Comment by malicious on This Can't Go On · 2021-09-19T16:25:50.192Z · LW · GW

Seriously, what is this piece? It smacks of scientism, trying to force economic growth into some kind of important metric that augurs limits on the future. ("Of course we won't leave the galaxy within 8200 years"? "This is all based on pretty basic observations"???)

• Clearly there are only there possible scenarios (stagnate, explode, collapse), which parallels the same kind of pure mathematics that big bang theorists work with? How about taking a page out of economics, "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent"?
• Money has barely existed in the same form for the last century, much less the last 8000 years. GDP as a metric is even worse; from wikipedia: "[GDP] focuses on flows, not stocks. As a result, an economy can run down its assets yet, at the same time, record high levels of GDP growth"

We keep reinventing political and cultural systems every few hundred years, why would our current frameworks even make sense 8000 years out?

Robin Hanson's [This is the Dream Time](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/09/this-is-the-dream-time.html) has a similar idea, but actually gives enough material to engage with.

Breaking out of your provably-complete set of end state scenarios, what if all that impossible economic wealth becomes concentrated in the hands of Bezos? Or we decide at 2000 years out that this is untenable; what actions could we take? Is it unavoidable, the way global warming seems to be?

It seems more important to talk about the details here, or provide something of interest, otherwise this is just advanced shitposting about "the end is coming", complete with clickbait title. Wtf?

Comment by malicious on Does blockchain technology offer potential solutions to some AI alignment problems? · 2021-09-09T20:35:43.372Z · LW · GW

One thing you're missing: cryptography is secured by say, the difficulty of factoring large numbers, but cryptocurrencies are secured by no one being able to take over more than 51% of the network's processing (in proof-of-work currencies, like Bitcoin). They're kind of the same technology, but cryptocurrencies are relying on a second-order effect.

Put another way: this "hardness" isn't a fundamental computational limit, but more of an enforced limitation because other parties want to verify your computation. 

Also, one hole in your idea: the actual machine you compute on wouldn't matter to an AI, so it could easily jump from say, the Ethereum VM to an AWS instance that runs the same code (several orders of magnitude faster). The AI only needs to hit the point where it can buy that AWS instance, so I think you're only providing a temporary barrier.