Isaiah Berlin once wrote, “We cannot legislate
for unknown consequences of consequences of consequences.”
He wasn’t making a statement about the mind’s resemblance to a broken record,
it wasn’t that he COULD NOT GET OVER consequences.
He was making a deep point about science and society…in the 20th century.
But suppose we produce a scientific approach that gets uncommonly robust forecasts
from cadres of superintelligent autonomous nano-brains,
and they all vote on a spectrum;
and suppose we decide to value their opinions?
We have so much that is known so well, an overdetermination of excellent forecasts. Is that so remarkably impossible? I mean, we get that
with global circulation models — which by the way aren’t so autonomous
or superintelligent and super excellent.
But would we legislate for consequences of consequences of consequences if they were OVERKNOWN?
???.
When we have all the terrible nightmares of the world and bright dreams to be thinking, what can we do?
agilekeys 
Fascinating! Speaking of ‘nano-brains’ I recently learned that rats have been remotely set up to telecommunicate via the internet and instruct each other on behaviour, etc! I wonder what your thoughts are about this type of emerging technology and the possibilities and fears (technophilia and technophobia) as it relates to nano-computation and nano-bio-synthesis?
Fascinating indeed — perhaps the most famous rats to appear in pop culture since Master Splinter!
I’m about to enter the main laboratory that’s building the nano-brain research programme in Mid-March for a three-month fellowship. I think this summer I’ll have more to say about the nano-brain. It’s a very particular line of research that I don’t understand well enough at this point.
One of my former professors, Braden Allenby, tells a funny story about the possibility of these type of mind-meld technologies. Brad is frequently invited to participate in high-level government deliberations about emerging technologies. He describes one case in which senior diplomats fantasized about how wonderful it would be to hook up global leaders via brain-to-brain interfaces. Allenby responded: “You can’t be serious! Could you imagine how catastrophic it would be if leaders from the PLO or Hamas and the Israeli Prime Minister and head of Mossad could read each others minds? Diplomacy is predicated on concealing your true feelings about the other for the sake of a lasting peace!”
Technophilia and technophobia … I’ll have to think more about that.