Moore’s law is an example of futures studies; it is a statistical collection of past and present trends with the goal of accurately extrapolating future trends.
Technology—especially intelligence augmentation and artificial intelligence—has the potential to transform the future of philosophy. Why? Because our cognitive limitations impede philosophical progress. But while we aren’t smart enough to resolve important philosophical conundrums, our cognitive limitations can be overcome by enhancing our intellectual capacities or by creating superintelligence. As a result, we would be able to better answer philosophical questions rather than being forced by intellectual honesty to remain ignorant. Put simply, if philosophy is an intellectual pursuit, then enhancing our cognitive faculties will make us better philosophers. (My colleague Philippe Verdoux and Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom have made the same point )
As an example of accepting philosophy’s limitations consider the recent New York Times piece, “There Is No Theory of Everything,” by the philosopher Simon Critchley. Critchley admits that philosophy hasn’t made much progress “because people keep asking the same questions and [are] perplexed by the same difficulties.” But Critchley counsels us to accept that philosophy can’t give definitive answers.
Philosophy scratches at the various itches we have, not in order that we might find some cure for what ails us, but in order to scratch in the right place and begin to understand why we engage in such apparently irritating activity. Philosophy is not Neosporin. It is not some healing balm. It is an irritant, which is why Socrates described himself as a gadfly.
Next Critchley applies his insight to the question of life’s meaning. There is nothing wrong with being justifiably perplexed by our lives, he argues, but it a mistake to believe we will find an answer. Instead of seeking answers, we should continue to ask questions; we should keep scratching the itch. He approvingly quotes Wittgenstein, “When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.”
But what if philosophy could be a healing balm? What if it worked better than Neosporin?What if we had the intellectual wherewithal to soothe our itch. Then we wouldn’t have to choose between accepting philosophical limitations or subscribing to imaginary supernatural cures for our existential maladies. If we augmented our intelligence we could really begin to understand what it’s all about. This ability to answer our deepest questions provides one of the very best reasons to become posthuman.
This from G. Prisco, recently:
“…Getting things to almost work is much, much easier than getting things to work. Engineers know that even if you do 90 percent of the work in 10 percent of the time, then you will have to spend the remaining 90 percent of the time to do the missing 10 percent of the work. Same, of course, for money.
Which means that 90 percent wasn’t really 90 percent, because it left out all the boring details that take 90 percent of the money and the time — boring details like sustainability, operational robustness, error recovery, fail-safe operations and all that, without forgetting social acceptance, financial and political aspects.
That real AI seems always 20 years away indicates that perhaps we just don’t know enough to estimate the development timeline for something that is actually 200 years away, or more. A good analogy is Leonardo’s flying machines. Leonardo correctly guessed that machines could fly, but the actual development of flying machines took centuries and required different technologies.
I don’t buy the idea of a “post-scarcity” utopia (actually, I don’t buy any utopia). It’s worth emphasizing that, from the perspective of our grandfathers and people in poor regions, today’s developed world is a post-scarcity utopia because nobody is starving to death…”
“Without forgetting social acceptance” is the key. We could transform the entire world rather quickly, but the dislocation would be such that, perhaps, all the positive (that we now define as positive) would be negated.