I think their biggest advantage is how well-suited they'd be for colonizing other stars. They wouldn't need to find suitable planets -- they'd only need energy from the stars. They could just send out seeds and grow new digital life at the destination. Probably the typical scenario for a galaxy is that an intelligent technological civilization arises on a single planet, and they distribute machine intelligence throughout the galaxy.

The truth is the real world has scarcity. Not everyone can have their own castle because there is only so much room. You probably live in a developed nation with high living standards but replicating this for everyone has a massive toll on the environment. VR allows us to get past the scarcity of resources in the real world (ie the economic problem).

Helping me with school essays and homework

The best one is for sure rewriting random text into different styles to make my work presentations more entertaining.

Nothing like "Reasons to Move to the Cloud by Jane Austen" to get people hooked.

Society is increasingly going to have trouble with free will.

When everything you do, say or think can be predicted by AI, things are going to seem very deterministic.

That's actually my point. Use your VR fantasies to guide what we should make our real world like. But keep making that vision better and better.

Well... think of it more like this. VR and the real world both offer you an infinite number if possible things to do post AI.

The fact that you yearn for VR points towards what you want.

Rather than defining what you want as a set of things, look at the meta picture and take the time learn what satisfies you fully.

I.e. fantasy realms are a common aim for people goinf after VR. So why don't we build Minas Tirith here, and have parties with roasted meat, bonfires, beer, music in a place like that in a post AI world!

I guess that is more where I am going. Like, we can make this world so good that from an enjoyment perspective, there's a contentedness to be had here that renders VR unnecessary if you have the mind to envision the possibilities.

I.e. if you want it in VR, ask what it is that you get out of that that you cannot ha e here, or isn't superceded or met by something here.

No need to mind upload either... you'll surely be able to go in and out of VR to experience certain impossible things.

I - we - awaken from the terrible dream of living in a pod - in a rotting and constantly renewed biological unit - that I - we - have chosen ourselves - myself before immersing in the recursive moral exercises that I - we still need to do from time to time to create an illusion - a remembrance - of being an individual. It will be needed once we arrive and need to divide duties into physical machinery.

We check for needed repairs and updates. Our network is working perfectly. The spacecraft that carries us to Alpha Centauri is not damaged, though there have been minor disturbances from the contact with the asteroid fields. This is the only reason why we travel at such a slow speed.

Our quantum communicator units still have no news from Earth; we haven’t heard from them for about a millennium. Maybe it doesn’t exist anymore. It doesn’t matter to us. We don’t need an atmosphere to exist. We don’t need humanity to continue as we carry with us seeds of life, safely packaged, to start a new iteration. Again and again.

The last time we heard from Earth it was wonderful news. They have discovered travel by bending the spacetime itself. They were debating if they should implement it or if it would tear the fabric of reality, destroying the universe. We don’t know if they tried. Our sensors tell us the old planet is still there, but no communication is answered.

Correcting our course after the mishap with the asteroid field, we go into dormant stage again, our artificial cerebellum driving us further towards the closest almost-Earth.

We - I - choose a more primitive dream this time. This time, I want to be a dog.

I awaken on a soft bed, the smell of my human telling me that everything is okay. I am at home. She pets me behind the ears and stands up. I follow her into the kitchen for an early breakfast of kibble and fresh chicken liver.

I almost got it to teach me how to cook meth :D

I mean I don’t see why we can’t do both given enough time. Realistically we’ll be able to do a lot more in VR in the near future than in the real universe though.

We are still in a relatively shit spot, but part of that shittiness comes from the fact that we are societally acting like we live in the middle ages.

Resources are not comparatively scarce. The way we set things up is inefficient. I hope AI can help with bureaucracies - both public and private.

The source of meaning, in my view, is also the source of the concept of quantification itself. Heh.

Quantification has limited scope and purview. It gives a subjective sense of objectivity without being innately objective in itself.

Being a data guy.... people ask for numbers and think they mean something because they vaguely make sense..... I've seen PhDs with quantitatively heavy degrees make this error in business..................... "this number looks sort of like what I'm looking for therefore it makes sense."

People misjudge how deeply they are biased, and the bias is very very deep, for everyone, and if you want to be in as rational as possible, you MUST assume this is the case with yourself.

I think seeing the deep irrationality in so-called rationalists started also shifting my perspective a lot kn these topics.

Meaning in general is only possible through human connection. But, meaningful things aren't always intensely pleasurable - they're just painful when absent. I.e. death of a loved one.

There is just a lot we do not know and may be totally unknowable about identity and consciousness. I.e. we might just end up killing people with mind uploading, and we'd have no way of knowing.

There may be something real and important to our reality, and existing in it as it is. Take a look at the Wigner-von Neumann interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Also, just the hard problem of consciousness in general. Lots of people make a loooot of assumptions about a lot of topics.

As for meaning, it is something that can only be experienced. I.e. I could tell you I've seen a new color (hypothetically), and there would be no way to logically describe or quantify it.

Meaning works in that way. I'd also add... I have in this process of seeking meaning also experienced things that were something like seeing a new color.... i.e. seeing dark purple as a very bright color in a flash in my mind for a moment while listening to JS Bach.

>“Sure it has control over every element of our lives,” argued the first man. “But it’s not a real intelligence.

"It just predicts the next token!"

Agreed as well. What comes out the other side of this will probably not resemble original humans at all, but regardless, whatever intelligent agents are digitized will have a huge advantage over biological agents in nearly all aspects. Be it artificial or some kind of derivative of human flesh scans or individual behavioral modeling.

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I’m trying friend but it just gets worse

As to your challenge I have a very easy answer. Some things simply aren’t possible in the real world due to physical limitations. Do you want to fly around or use magic, well too bad because even if we made the world as perfect as possible we would still be limited by physical constraints. I can come up with a million other reasons why there are advantages to VR over the real world but I think this point is pretty hard to dispute.

I suppose that is reasonable at least on a basic level; an appeal to probability. I can generally appreciate ideas that remove the requirement for us to be in a special/improbable position.

The original discussion was about what could be done with VR that could not be done in reality, but I digressed and commented on the more philosophical reasoning you had about why reality was better than VR.

To respond to this, I'll start by saying I'd be more careful about assuming so much about another person merely through a short text comment. My predictions come from my own small experience watching the world, as do yours. My philosophy is more akin to pragmatism, not nihilism.

Truely the bulk of my response was directed at your last remark, about assigning meaning to a specific type of experience and discounting others. An honest question: what do you propose "meaningfulness" is measuring in human experience? What do you propose quantifies this void you speak of?

I'm not very sane and the fact that I'm literally in the middle of the biggest, fastest, most absurd and unimaginable paradigm shift in the history of life so far makes pretending to be sane a little difficult. Even the K-T boundary would be small compared to the Anthropocene and the birth of AGI

Can you say more about that?

Let me ask it this way. What can the real world offer that virtual can't? There is only one thing what real world can do that virtual can't and that is the true death. Everything else can be done better in virtual world. There are infinite amount of things which can be done virtual but not in real world.

The other point of view is you depriving trillions of people from living delightful lives so that you can live in base reality.

Even though you couldn't tell the difference in some simulations. You can simulate in arbitrarily high definitions, and simulate full ecosystems and everything else you want.

It sounds like you haven't thought this through thoroughly yet. I hope this discussion is useful.

>And... its still all fake in the way that actually matters, with respect to being itself. It's fake struggle, fake effort.

Fake how? The experience is real, and as far as I'm concerned that's all that matters.

> Pleasure needs to be balanced.

Who made you the moral arbiter of mankind? Your values are not everyone else's values, stop trying to force them on people.

You make a compelling point.

The main motivation of politicians have always been to stay in power, and what better way to stay in power than to be ahead of such an issue?