there in the real world, but in this kind of circumstance, one really must consider the outside view, which insists: "When a human with a history of mental illness invents a seemingly plausible argument in favor of suicide, it is far more likely that they've made a disastrous mistake somewhere, then that committing suicide is actually the right thing to do."
+
+
+[TODO—
+
+The human era wasn't going to last forever. Turing saw it in 1951. ("It seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. [...] At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control[.]") _George Eliot_ [saw it in _1880_](http://www.online-literature.com/george_eliot/theophrastus-such/17/). ("Am I already in the shadow of the coming race? And will the creatures who are to transcend and supercede us be steely organisms, giving off the effluvia of the laboratory and performing with infallible exactness more than everything that we have performed with a slovenly approximativeness and self-defeating inaccuracy?")
+
+ * I've believed since Kurzweil that technology will remake the world sometime in the 21th century; it's just "the machines won't replace us, because we'll be them" doesn't seem credible
+
+list of lethalities
+
+ * I agree that it would be nice if Earth had a plan; it would be nice if people figured out the stuff Yudkowsky did earlier;
+
+Isaac Asimov wrote about robots in his fiction, and even the problem of alignment (in the form of his Three Laws of Robotics), and yet he still portrayed a future Galactic Empire populated by humans, which seems very silly.
+
+/2017/Jan/from-what-ive-tasted-of-desire/
+